Harry’s Place alert us of an essay by Kevin Arscott of The Disinformed, which seeks to debunk the myth of ‘Winterval’, which is the narrative that posits Christmas is under attack and being secularised for ‘politically correct’ reasons.
If you’re interested you can download the essay here.
It’s a fairly comprehensive essay (47 pages), however, the premise is the creation of a ‘moral panic’ through the mechanism of poor – or deliberately skewed – journalism.
How this happened is a fascinating story of bad journalism, the messages of irresponsible and paranoid church leaders and badly-informed, popularity-seeking politicians looking for a tabloid-friendly soundbite. The bad journalism started with the local newspaper that broke the ‘story’ of Winterval on the 8th November 1998 and travelled quickly through the national press. What is worrying is that the original story was so clearly completely untrue and contained clear statements from the council that demonstrated this.
To make things worse, it is not a myth copied and perpetuated solely by the tabloids; the broadsheets were equally responsible for repeating it, and perhaps, given their air of respectability, did more to legitimise it than the tabloids. The Sunday Times, for example, used the myth as a question and answer in three quizzes, twice in 1998 and once in 2000. The Times / Sunday Times has in fact managed to repeat the myth 40 times in total since 1998, an achievement only surpassed by the Daily Mail which leads the field with 44 mentions. The Daily Telegraph managed to repeat it 22 times, only slightly behind the Express (26), and a bit further behind The Sun (31). The Daily Mirror only seems to have repeated the myth on 4 occasions, which is less than the Guardian which has repeated it on 6 occasions – even though they did eventually debunk the myth in several different articles.
The myth was not just repeated, either; it was also gradually distorted to become ever more removed from the original misconception. What started as a myth that one council had rebranded or renamed Christmas became a pluralised, open-ended narrative that ‘councils’ and ‘authorities’ were in fact rebranding or renaming Christmas as ‘Winterval’.
It then mutated from a simple rebranding to a calculated attack on Christianity by ‘atheists’, ‘Muslims’ or the ‘PC Brigade’ who feared offending ‘other faiths’ or ‘ethnic minorities’. In one extreme example the South Wales Echo claimed that Winterval was the result of ‘Virulent attacks on religion by atheists’ which had led to ‘new rules such as Christmas being renamed as “Winterval”’. Who created and enforced this ‘rule’ and who it applied to was not explained in the article. In all, at least 15 articles directly claim that Christmas was renamed Winterval because of a fear of offending ‘other faiths’. At least a further 10 articles directly claim that Winterval was used to avoid offending ‘ethnic minorities’.
Naturally the vast majority of coverage has woven Winterval into the narrative of ‘political correctness gone mad’ – which helps to explain the increasing repetition of the myth in later years as newspapers became more and more obsessed with this particular media narrative. Indeed, the original story was sparked by the Christmas message of the then Bishop of Birmingham, the Rt Rev Mark Santer, who claimed that the decision was madness and an ‘attempt not to offend, not to exclude; not really to say anything at all’. The newspaper editorial on the same day blamed political correctness and the misguided belief that ‘ethnic minorities’ would be offended by Christmas, when they ‘don’t give a hoot about calling Christmas “Christmas”’. It encouraged its readers to ‘back the Bishop and tell our risible PC The Winterval Myth councillors to stop going Christmas crackers again’. The following day The Sun, Daily Mail, Scotsman, Daily Mirror, Irish Times, Evening Standard and Edinburgh Evening News all went with the ‘political correctness’ angle.
I’m still reading through, but if you do read it then let us know what you thought.
