diary of a recovering student is moving…come with me to abisworld.wordpress.com

Following my recent birthday I have decided it’s time to grow up! That means leaving my student identity behind and embracing the world of adult news. All my news blogs will now be posted on the fresh and exciting  page www.abisworld.wordpress.com

Education is key to remedying obesity

Britain is becoming a fast food nation

 

Abi Mowbray

Children are being taken into care at a time when obesity appears to be spiralling out of control.

A healthy alternative to a dial out pizza has become a reduced fat ready meal while a work out has become a twenty minute session on the Wii.

An unhealthy trend

The Americanisation of the UK food industry, which started with the bombardment of British high streets with 1960s milk bars, is almost complete as pram battles against pram in the queues of fast food restaurants across the country.

The ‘happy meal’ is the fast food industries’ key assault weapon. Adding a toy to a calorific meal in a brightly coloured box is a marketing ploy designed to satisfy the appetite of increasingly fat children and tired parents.

The Boar War highlighted the ill health of the British underclass. Conscription today would undoubtedly reveal a similar issue; a large portion of the nation would simply be too fat to fight.

Impact on families

In an era when child abuse is constantly being redefined, killing a child with kindness (or a week’s worth of happy meals) now constitutes as child abuse, just as starving a child does.

But whether it is fair to remove a child from overweight parents straight from birth is an issue of contention. Surely the answer is not to swoop into a maternity ward all guns blazing but instead to provide parents with the educational tools needed to transform their lifestyle.

We have saturated society with calorific easy options and now there is a responsibility to remedy the situation. The answer is not to punish the most vulnerable families who have fallen foul of the bargain bucket but instead to educate them.

Journalism Versus the PR Machine

Abi Mowbray

Journalism is drowning in a flood of PR.

That’s what ex-government Press Officer and author, Simon Goldsworthy, told Westminster journalism students this week.

Journalism is a second rate citizen in the “information market place’ Goldsworthy inferred. As companies are increasingly willing to pay for PR at a time when consumers are less willing to pay for news.

PR’s ‘tap of favour’

The struggling journalist has to rely on PR’s “tap of favour” said Goldsworthy, as “a journalist stumbling across a story walking down the street, is as likely as a policeman coming upon a crime.” He said.

“PR is a discipline which serves its paymasters” said Goldsworthy, “it isn’t on a mission to tell the truth. We are there to keep (journalists) from the facts.” The antithesis of the hard up truth seeker that to me is the journalist.

In effect Goldsworthy accused newspapers of being the PR guy’s parrot. The journalist is unable to reach the truth and so survives on the scraps of flavoured information thrown to them by the PR machine.

Dissident PR

But surely the journalist has defiantly beaten the PR system when the bad news comes to print? The breaking story? The exclusive?

Not according to Goldsworthy. That too is the work of PR. The dissent, the aggrieved, but not the journalist.

What a gloomy perspective on the world of news for an aspiring journalist.

Exciting beginnings

Ex-international footballer Nii Odartey Lamptey invited me into his Ghanaian school

My first real taste of journalistic practice was in Ghana where so often I was the unlikely policeman.

I hunted out exciting stories and went in search of the relevant people to interview. When I found the right doctor, footballer or government agency worker they would always talk to me. Not a PR man in sight.

In Ghana they were not suspicious of my notepad and pen. They freely exchanged information with me and I was obliged to answer only one question in return; “How do you find Ghana?”

I found Ghana liberating, honest and journalistically free.

The final word

As I write this from my desk in England I am mindful of a host of legal barriers that gag the media, already fighting against capitalism’s burly big brother in the form of PR.

But journalists are by nature bloody minded and as the struggle continues even Goldsworthy conceded “journalists still have the last word.”