Summary
Thousands of complaints have been made to the press regulator about Jeremy Clarkson’s column in the Sun newspaper, in which he expressed his hatred of Meghan Markle. His critics say he crossed a line in portraying her as someone who should be treated as less than human. He says he was making a clumsy TV reference and he’s “horrified to have caused so much hurt”.
For some, this is symptomatic of a wider culture which rewards extreme and unkind opinions, and that a right to free speech in a newspaper includes an obligation to uphold certain moral standards. Others say mainstream media commentators (and their editors) have no duty to be kind, only to tell the truth or present an honestly-held opinion.
Kindness, courtesy and respect are notable by their absence in our so-called ‘culture wars’. Kindness can be seen as twee, while rudeness can be applauded. We might appeal superficially to kindness, but it can often be secondary to values of honesty, justice and responsibility. For some, the unkindness in our culture is a systemic problem, demanding a radical change in our technological, social and political structures. For others, it is fundamentally a human problem, requiring us to draw deeply from the well of ancient wisdom.
The Christmas season approaches, when the ideal of goodwill is tested by the messy reality of human relationships. Is kindness the greatest virtue? What will it take for us all to be a little bit kinder? With Nana Akua, Alice Watkins, Edith Hall and Emily Kasriel.
Producer: Dan Tierney.
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | BBC Sounds, Music, radio, podcasts. |
| 0:05.1 | Good evening, there are those who would say that Jeremy Clarkson makes his living from being offensive. |
| 0:09.9 | There are certainly many who feel Meghan Duchess of Sussex spends an awful lot of time being offended, |
| 0:14.9 | so perhaps this week's bust up was predictable. |
| 0:17.5 | What wasn't in these cruelly opinionated times was the reaction. Even by his |
| 0:22.0 | standards, Clarkson was extreme. He wrote in the sun that he hated Meghan on a cellular level, |
| 0:27.7 | which I assume means a lot, and that he dreamt of her being paraded naked through the streets of |
| 0:32.3 | Britain while the crowd shouted shame and pelted her with excrement. Twitter went mad, the commentariat went into overdrive, |
| 0:39.3 | and the press watchdog had more than a year's worth of complaints in a few hours. |
| 0:44.1 | Clarkson had crossed a boundary. |
| 0:45.8 | Oh dear, I've rather put my foot in it, he said later. |
| 0:49.0 | But what does Clarksongate tell us about our society today? |
| 0:52.5 | There's a lot of nastiness out there. Social media drip with vitriol. The public discourse doesn't seem to respect differences of opinion. Other views are not just wrong but evil, espoused by enemies to be cancelled or reviled. Does the storm over Clarkson, though, showed that we've not become that unkind? |
| 1:11.2 | Or did he merely hit a more specialised modern moral tripwire? |
| 1:15.2 | We don't mind how vicious the attack, as long as it doesn't smack of misogyny or racism or transphobia. |
| 1:22.4 | General kindness is more, or perhaps less. |
| 1:25.9 | Is it a superior virtue, or should we prefer honesty, responsibility, accountability? |
| 1:31.1 | Are we less kind than we were? |
| 1:33.2 | If so, what should we do about it? |
| 1:35.1 | A season of goodwill moral maze tonight, the panel, Melanie Phillips, social commentator |
| 1:38.9 | at the Times, Ash Sarker, the libertarian Marxist from the Navarra Media Group, |
| 1:43.5 | the historian Tim Stanley, and the priest and polemicist, Charles Fraser. |
... |
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