Mark Williams-Thomas

[Erik Narramore]

As I see it, Mark Williams-Thomas is just a media personality.  He will be right about some things, wrong about others.  Just because somebody appears in the media or on Panorama or on YouTube or wherever as an 'expert', doesn't mean they really are an expert or actually important in their field, or even know much at all about the subject they speak of.  Often the most important people in a given field or profession are the ones who work quietly in the background, without ego, unknown to the public, allowing the 'personalities' to take the credit.

Sometimes the two things can be conflated and a media icon can end up as iconic in the field.  An example is Einstein.  I'm not sure which came first: Einstein as the iconic 'clever person' or Einstein as the inaugurator of an intellectual paradigm.  There are physicists, even today, who regard him as little more than a science communicator and not a serious scientist in his own right.  They may be wrong about this, but the general point is that just because somebody is well-known to the public, it doesn't mean they are taken seriously by serious people who actually know a thing or two about the subject-matter under discussion.

Personally I wish there was better civic education for the public about things like law and due process.  It would be nice if a Mark Williams-Thomas, or even a Piers Morgan or somebody like that, came along and produced interesting material that explored those topics with the aim of improving people's understanding rather than making vapid judgements about particular cases.  Comments online may not always be representative, but I worry sometimes that people-at-large don't understand very well the point that serious criminal allegations must be proved to a high standard in a fair trial before an impartial judge and jury.

That's why, I suppose, like you I disapprove of Mark Williams-Thomas and people like him, but not for the same reason you do.  My issue with him is not that he is right or wrong about specific things.  We can all be right or wrong at any time.  That's human.  It's more that he is not educating or informing anybody, which is what the media should be for.  Even when people like him try to be balanced, it's more about hearing two different sides and letting people decide, which actually is not true balance.  Balance in dialogue requires synthesis.  In other words, we say: Jeremy is right about this, but the Crown are right about that, now how can we reconcile these two things, what are the probabilities of one or other being right and is there an alternate explanation, and what does this all mean, and how does it fit together?

It is not cold or unfeeling or bloodless for us to have a discussion in which we admit that we can't know that Jeremy is guilty.  In some ways, acknowledging the grey zone between black and white makes for much more interesting and nuanced dialogue.  We are still human and can still say to each other: 'This is appalling' and 'Those poor children...' and so on.