2017年catti高级口译阅读练习（4）
【媒体与道德的争战 Publish, perish, protest】
Libel law in England is too expensive and restricts free speech. But journalistic dirty tricks are a disgrace and self-regulation of the media isn’t working properly. So the rules need lots of tweaks and a couple of big changes. Those are the conclusions of a much-awaited parliamentary committee report on the British press.
It makes uncomfortable reading for many. But the sharpest criticism was reserved for the News of the World, a tabloid that is Britain’s best-selling Sunday newspaper; its owner, Rupert Murdoch’s News International; and its practice of stealing messages from the voice mailboxes of prominent people, including members of the royal family. A reporter, Clive Goodman, was jailed for four months for the offence, later receiving a generous pay-off from his erstwhile employer for “unfair dismissal”.
The report says the number of phones hacked must have been far bigger than the handful admitted by the company, and calls it “inconceivable” that nobody else knew what was going on. It criticises the “collective amnesia” of the company’s witnesses and their “deliberate obfuscation” (some refused to give evidence; others said things that the MPs implied were untrue). But the report makes only indirect criticism of Andy Coulson, then the paper’s editor and now a close adviser to the Conservative leader, David Cameron. In response, News International rejected the allegations, accused the MPs of bias and said they had produced nothing new. Calls for a further inquiry are growing.
The report gives other journalistic misconduct a savaging too, especially the “abysmal” standards of reporting in the frenzy surrounding Kate and Gerry McCann, the parents of a British child who went missing in Portugal in 2007. (The McCanns later won hefty libel damages from newspapers that wrongly blamed them for abducting their own daughter.) The MPs also note that the McCanns were failed by the Press Complaints Commission, a self-regulatory body which is meant to deal with such conduct.
The committee’s original aim was to focus on media misbehaviour. But its investigation has ranged more widely. The report has plenty of comfort for more serious-minded journalists, as well as for the campaigning groups, scientists and others who worry about the chilling effect of libel law on press freedom. In English libel law (Scotland’s is different), the fact that the public has an interest in knowing about something offers only a limited defence against a charge of libel. (This is not unlike the rest of Europe, but it is shockingly different for Americans used to the First Amendment’s protection of free speech.) When sued, journalists usually have to prove that what they wrote was right, fair or at least conscientiously reported. That can be costly (even a preliminary defence can easily exceed £100,000). Foreigners may sue other foreigners, as long as they can show that their reputation was damaged in England.
Many lawyers and judges have dismissed media campaigns for changes in the law as self-interested. The committee rejects sweeping proposals for reform, such as statutory caps on the size of libel damages. But it does suggest that the Ministry of Justice, which is examining the libel law, make some important changes.
One is reversing the burden of proof for corporate claimants: if they want to sue for libel, they would have to show that the published material actually damaged their business. That could help people such as Simon Singh, a science writer facing a lawsuit from the chiropractors’ trade body for calling their treatments “bogus”. The MPs also want to discourage “libel tourism” by requiring a claimant who is not based in Britain to produce a very solid argument as to why the case needs to be brought there.
As for the cost of libel actions, which can be ruinous to all but the biggest defendants, the MPs have few specific ideas, though they appeal to lawyers’ sense of responsibility. That is about as realistic as urging tabloid journalists to act ethically.
词句笔记：
chiropractor：脊柱按摩师
tweak：n.调整
erstwhile：从前的
amnesia：健忘症
obfuscation：困惑
misconduct：n.行为不端
abysmal：深不可测的
bogus：假的，伪造的
【铜管乐队的衰落 Saving Britain’s proud brass band legacy】
Practice night for Carlton Main Frickley Colliery Band, one of the oldest brass bands in Britain. History lines the walls of the Yorkshire band’s practice room: gleaming trophies of past victories, a banner for Best of Brass Champions 1983 and, on one wall, a poster: “The Yorkshire Coalfield — Memories.” It shows a miner, face blackened from the pit, and names every closed Yorkshire colliery.
Only three former miners play for Carlton Main these days; the band has survived without the pit, its ranks swelled by young male and female professionals and five members under 20. This is the typical, new, middle-class face of brass bands. Yet their links to a bygone mining tradition persist.
Twenty-five years after brass bands marched during the miners’ strike, this underground music is in the spotlight again. A new compilation, The Music Lives on Now the Mines Have Gone, brings 11 colliery bands together, including Carlton Main. They will line up against another colliery brass album, by the Dinnington Colliery Band, from Sheffield, the stars of the BBC show A Band for Britain, which follows Sue Perkins’s efforts to save Dinnington. And next month, the Leeds-based Opera North commemorates the year-long miners’ strike with Songs at the Year’s End, a song cycle for brass band.
But what future do these historic groups have? Most brass bands today have outlived their mining communities, and the effects are profound. When collieries and their bands were the heart of a close-knit, thriving village, bands played for pleasure and pride.
The Yorkshire-born Stan Lippeatt, 60, is a former Grimethorpe bandsman who started playing when he was 10 years old. His father played, so did his grandfathers, his uncles and his two brothers. “Bands became the pillars of the village; they turned out to march on Armistice Sunday, they would play the Christmas carols. They were something for villagers to go to when there wasn’t much TV about,” he says. Lippeatt founded the annual Butlins Mineworkers Open Brass Band Championships. “A guy would be on his holidays in Torquay and he’d be proud to boast he came from the home town of a band.”
The Barnsley poet Ian McMillan, who has written the words for Opera North’s Songs at the Year’s End, believes that brass bands still play a role in their communities. “They are an image for how collectivism can survive. And when you have an area that’s had the collectivism knocked out of it [such as Grimethorpe] any image of that collectivism and community activity is a good thing.”
Last week, a brass band played outside the Corus steelworks on Teesside as it was closed down. With the strike of 1984-85, collectivism took on a political edge. Brass bands led marches to London. They led rallies in villages across the mining heartlands, North and South, and they played at the funerals of miners killed on picket lines. A sense of lost camaraderie remains. “Margaret Thatcher didn’t just decimate the pits, she decimated our community spirit,” says the former miner Ray Sykes, the 63-year-old chairman of Carlton Main. “With the closure of the collieries, she’s hurt my band.”
Today, bands are no longer the “glue” of their communities. The infrastructure they relied on — miners’ social clubs, bandstands and so on — has largely disappeared. And though they struggle on, the bands are disappearing, too. From about 20,000 brass bands at the turn of the 19th century, numbers are down to an estimated 1,000 bands. Anecdotally, bandsmen will tell you of ten bands a year folding. Banding’s grassroots are dying.
Why the crisis? The problem is money: both too much and too little. In recent years a footballing analogy has become more potent as sponsorship money has flooded the top echelons of brass banding, leaving the lower bands fighting for survival.
The top bands, such as Grimethorpe Colliery (famously the one playing in the 1996 movie Brassed Off), Black Dyke and Brighouse and Rastrick — all in Yorkshire — and the Wales-based Cory, can afford to pay their players five-figure retainers in addition to concert fees and travel expenses to contests and rehearsals.
Most players today own their instruments (though brass doesn’t come cheap; a tuba can cost £7,000). The catch is that the better you get, the more it costs. Carlton Main compete in the championship, pushing running costs to about £30,000 a year. Attending one contest can cost £3,000, for coach hire, the conductor’s fee and the sheet music (at least £100 a pop). Carlton Main’s players pay their own hotel costs and for travel to rehearsals. Self-sufficiency has replaced collectivism; how very Thatcherite.
词句笔记：
outlive:经受住，比……活得长，渡过
knock out：赶出去
echelon：等级，阶层
tuba：低音大喇叭
conductor：乐队指挥
