Let's Not Be Antisocial

Social media is the ideal platform for shooting to promote its positive influences — but we have to be smart about it, warns Richard Negus

- Richard Negus

In times of fairly recent memory, the mainstream media (MSM) talked about the goings-on in the countryside in a markedly different way to what we see today.

Phil Drabble appeared weekly on our screens, twinkling on about sheep and dogs, fell hounds, and uplands. Jack Hargreaves sat in his shed entertaining viewers with everything from fowling and ploughing to flyfishing and dwile flonking — a pub game for the initiated. The results of the Waterloo Cup were published in all broadsheets. Newspapers carried a weekend angling section.

That is not to say that the MSM of 30 years ago was a nirvana of procountry sports journalism.

Animal rights types still had their letters to the editor published. Hunting received a regular going over by programmes like Panorama. The Glorious Twelfth was frequently portrayed in the red tops as being not all that glorious.

I have long thought that field sports’ slow decline in MSM is not a conspiracy; simply a reflection of society today. I was delighted when I had these suspicions confirmed by Guy Adams (Why shooting should stay in the shadows, 22 April). Our image ‘problem’ is not the fault of a biased BBC or because newspapers are prejudiced, it is simply due to the fact that they just aren’t that into us.

Polarising

Today, however, neither radio and TV producers nor newspaper editors, command the exclusive right over who is heard or what is shown.