"So embarrassing"

 

Did you see Jon Sopel's first question to Joe Biden's new press secretary Jen Psaki? 

Did it make you cringe?

Neither of them took it very seriously, as you can tell from his laughing eyes...

...and her [p]sarky reply:

Jon Sopel: What happened to the Churchill bust and what should be read about its removal from the Oval Office?
Jen Psaki: Oooh, such an important question! It's the plane of today. 

Stephen Bush, the political editor of The New Statesman, wasn't impressed. And nor was another New Statesman author:

Stephen Bush, New Statesman: I know I'm a joyless bore, but isn't, say, that Blinken has said a genocide has taken place in Xinjang and there's another vote on this exact topic coming in Parliament a more important question for our public service broadcaster? Isn't the point of the levy we literally take the country's poorest *to court* to enforce that it frees them up to be joyless bores? 

Ian Leslie, New Statesman: This is pathetic. It makes Jon Sopel look silly but more importantly, as Stephen Bush suggests, it's exactly what the BBC shouldn't be doing. The BBC should always be trying to be more serious than its competitors. That's the licence that the licence fee gives it. And when you aim over the heads of the audience, more often than not you meet them head on. People are not stupid. 

Darren Sugg: "Such an important question". The Press Sec beginning the answer by taking the p*ss is not a good sign. 

Ian Leslie: So embarrassing.

*******

UPDATE: A rather different way of putting it, but a similar sentiment:

The Leave Alliance: See, this is why the BBC is shit. Here you have a "journalist" with privileged access to the *White House*, who could have asked any question under the sun be it pertaining to trade, security, Covid (take your pick) and this is what the useless BBC obsesses about. Total wastrels.

I mean, you can argue the toss whether it's got a left wing bias but if you wanted definitive proof that it's a useless heap shit that adds no value to public discourse, then this is it. But this is essentially a manifestation of that metropolitan bias.

And the worst part about this? You could raise this issue with BBC news producers and they wouldn't even see what the problem was. They think this guy is elite journalism - and the worse they get, the better they think they are.

This is the same media that gives us all the other sub-mediocre deadbeats who routinely waste airspace on trivia, not having the first idea how to interrogate an issue - and then they tell us we should be glad to pay for it.