Author: Samuel Hooper

Live Television – How Not To Do It

Samuel HooperLeave a comment

There has been widespread public criticism – and not just from the usual suspects in the fusty, traditionalist right-wing media – about the quality of the BBC’s coverage of the Queen’s diamond jubilee river flotilla, which aired on Sunday.

The Telegraph, twisting the knife, claims that the BBC’s reputation is “sunk” in the River Thames:

Like many viewers, I watched the BBC on Sunday with incredulity and mounting anger. It has become a truism that our national culture has been infantilised and made stupid. But if ever anything could be relied on to provide a temporary halt in that slide it would, surely, be the BBC’s coverage of the Diamond Jubilee. Much to the irritation of other channels, we turn to the national broadcaster at times of national togetherness. The BBC just gets it right.

Not any more. Sunday’s broadcast was not merely inane, it was insulting. The instruction had clearly gone out from on high that the audience would comprise imbeciles with a mental age of three and a 20-second attention span. And that any celebrity sighting, no matter how minor, would trump anything happening on the river.

So the flotilla – an event so awe-inspiring that it drew well over a million people, on a cold wet day, to stand 10-deep on the banks of the Thames to try to catch a sight – was treated merely as background for the witterings of the BBC’s most lightweight presenters and the D-list celebrities they had lined up to lurk anywhere but on the river.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/comment/9311490/The-BBCs-reputation-is-sunk-in-the-Thames.html

The Daily Mail sneers about the tasteless product placement during the broadcast:

The item that came in for most criticism featured Miss Cotton discussing a jubilee sick-bag with singer Paloma Faith.

After being asked by Miss Cotton whether she had had ‘a lovely jubilee weekend’, the singer seized the opportunity to plug her new album.

The pair then went on to discuss a number of bizarre items of jubilee memorabilia, including jelly moulds shaped like the Queen’s face; a high-visibility vest bearing the words ‘High Viz, Diamond Liz’; and, finally, a sick-bag bearing an image of the Queen.

Holding the bag, Miss Faith explained: ‘Then, if you’ve eaten too much, you can just vomit into a jubilee sick-bag.’

Miss Cotton replied: ‘Lovely, isn’t that just lovely? And you can choose your colour, red or blue, it’s up to you.’

The presenter, 30, last night congratulated herself and colleagues on ‘seven hours of spotless TV’.

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2154222/Queens-Diamond-Jubilee-2012-BBC-sank-tide-wittering-inanity.html

Having personally sat through most of the Sunday coverage myself, I can only agree with these assessments.

Traditionally, Sky News has been (to my mind) the channel you turn to when there is breaking news and you want to see immediate, if somewhat shaky footage, shot from a helicopter and narrated by the reporter who is first on the scene, but is perhaps not fully briefed on the background of the story they are covering, while the BBC is the channel that you give an extra half hour for their reporter to turn up at the scene, but who then delivers a more nuanced and knowledgeable report when in situ.

This Jubilee weekend the situation was reversed, and I found myself giving up on the BBC’s lamentable, dumbed-down coverage in disgust, and switching over to Sky News so that I might actually learn something about what was taking place on the river, rather than have my intelligence insulted any further by the BBC’s callow, youthful and unknowledgeable presenters.

I suppose that my serious point would be that any large commercial broadcaster (Sky, ITV) can televise a large outdoor event and make it cheerful and perky. However, the BBC’s long history and deep institutional experience of broadcasting important national events – not to mention the fact that they are publicly funded by the television license fee – means that they are rightly held to a higher standard on such occasions. Certainly, in my view, the BBC should not merely replicate what is already readily available in the commercial media. But more importantly, like it or not, the BBC’s coverage of such events becomes the “coverage of record”. This is the footage that we will want to watch again when we ourselves are old, and the footage that future historians will study a century from now.

The BBC’s lamentable, frankly amateurish televised coverage of the Queen’s diamond jubilee celebrations has given those future historians an unintentionally revealing insight into what our pop culture, media and attention spans are apparently like in the second decade of the twenty-first century. But they will be sorely disappointed if they watch it with a view to learning anything at all about the British nation, British history or the monarchy – supposedly the reason for the broadcast in the first place.

Oops

Samuel HooperLeave a comment

Barbara Walters’s credibility takes an unfortunate knock with the recent revelations that she tried to help further the journalistic career of one of Syrian President Bashar Al-Assad’s close aides:

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/middleeast/syria/9312558/Barbara-Walters-apologises-over-links-to-Syrian-aide-of-Bashar-al-Assad.html

Says the Daily Telegraph:

Miss Jaafari, 22, was a close adviser to Mr Assad and was at his side as Syrian troops stepped up their campaign of killing and repression. She would speak to him several times a day, sometimes calling him “the Dude” in her adopted American accent, and was sometimes the only official in the room when he did interviews with Western journalists.

Miss Jaafari, whose father Bashar Jaafari has known Walters for around seven years, began dealing with the broadcaster late last year as ABC News lobbied for an interview with Mr Assad.

And worryingly:

Shortly afterwards, Walters emailed the young Syrian saying: “I wrote to Piers Morgan and his producer to say how terrific you are and attached your résumé.” She also asked whether Miss Jaafari was still planning on applying to Columbia University and offered to help.

A week later, Walters emailed Richard Wald, a professor at the Columbia School of Journalism and the father of Jonathan Wald, Morgan’s executive producer.

Walters described Miss Jaafari as “brilliant, beautiful, [and] speaks five languages” and asked whether there was “anything you can do to help?” Prof Wald replied that he would get the admissions office to “give her special attention”.

But despite this lapse in judgement, let us not forget the many high points in the career of Barbara Walters – none so resplendent as the time when she interviewed former Republican presidential candidate Herman Cain and asked him what cabinet position he would be interested in holding in a future Republican administration:

 

“WHAT?”

Dancing With Yourself

Samuel HooperLeave a comment

Tea Party Protest - Barack Obama

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It is hard to disagree with this assessment of recent GOP obstructionism from Jamelle Bouie at The American Prospect:

The crux of the matter:

If I sound frustrated—and I am—it’s because we’re in the middle of an absolutely ludicrous scenario. Under a Republican president, the United States endured eight years of disastrous economic stewardship—arguably the worst of the post-war era—that nearly led to a second Great Depression. In response, voters elected a Democratic president and gave him huge majorities in both chambers of Congress. Rather than work with the new president, Republicans ran to the right and promised to defeat this president by any means necessary. They abused institutional rules to block nominees, and imposed a de-facto super-majority requirement on all legislation. Republicans rejected stimulus, the automobile rescue, a climate bill built from their ideas, a health care bill built from their ideas, and a reform bill designed to keep the Great Recession from happening again.

This was an amazingly successful strategy. It destroyed Democratic standing with the public, energized the right-wing fringe, and led to a historic victory in the House of Representatives. Once in command of the House, Republicans pushed hugely draconian budgets, risked a government shutdown, and nearly caused a second economic collapse by threatening to default on the nation’s debt. This reckless behavior depressed the economy, prolonged the recovery, and destroyed trust in the nation’s political institutions. The Speaker of the House has even promised to do this again, if Democrats don’t bow to his demands for greater spending cuts.

The Republican party of today has drifted so far – not just to the right, but into the realm of crazy, where the eight years of disastrous Bush economic stewardship apparently never happened, and the economic malaise is entirely Obama’s fault – that it’s hard for me to see how I could ever bring myself to vote for them. I have joined firmly with those who are hoping for a complete electoral landslide in the upcoming presidential elections, to perhaps convince the GOP to tack back toward a reasonable, pragmatic conservatism.

Of course, this would have been easier if one of the crazies had managed to wrest the nomination away from Mitt Romney. As it is, we will probably have to wait until Romney’s likely defeat in 2012, and then a further tack to the right and an even bigger defeat in 2016 before we might finally have a viable choice between two parties again.

Happy Jubilee Weekend

Samuel Hooper1 Comment

In honour of Queen Elizabeth II’s 60 years of service to our country as Queen, here is a stunning setting of the National Anthem, arranged by Benjamin Britten, and performed here by the BBC Singers and  BBC Symphony Orchestra at the Last Night of the 2010 Promenade Concerts:

 

And three cheers for our great country. No matter our circumstances or political leanings, we are all exceptionally lucky to live here in Britain.

Birtherism Antidote

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A nice short piece from NPR yesterday, about a courageous mother who stood up to a hostile neighbourhood and antigonistic police to let her black son swim in the newly-desegregated swimming pool in their town:

http://www.npr.org/2012/06/01/154100293/when-mom-is-right-and-tells-police-theyre-wrong?sc=fb&cc=fp

Even at the age of 13, Holmes felt the animosity. The neighborhood had a private swim club that opened up to anyone who participated in the Memorial Day parade. Holmes was in the band.

“I arrived at the pool on Memorial Day having marched in the parade with my uniform still on, and they called the police,” he says.

The pool managers and the police department told Holmes’ mother that her son was not allowed in the pool. She started to ask why, but then she stopped herself. Instead, she told Holmes to crawl under the turnstile and go into the pool.

“I looked at my mother; I looked at the police,” Holmes says. “And I will tell you that as a 13-year-old, I was more inclined to do what my mother said than to be afraid of the police. So I did it.”

A policeman told Holmes’ mother to get him. Holmes distinctly remembers her response: “If you want him out of the pool, you go take him out of the pool. And by the way, as you take him out, you tell him why he can’t go in the pool today.”

“No one came. No one got me out, and I stayed in the pool,” Holmes says.

I think I needed to post something positive – albeit from 1956 – as an antidote to all of the Donald Trump / Birtherism nonsense that has been dominating the US news recently.