Talk:Martin Wainwright

Paragraph on Jimmy Savile

Hello!

I wouldn't normally comment on a piece about me but I would be grateful for rewording of the paragraph recently added which says:

In 2011, Wainwright wrote several articles for The Guardian supporting the paedophile TV presenter Jimmy Savile. Justifying Savile's rape of children, Wainwright wrote that it had been "presented without the overwhelming goodness, or at the least normality, which surrounds it."[10]

This is nonsense. I appreciate that people will have to take me on trust when I say that I would never write an article supporting paedophilia or justifying the rape of children, but the idea that the Guardian would publish such a thing is ridiculous.

I wrote the articles including the comment piece to which the paragraph is correctly linked and I absolutely agree that they read differently now, in the light of the material unearthed about Savile. But they were written without any knowledge of this side of him, like the eulogies at his funeral and the warmth and sense of loss shown in Leeds at the time. I am one of a very large number of people who are extremely shocked. I will be writing a further comment piece for the Guardian but I hope that people understand that it takes time to adjust from admiring someone's charitable work very much to absorbing the material now emerging. I am sure that I am not alone in this.

I'd therefore be grateful if you could either remove or alter the reference whose specifically inaccurate and objectionable features are (1) the implication in the first sentence that the articles were written in the knowledge that Savile was a paedophile, and (2) the juxtaposition in the second sentence of child rape and the quotation which did not refer to that, but to the fact that bad news in the media is seldom presented in the context of the good which is so much greater and indeed the norm. This is a subject which has concerned me throughout my life in journalism and one on which I have written and spoken many times.

I am not very expert in Wikipedia's methods, but I sent an email about this yesterday which has not so far had any effect although I appreciate that you will be constantly busy. I would be very happy to help further in any appropriate way or to discuss the Savile case and my coverage with anyone interested on martin.wainwright@guardian.co.uk.

Best wishes

Martin WainwrightWainwrightms (talk) 11:24, 11 October 2012 (UTC)

I have read the Guardian article in the reference, and I believe that the paragraph added to the article completely misrepresents what Wainwright wrote. The phrase "badness – inevitably the stock-in-trade of news – is presented without the overwhelming goodness, or at the least normality, which surrounds it." is written with no direct connection to Savile, in an article which starts "People in general and journalists in particular find it hard to write simple, nice things about good people.", and which comments on Savile's "lying in state" at a point in time when nothing was known about his paedophilia. The previous paragraph is: "It's just a lovely do, with the huge emphasis on Savile's voluntary hospital work and everyday mateyness in Leeds taking away the potential over-sentimentality." To suggest that Wainwright was "justifying Savile's rape of children" is completely unjustified.

I have removed the paragraph from the article, because there is nothing noteworthy about the Guardian column, written last November. It might have a place in the article on Savile as an illustration of the general public attitude to him at the time just after his death. PamD 16:17, 11 October 2012 (UTC)