I caught a bit of the BBC’s News at Ten last night and for me it showed what is pretty much wrong with the way that news programmes treat their viewers. For reasons best known to the editors, they were in an old age peoples home, interviewing OAPs about the referendum.
Old people lent in conspiratorially to camera and said things like “There’s no room, we’re full up.” and “We’re voting out, it’s time to take charge again and put the Great back in Great Britain.”
It was depressing because 98% of the UK is undeveloped and I’m not entirely sure a policy of isolation will do us much good- it’s not worked very well for North Korea. I’m not sure what benefit it had to the reporting around the referendum, other than to reinforce the idea that these decrepit loons are in a nursing home for very sensible reasons.
To be fair, as I get older I do get more like my dad in as much as there are two opinions on any subject, my opinion and the wrong one. I can see other people’s point of view though and that’s where modern news reporting gets me down. There is too much emphasis on asking a specially chosen selection of people for their opinion for no other reason than to pad out a report.
News now includes so much organised argument, presumably in the interests of “balance” that it’s more talk show than the dissemination of occurrences that might be of interest to members of the general public. Breakfast had some poor sod on the other day with his OTT pudding (lots of ice cream, cake, cream etc in a jam jar, typical hipster food) and rather than talk about why he made it, and what sort of clientèle ate it, they simply presented him with a woman from a diabetes charity and got them to have a really awkward discussion over it all.
Pointless.
It’s the whole this is the news but to make sense of it for you, we’re going to vox pop some morons on the high st aspect of modern television news that gets me and I don’t see that it’s going to change any time soon.
