From the "makes you weep" department
Last week on Panorama: We fearlessly expose the pseudoscientific loons of Scientology.
Next week on Panorama: Are WiFi signals giving your children cancer?
it's the journalistic equivalent of "please don't put your life in the hands of a rock'n'roll band, they'll throw it all away".
Slightly left of field, but my favourite of recent times was Keith Allan taking a load of kids with Tourretes on a double decker bus round Paris.
ReplyDeleteIf only Alan Partridge had suggested this as a programme idea instead of Monkey Tennis, Youth Hostelling with Chris Eubank or Knowing M.E. Knowing You.
In general, I am getting increasingly fooked off with the BBC's news coverage being driven by consultants reports. EVERY morning, it's "A report out today says eating spam and wearing braces increases your chance of skin cancer".
Maybe I am being dewy eyed, but I remember a time when I could turn on the BBC news and hear reports from Africa (that didn't involve Geldof et al) Asia etc about what was going on in the world. What has happened to embedded reporters?
Well, in the case of the loathsome Mark Urban, they're currently embedded with US troops in Baghdad in what may not be an improvement in the BBC's coverage of actual news.
ReplyDeleteNThese days pretty much everybody the BBC sends to report on the US is an self-important and ambitious Atlanticist with no understanding of anything outside the Republican/Democratic mainstream, except in so far as they are occasionally required to rubbish something. I'm thinking in particular of Justin Webb's ludicrous recent BBC Online series about "anti-Americanism" but the loathsome Gavin Esler would also serve as a good example. The BBC's Washington Correspondent used to be the great Charles Wheeler: all that's left is these suited cheerleaders.
As far as Alan Partridge is concerned, I think it was Touch The Truck that convinced me that satire was no longer distinguishable from reality. I swear that some of the "reality" TV shows that get commissioned are actually pitched by students as a joke that goes completely undetected.
oh I think that's unfair; the film from Sadr City I linked below is pretty bloody good. It's Panorama I'm complaining about.
ReplyDeleteI was trying (but failed) to locate a piece from BBC Online in which Urban wondered (in the most patronising way, much like Webb's series) why people didn't like the Americans and concluded it must be all down to prejudice and past mistakes. I didn't see your film - I couldn't listen to it anyway as I'm not organised for sound here.
ReplyDeleteNor at home, though presumably I could be if I put a couple of wires into a couple of sockets. I fear that if I did so I would spend my entire leisure time watching clips on YouTube and I'm not sure that when I'm sixty I want to realise that I spent the last twenty years doing that.
Parenthetically, although David Icke does not actually name Gavin Esler in any of his books[1] as an Annunaki lizard from the fifth dimension, I am positive that on at least one occasion I have seen him "shudder", changing rapidly into a reptilian and back again. I am not a loony.
ReplyDelete[1]Or at least, any of them up until "Tales From The Time Loop" which was the point at which I gave up on him.
You mean you've seen Gavin Esler when he hasn't been a reptile?
ReplyDeleteThe only bit of Panorama I caught was the Youtube clip when man Sweeney, his self awareness gene pivotting on its axis, went crackers. You could guess where it was headed from there.
ReplyDeleteNewsnight is the exception, but the day to day foreign news coverage is lousy.
There's still some good stuff out there. There was a good two part piece on the Today programme about the Congo, recently, a place that is normally woefully under-reported.
BBC4's news program is okay. Radio 4 used to be good, but I've given up on the Today program. If I want to live to Radio 5, I'll tune my radio myself, ta.
ReplyDeleteFor foreign news, Al-Jazeera is actually pretty good. Very good on the middle east, SE Asia and Africa - adequate on the rest of the world. Shamingly, its often better on the US than CNN (my wife's an American, so American news is a priority, apparently).
BTW, isn't Mark Urban ex MI6, or 5, or something. I vaguely remember him once reporting on the security services and saying "We think that Al-Quaeda are...", rather than "they think".
ReplyDeleteHe's ex-army. I think he did a short service commission in (if memory serves) either the Household Cav or some other cavalry recce regiment.
ReplyDelete