Pandagate

Last week, I became involved in a minor spat over the BBC's inclusion of a panda in its Women Faces of the Year 2011. I wrote mini-profiles of a list of people of which I had no input over the choice. I say minor: it was enough to make the front page of several papers including, disappointingly, The Guardian. It was meant to be a light-hearted piece in keeping with a tradition in which Peppa the Pig and Benson the Carp had featured in previous years in both the male and female lists. However, given the justified anger at the BBC's failure to include a woman in their nominations for Sports Personality of the Year, and being an extremely thin day for news, the choice of the panda was seized upon, out of all proportion, as another example of BBC misogyny.
It was interesting that most of the argument was played out on Twitter. I enjoy Twitter for various reasons but the very nature of the medium does lend itself open to frenzied responses and bandwagon jumping. Once a row has started and a trend begun, here's an opportunity for everyone to charge in with an opinion. This can be fun and entertaining, but the importance of the subject can spiral out of all proportion.
Another amusing aspect of the whole business was that many of the abusive emails and tweets I received, including one which read "all men are apes" were far more sexist than anything being complained about. Insult to apes, methinks.