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Real news need not apply

I’m watching the evening news while I eat… or perhaps I should call it the evening non-news as there has been very little time allocated for News tonight. With Iran in the midst of potentially historic changes, demonstrations against the dictator wannabe in Venezuala and with the Iraq situation moving towards endgame…. we get the Blair’s family business. The top news in the UK is whether the wife of the Prime Minister had help on a family mortgage from a con artist who was going out with her best friend. I’d like to know: “Why on EARTH should I give a flying f**k?”

Journalism has across the board sunk to the depths of super market rags. No garbage is too insignificant to be turned into a headline.

Minutes later: I give up. Television off. Garbage news on two channels, journalists rabbiting on about the importance of the utterly banal and unimportant. If everyone just turned the telly off now and told them how idiotic they all sound, I wonder if they’d get the point and give us News?

Thank god for the internet where I can go find news that actually matters.

6 comments to Real news need not apply

  • Network television news strikes me as a weird historical anachronism from the 1950s. I consider myself well informed, and I am bombarded with news for a variety of places, yet I haven’t watched “the news” in years. (I watch 24 hour news channels from time to time, however, especially when a big story breaks). Yet when I was a kid, everybody going into the living room to watch a half hour news bulletin every night was almost an unavoidable ritual.

  • Kevin Connors

    Ha! I just saw that same report on MSNBC complete with a dialog between the anchor and correspondent about whether Mrs. PM was “well liked” by the British people. Argh!

    The worst is the 11 pm local news, filled with crap about car wrecks, bank robberies and such that I can get with a five minute scan of the next morning’s metro section, sports, and a couple of fluff/titilation pieces that have been shamelessly hyped all through that night’s prime time programming. The only saving grace is the weather report, which is still a bit better than what’s on the web.

  • David Carr

    Dale,

    Two points. First, I don’t agree that ‘Cherie-gate’ is trivial. It is a glimpse of the kind of croneyism and corruption and arrogance that surrounds not just Blair but the whole Nulabour project.

    However, you are right about the British mainstream ‘news’ providers who have begun to plumb the depths of banality. I am of the opinion that this reflects the British polity. There is just no serious debate in this country about anything and the news providers have probably made the commercially sensible decision that they don’t want to bore their shallow and indifferent audience with ‘big, heavy stuff’.

  • Dale Amon

    Sorry I’ll have to disagree with you on this one David. If there is any meat on that bone, I’ve yet to see it.

    I seriously doubt there is any more cronyism going on than would be going on with any political party with X years in majority.

    It’s not the party, it’s the very nature of the beast.

    The whole thing strikes me as similar to the whole Clinton thing in the USA, only even more unimportant. The ones gunning for Blair can’t get at him on anything real, so they’re showing their impotence by making fools of themselves by going after the inconsequential.

    The Tories are looking and soundling like total idiots. They have nothing to say, no policy, no leadership, no differentiation, no nothing. They’re going for hype over substance and it will just push them deeper into their party death throes.

    Hell, what can you say when IDS’s answer to the Labour anti-terrorist program was to suggest a US-like Home Land Security Department? And this when Tom Ridge, head of the American one, has been quoted saying the US couldn’t mirror the powers of the MI5 because they would be impossible under US Constutional protections? So IDS wants even MORE of a police state than the NuLabour is giving us?

    Given the choice of the two men, we’re (sadly) better off with Blair.

  • David Carr

    “It’s not the party, it’s the very nature of the beast.”

    Oh I agree with you, mate. But it’s important, nonetheless, to keep this point fresh in people’s minds so as to fuel the disillusion with the entire political class.

    I don’t think the Tories are behind it. They’re not competent enough. Somebody leaked Mrs.Blair’s e-mails to the press and the most likely suspect is MI5. Why? Search me.

    IDS may not be any better but that doesn’t mean that I want Blair or the Nulabour regime given a free pass or an easy ride.

  • Byron

    Same general problem here in the US. It ticks me off to no end every time I see on the cable news networks a jack-knifed tractor trailor in Massachussetts, a police car chase on a California highway, or a sinkhole in Florida. Unfrickinbelievable that this stuff is considered national news. Sometimes I think its all a conspiracy to dumb down the population and make them easier to control.