Today’s inaugural Spot The Difference competition comes to you courtesy of Photoshop Disasters, in association with Metro and The Sun. Click on the image for a full-screen view. First correct answer wins no prize.
Posted in Media
So, has Banksy finally been unmasked? More importantly, who cares? Not I. I’m afraid I’m going to have to demur from the popular opinion that Banksy is our most finest graffitoist.
Let’s start with a couple of his recent topical daubings that have regularly appeared on news reports, often without being specifically referred to, as if the image alone speaks volumes. First there was that “comment” on the government’s 10p tax travails, where Banksy decided to draw a 10 pence piece with – gasp – Gordon Brown’s face where the lion should appear! Because, it is a 10p tax, and Gordon Brown removed the 10p band, and he is now the prime minister, and…oh, if you don’t get it, just forget it. Then Banksy’s satirical gaze moved to the Glastonbury festival; there had been some controversy as Michael Eavis, organiser fo the festival, invited a rapper, Jay Z, to perform at what has historically been a rock and folk affair. Banksy’s inspired painting: Jay Zeavis! Yes, Jay Z, and Michael Eavis, put them together and taa-daa! Er, that’s it.*
Of course, these are just two off-the-cuff recent paintings from Banksy’s conveyor belt of talent; like all artists we should perhaps judge him by some of his timeless classics. So what of them? Well there’s
Sigh. I mean they’re fine, they’re alright, but no more than that. Even when you take a Banksy painting I quite like – that one of a workman cleaning a wall of graffiti that is in fact an ancient cave painting – it is at best a half-decent half-thought, albeit one beautifully rendered. As for the majority, whether a picture of a dove of peace wearing a bullet-proof vest, or of a rioter throwing not a Molotov cocktail but a bunch of flowers, this stuff has all the intellectual depth of something you may find on twitter – “wot if a child frisked a soldier not the other way around lol!” – but coming in at well under the maximum 140 characters.
Why Banksy gets the praise he does I cannot tell, but equally surprising has been the reaction to these stories of his supposed unmasking where an emphasis has been placed on the shock discovery that Banksy may be a former public school boy. Again, I don’t care, but what were people expecting? Banksy’s pieces scream to me of being the work of a sniggering prankster playing at being a notorious, anti-establishment figure. Clearly a technically gifted artist and quite probably an alumnus of some art college or other his work puts me more in mind of Pulp’s “Common People” than Public Enemy’s “Fight The Power”, such is the “look at me, Mum, aren’t I being naughty” nature of his work. Now, that doesn’t necessarily mean that Banksy has come from a privileged background but I would personally be far more amazed if it turned out that he is in fact some hard-nosed, dragged-up kid from the streets who “turned to the art of stencilling…whilst he was hiding from the police under a train carriage,” man. As it is, if it is ever confirmed that Banksy did receive a public school education then I wouldn’t bat an eyelid.
* Update: A question of attribution. Since conducting some rudimentary research following writing this rant I’m not now sure whether either of these pieces are in fact authentic Banksy’s. Pure laziness and assumptioning on my part I’m afraid. Still, they are pathetic enough to pass for the Master’s work, so the general point still remains.
Posted in Media
I drive my own car. I fill it up at the pumps, and when diesel hit 121.9p per litre, which I paid outside Chipping Norton a couple of weeks ago, it really struck me that there was an intriguing advert on the forecourt of the filling station.
“A great way to start your day,” the advert announced (or something like that), and it featured a picture of some breakfasting suggestions, purchasable, one presumes, in the little shop. There was a washed-out looking photograph of an arrangement of some common-or-garden morning staples; a coffee, a croissant, a sweet Danish pastry…but then, somewhat disturbingly, a fresh, folded copy of the Daily Mail and two cans of Red Bull.
And I’m scared, frankly. Scared that someone thinks that those last two items taken together are a suitable and safe way for someone to start their day. Scared that perhaps the creator of that advertisement personally kicks off their morning by necking a couple of cans of Red Bull while devouring the latest ravings that the Mail has to offer. The possibility that someone, once fully breakfasted in such a style, and no doubt swivel-eyed, delusional and frantically gibbering Daily Mail stock-phrases to boot, could then embark on a full day’s work doing, well, anything really, anything at all, quite petrifies me.
Am I wrong? Naïve? Am I the one out of step? Is a double dose of adrenaline and bigotry a popular way for people to begin their day? Perhaps, but I have to believe that it is not, that the constituent parts of this lethal cocktail are kept at a safe distance from each other for the most part, and that the only person who thinks that the Mail and taurine should be freely mixed is also the person solely responsible for this advert.
Clearly I need to take action. I don’t want that advertisement putting ideas in people’s heads and so I will be contacting the oil company – Total – myself and demanding its immediate removal (I will play the corporate responsibility card, that they should do the right thing, as well as the self-interest one, advising them that they could be sued if a high-as-a-kite customer snaps their wrist in a green-ink frenzy.) My main concern, however, is for the person who created the advert; but is it a Total staffer or an employee from an advertising agency? We need to know, because we need to track them down. Whether the author personally imbibes Red Bull while reading the Melanie Phillips column – a chilling thought – or just thinks it is a socially and/or medically responsible thing to do, here is someone who is clearly a danger to themselves and others.
But how do we do it? How can we identify this trouble soul? There were no clues on the advert itself; no credits, no copywrite symbol, no identifying marks of any kind as far as I could see. We don’t even know when this specific advert was made; the date on the copy of the Daily Mail was obscured, and the banner headline, “‘Why the English middle classes have had enough,’ by Simon Heffer” doesn’t narrow things down at all. They publish a similar article every other week: the specific article in question, if even uniquely identifiable, could have been from anytime in the last twenty-odd years.
Can you help? Please? A Red Bull drinking Daily Mail reader is a ticking time-bomb that will eventually blow, and when it does I want to know that I have done everything humanly possible to have prevented it.
I was awoken with a jolt in the wee small hours; not by the earthquake, but by my wife whispering, “There’s been an earthquake!” Somehow I managed to sleep through a magnitude 5.2 seismic shock (albeit one that’s power must have dissipated markedly by the time it reached us, considering our distance from the epicentre) but not through my beloved’s gentle prodding. What that tells you about my survival instinct I don’t know; interesting that a geological incident won’t shift me (suggesting that I care not for my personal safety) but when my wife merely turns to me (and I perhaps imagine an alternative motive for her action requiring me to fulfil some primal duty to perpetuate the species) I’m up like a shot, so to speak.
At the time of course we had no idea how localised the quake was, and so once downstairs with the kids a (depressingly) few hours later I checked the internet to see if there had been word. My home page showed a link to an article in The Guardian, and so I had a quick read.
Large areas of England from London to Manchester suffered tremors just before 1am last night as an earthquake measuring 4.7 on the Richter scale rumbled through the country for several seconds.
There were reports of power cuts in some cities and of buildings shaking – in Hull students ran into the street for fear of falling masonry – but no reports of injuries.
According to the US Geological Survey, the earthquake struck at 12.56am at a depth of 10km (6.2 miles) with an epicentre 205 km (127 miles) north of London and 30 miles south of Kingston upon Hull.
“What-what-what-what-what”, as Dannan O’Mallard would doubtless say. Do we really need to know that the epicentre was 127 miles north of London? Should it be the first geographical reference point we are presented with concerning an incident in Lincolnshire? Is it so impossible to describe anything without relating it in some way to the capital? Good – and indeed – grief. I can see why Reuters or the foreign press might mention London in passing, dealing as they are with an international readership, but does a British paper need to do the same? Perhaps, for a metropolitan audience, the sad answer is “yes, it does.”
Sorry, then, if I come across as a chippy northerner, because I really don’t mean to. Perhaps it is because I am a chippy northerner – it’s as good a reason as any – or perhaps it is a temporary effect caused by me currently reading Stuart Maconie’s rather splendid Pies And Prejudice. I don’t know the answer just yet; ask me again in a week.
Posted in Media
Last year I was going to write a post prompted by this Daily Telegraph article from Jeff Randall, the ex-Business Editor of the BBC, where he criticised his former employer for the profusion of useless timeservers at the corporation. Well he should know, I was going to say; how ironic that during his period at the BBC I found him to be such an utter waste of space. I could only imagine what talented journalists such as Evan Davis, Stephanie Flanders and Paul Mason must have thought working alongside someone so woeful. But with so much wrong in this world, and having already written one post slagging the man off, I decided a second was hardly required and so I binned it.
I’m still sure that decision was correct, but recently I have read a good number of posts and comments around the place that, when legitimately criticising the BBC’s business coverage, have spoken wistfully of the Jeff Randall era. Such instances are rare but still they haunt me (I’m easily spooked) and they are a disturbing development. For example take Guido (via Gracchii) who, in one of those posts that suggests he really should just stick to the gossip, criticises Newsnight and Stephanie Flanders because of what appears to be a simple transposing error when reporting the markets; he then finishes his post by pointedly noting that “Jeff Randall is on Sky…“, as is his style.
Well I read that as an invitation, so this week I decided to check out Jeff at his new televisual home, Jeff Randall Live on Sky News. Much water has gone under the bridge since I last clapped eyes on the fellow, and I wondered if perhaps I had been a bit harsh in my appraisal of his talents, that maybe Guido’s implication is right and that he and others have seen something I have not, and that Jeff is a far better journalist that I have hitherto given him credit for.
But oh dear no, it is all still there; Jeff still has the air of someone slightly puzzled, who is trying really hard but is not at all sure quite where he is. When he talks it seems less like he is speaking his brains than he is conducting someone else’s thoughts. Okay, but that’s just presentation, and while it doesn’t breed confidence or suggest Jeff has a mastery of his subject he may still know his stuff, even if he gives every impression that he doesn’t.
But there is more to it than that. In his BBC days Jeff’s role was to answer questions put to him by the presenter, whereupon he would typically appear clueless and flounder around for a bit, unquestioningly trotting out some received wisdom lacking in any supporting evidence, or drawing lazy and false conclusions; I particularly remember him trying to illustrate Leeds United’s financial problems by comparing its turnover against Manchester United’s, which is idiotic. Fortunately Jeff is now spared all that indignity, being both the presenter and interviewer for his own programme, and presumably fed his lines by autocue and earpiece; but still all is not well. He is a very poor interrogator for one thing, his technique apparantly being to lob the obvious and most contentious question first – the one the interviewee will be well rehearsed for – and to then fail to follow it up, plodding on to the next question regardless and making little attempt to react to and engage with whatever the other party has actually said. The result is that he allows the interviewee to speechify, to in effect be allowed to get away with delivering a PR monologue without any fear of being picked up on any of the specifics. In all it doesn’t feel like he is conducting an interview, he may as well be running through a questionnaire.
So yesterday we had David Greene of the law firm representing around 6000 of Northern Rock’s shareholders who reasoned that the government could recompense each shareholder to the value of £4 per share of their worthless stock, a statement that went entirely unchallenged by Jeff. His “interview” with Mike Turner of BAe Systems was even worse, allowing Turner to respond to the obligatory question about the company’s contentious links with Saudi Arabia by sighing, shrugging his shoulders and wondering aloud about what a cruel and unfair world we live in where people can’t just leave his great British company alone, as if concern about the Serious Fraud Office investigation into the Al Yamamah deal and the political interference that brought it to a halt was just an example of the tall poppy syndrome, sour grapes and a sadly regretable lack of patriotism. It was all pretty pathetic.
Now I have nothing against Jeff personally, he is only doing his best bless him, but had I read some of these recent criticisms of the BBC’s business coverage during his tenure I may have entirely agreed, but cited Jeff as a perfect example; so how can you explain his fine reputation among the same folk? Clearly I’ve not watched every report or read every article Jeff has ever produced, and it is possible, though barely plausible, that I have been uniquely unfortunate in my exposure to the bloke; this could merely be a difference of opinion between Jeff’s cheerleaders and myself and there’s no accounting for taste. Maybe it is all down to his supporters taking a dim view of Jeff’s replacement, Robert Peston, who is himself no great shakes; it may be a straightforward case of absence making the heart grow fonder. But just perhaps, could it be the very fact that Jeff has spent much of his post-BBC career regularly criticising the corporation he used to work for that has so endeared him to some? Not for me to say, but whatever the reason the solution is simple; should anyone praise Jeff’s journalistic abilities I will just point them in the direction of his Sky News show and leave it at that. Nothing more will be required, and I never need write about him again.
Television scheduling today looks to be so much neater, perhaps more professional, than in my youth. There was a time when programmes would start and finish at all sorts of odd times, with the awkward gaps filled in by cartoons; now programmes seem far more likely to begin almost religiously on the hour or half-hour, and the cartoons have been replaced by trailers and other promotions. Whether this is down to greater discipline on the part of programme makers, or to refinements in the schedulers’ art, I don’t know.
What I do know is that I find it a shame. The uniform regularity of the schedules, the lack of surprise, feels dull. I miss the occasional cartoon; more’s the point, I miss them on behalf of my kids, who it appears will never know the pleasure of the TV announcer revealing that there is just enough time between the end of Grandstand and the start of the News to squeeze in a Daffy Duck cartoon, or the extra special thrill of discovering as that cartoon ends and another starts that you are to be treated to a double bill.
The cartoons are still out there, of course, on their own digital subscription channels, and on DVD; perhaps it was the recognition of the money to be made from these commercial opportunities that spelt the end of the filler cartoon on the main networks, but if so it seems short-sighted to me. Sure, it worked in my case – fearing my son would miss out I bought several Tom & Jerry DVDs, and I urge you to do the same; you’ll want to stop at volume 5, mind, when the sublime comedy and Scott Bradley’s joyous Gershwinesque scores give way to tatty drawings, grating music and unfunny jokes – but I can’t help thinking that lacking a presence on terrestrial TV is akin to the cartoon makers shooting themselves in the foot. There must be kids growing up today who have no idea who Tom & Jerry are, and that is nothing short of a disgrace.
Thank heavens for the Internet, then, where free cartoons live to be stumbled upon again, and which hasn’t so much improved on the “old media” as to have taken up the mantle they have so willingly cast aside. For ages I wanted to track down one of my favourite childhood cartoons featuring a chemist who falls asleep and dreams that one of his potions has made him shrink to just a few inches tall while his bottles of witch hazel and ammonia spring to life and dance around him. Interrogating Google meant that I learned that it was called Bottles and was an MGM Happy Harmonies cartoon from 1936, but try as I might I couldn’t find out where to buy it. Then, periodically chancing my arm on YouTube, I finally located the whole 10-minute cartoon the other week, to my – and now my son’s – delight. So here it is in all its glory, my Christmas present to you all, and as a kind of placeholder until I write something here again, probably in the New Year. So until then, take care, and I’ll see you in 2008.
Posted in Media
So I’ve voluntarily given up my season ticket for Eastlands, and thanks to our “Frank” Shinawatra I’ve been forced into selling my shareholding in Manchester City; so what should I do with my money instead? Well, watching the half-time adverts while sat in The Queen’s Arms last night, during the piss-awful tedious toss that passed for City’s 1-0 victory over “Roy Keane’s Sunderland”, I was presented with this opportunity.
You could be watching Barclays Premier league in your living room
For just £9.99 a month & no annual contract
Subscribe at Setanta.com
At which I sighed, polished-off my second pint of sublime draught Stella that slipped down sweet and cool as you like, then ambled to the bar and ordered one more. Returning to my prime spot, slap-bang in front of the pub’s generous 40”+ plasma screen, I sank back into my seat and briefly pondered the kind offer while savouring my third exquisite pint.
Now just why would I want to go and do a stupid thing like that?
I don’t know what Gordon Brown thought he had to laugh about. His childish chuckling at the Conservatives yesterday as Alistair Darling announced the government’s new policy on inheritance tax was a depressing sight to behold. Can he not just stick to looking dour? It was the shamelessness that so grated; it was always pretty obvious once the Tories had received a boost in the polls with their proposal to raise the inheritance tax threshold that Labour would respond in some way; but the following week? It was all about as subtle as a brick. Fortunately, the sneering response from George Osborne on the opposition benches soon shook me awake; I can never hate Labour as much as I ought whenever I’m reminded what the alternative is.
Yes, I have “a plague o’ all your houses” feeling this week, I think that is the only sensible reaction to yesterday’s announcements, and to the previous week’s shenanigans over the election that wasn’t; which gives an extra added reason to avoid blogs like Iain Dale’s and similar, and reminds me why I tend to give them a wide berth. What has happened recently should give further cause for despair at the nature of politics itself, not mirth-filled glee at having put one over the opposition. It highlights the difference between “political blogs” and “blogs about politics”, as Paulie mentioned last week. We all have our particular viewpoints and biases and it can be interesting to read the writings of someone whose opinions don’t chime with our own, but this week has starkly shown why I avoid those blogs that have a party political axe to grind; they seem completely out of touch, not to be trusted, and while the popular ones may be hugely popular, it is a popularity based on a worthless political tribalism.
But I’m not interested in political blogs. Time and tide (and in the case of the Tory blogs the inevitable Conservative government at some point) will make them disappear up their own arses. Political blogs, like the Westminster village gossip they prattle on about, are ultimately irrelevant. No it’s politics itself I want to talk about, because politics is important, no matter how hard our politicians try to debase it.
Let me deal with Gordon Brown’s faults first, because they are fairly obvious. Bringing forward government announcements, especially the troop “reductions” during the Tory party conference, was as cynical as you can get, and was bound to stoke speculation about an early election. It was spin, of course, and really bad, contemptuous spin at that; so transparent that Brown must really have a low opinion of the British public to think we wouldn’t see through it right away. That it has backfired so beautifully is justice in action. To then play down the importance of the recent opinion polls in the decision not to hold an election, to claim he would still have comfortably won in the marginal constituencies in spite of all the evidence, and to wibble on about not going to the country now because he wants to show the nation his “vision”; enough already.
But if Brown is full of shit, what about the Tories? They have had a pretty easy ride recently as everyone from Conservative bloggers to newspaper leader writers have stuck the boot into Brown, but I mean honestly; all that guff praising Cameron’s autocue-free speech at his party conference overshadowed the hypocritical, vacuous and content-free flim-flammery of the speech itself; the demand for a general election they clearly didn’t want to fight is as disingenuous a declaration as any (Cameron’s shout of “we will fight, Britain will win” must be the most enthusiastically received defeatist rallying cry in history); the fact that in trying to goad Brown into calling an election let’s not forget they were in effect trying to goad him into making a decision based purely on opportunism and self-interest; and to then criticise his decision not to go down that path and to reiterate the party line that Brown had bottled it is to ignore the simple point, obvious in any dispassionate reading of the situation, that Brown just made the correct, common sense decision.
I think that last point bears further consideration. Brown didn’t have to call an election; that he thought about it when opinion polls showed Labour having such a huge lead over the Tories – and when he must have wondered if he would ever again have it as good – is only human. That he then decided against it when the poll lead either closed or disappeared is just the sensible thing to do; to have pressed on with an election he didn’t have to call under such circumstances would have been utterly stupid, and the fact that he can be criticised as being a coward because he refused to do the stupid thing shows how crap party politics is, where saving face is more important than good judgement. That making the right decision can be so criticised is because spin is so endemic to politics, but what to do? Spin is endemic, full stop. If politics is to reform itself where is it to get its inspiration from; from business? But the PM of the UK is no different from any CEO of a PLC in this regard, spin is everywhere we look from government announcements to company press releases. There is a reason why each firm’s in-house magazine is referred to by its employees as Pravda.
Talking of which, I’m not letting the media off the hook either. No doubt there were briefings by senior politicians hinting at an election to come and that this helped build election fever, but the media really doesn’t need any assistance. It was largely the Labour lead in the opinion polls that allowed the media to lose their heads completely and crank up the hype; for them to now blame the politicians for spinning is a bit rich, and it’s not for the first time. More and more it seems that the media are very quick to point the finger at others, when really a degree of introspection is in order (the Madeleine McCann story is a case study on the subject.) It is here that the best “blogs about politics” should be valued as cutting through the media bollocks and providing an alternative, and where the “political blogs” fail because they follow the herd and exhibit all the faults of the MSM.
I’ve not mentioned the Liberal Democrats yet, but I will; they have been as guilty as the Tories in playing this affair for point scoring party politicking gain. But give them their due; at least they have also used it to propose a move towards fixed-term parliaments, which would prevent the farce of the past few weeks while dealing with the inequity behind it. It is interesting how many Tories have been heard to criticise Brown’s constitutional right to call an election when he likes, but I don’t remember such criticism when the Tories were themselves in power. Also, while there has been much criticism of Brown’s antics, there seems a far less noticeable enthusiasm from Conservatives to back the Lib Dems’ motion, at least at this stage, almost as if the problem isn’t with the prime minister having this power, just with Gordon Brown having it and threatening to utilise it. As with proportional representation, while many in the Labour and the Conservative parties complain about the unfairness of the current system when in opposition, few support an alternative because they don’t want to lose the advantage they perceive it will provide them when they get back into power.
In considering and then dismissing the option of holding an early election Gordon Brown did the sensible thing, he did what anyone would have done in his position; but it shouldn’t be in his gift. Hopefully the lasting legacy of this past week will be that in bungling his election decision Brown has drawn attention to this element of our electoral system, and a groundswell of opinion can build to put an end to the anachronism of the government of the day being able to go to the country at the most advantageous opportunity. As a rule of thumb, if we can take something out of the hands of politicians then it is probably a good idea if we do; and when the thing in question is only of benefit to politicians themselves, then that counts double.
So Jim Davidson is the latest casualty of reality TV, pushed before he could jump from the current incarnation of Hell’s Kitchen because he made offensive remarks to a fellow contestant. I’ve never been a fan of the man personally, but incredibly he managed to fall short of the very low standards I already expected of him.
Jim’s response has been entirely predictable. There were double standards because apparently people were also offensive to him on the show, though examples were not forthcoming, because they don’t exist. He said that the pressures of the show made him “play up to the worst of my perceived image”; this is known as the “Chubby Brown defence”, and was bollocks when he originally came out with it to differentiate his “stage persona” from the “real him”, when they’re essentially the same. He was appalled that now it appeared that he had become the victim, as if this were some terrible, unjust reverse contrary to the laws of nature. If he was now a victim, then he wondered where all the other “heterosexual, white, normal” people like him should go now; oblivious to the fact that he could have stayed put as long as he stopped acting the dick, but that even if he had to move on his specific demographic doesn’t appear to be struggling overall so he has plenty of options. He was of an earlier generation he said (“before racism was bad”, as that line in The Office had it?) as if there were a time when rudeness was once in fashion. In the end, of course, Jim complained that this was all down to “politically correctness”, of which he knows nothing.
But I think we should give thanks to Jim Davidson for his foray into the debate on political correctness, because it has helped me in my understanding of what it actually means. There are some egregious examples of PC “gone mad” – often more urban myth than reality, in my experience – but at its heart I believe that to be political correct simply means that you don’t use terms that other people find offensive, and that you treat others with respect. It is about politeness and decency, and Jim’s behaviour has confirmed me in this opinion. Regarding the specific incident that resulted in Jim Davidson’s expulsion, it should be obvious to all that it is less than courteous to refer to other people as “shirt-lifters”, and pretty stupid to do so while in the presence of a gay man; that when said gay man admits that he finds the term offensive, apologising is generally preferred to saying “I don’t care” and accusing him of “playing the homophobic card” as that is unlikely to calm the situation; still less is it recommended to then call him a “fucking disgrace”, as that term is typically frowned upon in polite society, and absent from most good books on etiquette. This is all common sense, the basic principles of human engagement that we really should learn at our mother’s knee, rather than have battered into us on some Diversity course or other.
ITV, in sacking Davidson as he was walking out of the door, was probably trying to earn easy brownie points while avoiding the kind of furore Channel 4 was embroiled in during the last series of Celebrity Big Brother. There was no need to fire him, and to do so seems an overreaction in my opinion; but from the (admittedly) little I saw of Hell’s Kitchen, by my definition of political correctness Jim Davidson certainly failed the test, but not because on one occasion he used an offensive and homophobic term. The problem was that he came across as a picky, condescending and arrogant character who didn’t appear to understand anyone else, his fellow white middle-aged male contestants being as baffled by his behaviour as anybody; in fact he cut such a sad, confused and misanthropic figure that you could almost feel sorry for him, were he not acting the twat, all the time. It was his shitty attitude and lack of respect towards other people in general that was the problem; the supposedly PC-specific complaints such as the hateful misogyny that appeared so entwined and intrinsic to his being, and the thoughtless, casual homophobia that he brushed off, only seemed to come with the territory.
What do you think has been the most annoying element in this story regarding the “storming off” furore that probably won’t be featured in the forthcoming documentary A Year With The Queen?
In the first place there is the fact that the BBC and RDF appear to have constructed a preview tape that does not conform to reality, and that is bad. It is simply not on for a programme maker to misrepresent its subject, or in this case for subjects to misrepresent their monarch. Perhaps I am being too sanguine, though, but I do view this incident as simply a mistake, just a lazy error. I can’t rule out wilful deception, but I also can’t imagine many people purposefully manufacturing such a situation when they would surely anticipate the utter shitstorm that would occur (and has occurred) once the palace caught wind of what had happened, and would realise that the negative PR consequences would far outweigh any extra publicity gained. Perhaps I’m the idiot, but the initial incident, while valid for criticism, doesn’t vex me all that much.
More irritating has been the media’s response. I haven’t read the papers today – I rarely do – but on hearing the paper review earlier on Radio 4 it seemed to suggest that the nation’s press were as one in condemning the BBC for their actions. Fine in so far as it goes, but it was the papers’ attitude that irked, as if the Queen has suffered some cruel, unusual and unique mishap. If this story hadn’t featured the Queen but some lesser mortal then there would be criticism of the BBC for sure, but not quite the tone of apoplectic moral outrage that we have seen. Why get so worked up because it is the Queen who has been affected? Just because. I’d hoped that I would be old enough by now not to get worked up by such double standards, but it seems such attitudes still get on my tits. Oh well.
But the most annoying issue hasn’t been the accusatory media’s message but the accusatory media as messenger. As I see it this whole incident may have been (and probably is) a mistake, but at worst it is an example of a media organisation twisting the facts to fit with their agenda. That is a serious accusation – especially for a publicly funded broadcaster – but just what media organisation isn’t routinely accused and frequently found guilty of exactly the same thing? It smacks of hypocrisy right out of the top drawer. I mean good God, if I didn’t dismiss almost everything I read in the Mail, Express and Mirror as laughable bias, half-truth and selective reporting then I’d never be off the phone to the PCC. Not to mention the fact that the self same papers now condemning the BBC also gleefully reported the story in the first place, without making any background checks to corroborate the facts.
If the BBC has been guilty of lying and manipulation then they deserve all the criticism they receive; I just don’t think the press should be the ones taking the moral high ground. They don’t belong there.
Posted in Media
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