Sunday, September 18, 2005
Entertainment/News?
So Tony Blair raged at the news coverage of Katrina as Anti-American. What he doesn't understand is that it's not about politics any more. Not there isn't likely to be a majority in the BBC who dislike America: they advertise their jobs in The Guardian after all. But the PM doesn't realise that the primary risk to news isn't political bias any more -- it's the desire to entertain. John Humphrys has been defended by his friends for the past week or two for his marvellous lack of bias, his even-handedness. 'He's nasty to everyone', they say. What is being missed is that, when a news program is driven by the desire to entertain and not to discover and disseminate truth it will always choose the most exciting angle. What could be more boring than news that said, 'actually, the US isn't a vicious persecutor of black people: it's more complex than that'? And attacking everyone as if they were a seasoned liar is not the route to truth -- it just degrades the public discourse and encourages popular paranoia. Truth is hard work, and only entertaining by accident. We have to decide whether we want news or entertainment. You can't have both.
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And did you see the ITV 50 years of gory photo show? Talk about tasteless. How emotionally dead do you have to be to invite people to choose whether they were more entertained by the footage of a girl being set on fire, the 1966 world cup or Kennedy having the back of his head blown open (in the Splatter category). Foul and proof that news is judged as entertainment these days. The whole subtext seemed to be: oh, it's a shame tragic events like this don't come along more often. Let's review the classics one more time and pray for a nuke in Washington. Not anti-American so much as morally bankrupt.
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