Source A is an article written for the Daily Mail by Paul Eastham on the 17 September 1999. As with most newspaper articles, this article is designed to be informative but also persuasive. As the Mail is a slightly right-wing publication, the journalist expects it’s readers to have conservative views so the article is written in favour of the paratroopers to attract the right readership. The majority of the article focuses on the paratroopers disgust at the release of a new forensic report by Lord Saville. There is a brief sentence about what the report is actually about followed by two paragraphs about the reactions of the paratroopers. Therefore the quality and quantity of the information in this source is low. It only puts across one side of the story, the only quotes coming from either the paratroopers themselves or the Conservative MP for the paratrooper’s base, whose information is naturally going to be biased in favour of the paratroopers. The only section of the article which seems to favour the victims is in the last paragraph where there is a mention of a forensic scientist reversing his opinion in favour of the victims. However, it does not say why or have any further information, so this piece of interpretation is not really sufficient to draw any conclusions from.
Source B on the other hand is the opposite of source A; written for the slightly left wing publication The Guardian, on the same day as source A, it is clearly written in support of the victims and their families, again to appeal to the right readership. There is much more detail about the actual contents of the new report, emphasised with forceful adjectives such as ‘demolished’ and ‘massacre’. As a result this source is much more informative than source A, which was mostly opinions rather than facts. Despite this, the article is still one-sided, the only quotes coming from either the victim’s families or people working for the Saville Inquiry. In fact, source B is actually more biased than source A, as it gives absolutely no support to the paratroopers, making the article less reliable.
Source C is by far the least useful of the sources, mainly because rather than being a newspaper article it is a news broadcast, rather than being a detailed article it is merely a media-friendly sound bite. It is also produced more than a year after the first two sources, so media attention will have died down making it unnecessary for the broadcast to be long and detailed. As a result the broadcast is simply a brief summary of events with limited detail and a quote from the first witness of the Saville Inquiry.
I also looked at the drama-documentary, ‘Sunday’ by Jimmy McGovern as an alternative source. While it claimed to be completely based on fact, a large amount of ‘artistic licence’ has clearly been employed by McGovern to make the programme very biased against the paratroopers. They are portrayed as cold blooded killers who simply start shooting rather than responding to enemy fire, and there is a lot of focus on the sorrow of the victims families. This is clearly done to make it a good TV programme, but unfortunately makes it quite a limited source in terms of reliability.
