Sunday 3 September 2017

Of Shoes and Shirts


Two Kates

Stephen Daisley's Spectator piece on the hypocrisy of some feminist journalists over Melania Trump is well worth a read. It begins:


Stephen cites a number of spiteful American examples, but if you want to see some first-class British journalistic sneering and tut-tutting at Melania then just take a look at last Tuesday's The Papers on the BBC News Channel (from five minutes in) where a couple of media Kates can be seen sniping away at the First Lady over her choice of shoes with not-so-merry abandon. 

And the BBC presenter, Clive Myrie, joined in the sneering too. ("Interesting attire...She put her flats on...They were quite shiny...Well, how often does one get to go to a disaster zone?"). 

Kate 1 was wearing an old-fashioned black top with white polka dots. Kate 2 was wearing a gender-neutral white shirt (as befits someone from the Huffington Post). Clive was wearing a BBC dark blue suit with a striped blue tie and white shirt.  None of their shoes were visible under the table. 

The BBC's very own White House correspondent Tara McKelvey, accompanying the Trumps on Air Force One, used her Twitter feed to report the latest presidential visits to Texas and Louisiana, sending regular updates and photos. Among the updates were:


Tara's BBC website report on the Presidential couple's tour of the hurricane-hit areas is quite complimentary about the President's own performance (albeit in a slightly sneering BBC way), with lines such as this:
Still, on the Trump-o-meter scale, the things he said and did on Saturday - and earlier in the week too - did not seem all that bad.
I can't see what shoes she had on when she wrote that though. Nor did she even bother to tweet a photo of her own shoes either. I can't help feeling that was an opportunity missed on her part.

6 comments:

  1. "...sneering and tut-tutting..."

    It's what we do best (though only part time as directed exclusively towards the other side).

    As ever there is nothing wrong in the idea of a campaigning news organisation though why should I be made to pay for it?

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  2. This is why I think they should all be able to say what they wish and abandon the impartiality nonsense. They reveal the lightweight hive-like nature of their thought processes, and prove that racial diversity in the media is irrelevant on the way. They're all of an ilk, one that bleats.

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  3. Kate Who and Who? I think we should be told. On the other hand, I do appreciate the skittish mood of the piece. Some of us do not have access to the Player because we are stubborn refusers to sign up to the latest machinations of our masters.

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  4. Ah, it was Kate Forrester of the HuffPost and Kate McCann (no, not that one) of the Telegraph.

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    1. Thank you. Haven't seen either of them before. I do tend to watch the Sky press preview more than the beeb one. And quite often end up muting some of the more annoying ones. There's a Kate among them, Kate Williams, a historian.

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  5. The ability for Fleet Street to locate airhead Sloane Rangers to employ and the BBC to 'feature' never ceases to be... well, predictable.

    Still, go with who you know, loves.

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