(Not) dropping clangers

In a crisis, everyone realises how much we need a charismatic and morale-boosting leader. 

Why do so many get-well wishers think they have to include a caveat:  “…. Boris has so many flaws, but…..”  

No! Just admit it. Boris is irreplaceable.

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While Boris is in intensive care and we’re all in lockdown, it seems churlish or crass to obsess and/or carp about BBC bias. Especially as all UK TV channels are responsible for imposing their own bubble-dwelling version of bias upon the public. However, I suppose it’s the BBC that has the most widely-understood obligation to be impartial. 

Here, Douglas Murray concentrates on two non-BBC figures. Channel 4’s Cathy Newman and her absurd attack on (his friend and hero) Jordan Peterson and ITV and Robert Peston’s farcical interview with Deputy Chief Medical Officer Jonathan Van Tam. 

“Of course there is, and must be, a place in every society for people asking awkward questions. But asking awkward, difficult questions is a different thing from asking the wrong questions, or asking questions which are ill-informed. And perhaps, during an epidemic unprecedented in our lifetimes, and in which very difficult decisions must be made based on highly complex scientific calculations, that kind of gotcha journalism is no longer a public service but a public nuisance. 

Journalism is at a difficult enough juncture, and there are many people in the trade who know a great deal. But the whole profession would be enormously helped if its most prominent representatives stopped giving off the impression of thinking that the primary problem with real experts is that they don’t listen to journalists enough.”

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I haven’t watched any of this programme deliberately. Why needlessly rocket one’s blood pressure into the stratosphere? However, Douglas Murray calls ‘Noughts + Crosses’ an ugly work about racism, and ugly works are bad.

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At a time when everyone who normally comes into the studio in person to unload their expertise is socially distancing, one can’t but notice the backgrounds they choose to sit in front of while filming, in self-isolation, from home. Some home-videoers place the camera lens low, and the backdrop is an attic with a hipped roof; we get a good view of the ceiling. Others sit in front of a bookcase, which signals both virtue and education. Trying to read the titles on the spines, (which I never can) can be distracting. When more than two talking heads are shown side by side on a split-screen, the difference between the head-heights, some at the top of the screen, some at the bottom, the lack of uniformity adds a comical air. (You’d think some general advice would be offered, at least wrt the ‘lighting’.  

So there I am, nit-picking in a crass, churlish and obsessive manner.

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I still like our Clanger-oronavirus image. So I’m leaving the open thread as it is for now. What I need is a mug of soup.