Business as usual
Right. Back to bitching. The usual objects, I'm afraid: Ken and the BBC.
Ken's latest wheeze, in his ongoing mission to be informally deified by London's bien-pensants, involves promoting his extension to the Congestion Charging zone (ie, his application of the screw to yet more small businesses in the name of buggering the motorist) with a poster that shows the London skyline, the left half of the picture in daylight and the right in darkness (or perhaps that should be, "the Left half of the picture in daylight and the Right in darkness"). The caption is "7am - 6.30pm". Now that the clocks have gone forward and summer's on the way it doesn't get dark by 6.30 any more, but Ken would never let the facts get in the way of an arresting image. The crowning glory of this image, however, is the C logo perched on the horizon, clearly intended, with its terribly subtle glow effect at the edge, to resemble the sun, rising above the city and imperiously burning away the frost and dew of congestion and immeasurably improving our lives the way all Ken's initiatives have, don't you know.
BBC News 24 is a pretty shambolic affair occasionally. The guy presenting last night stumbled over his words five times during a 90-second piece to camera (and when you consider that he is also frightfully well-spoken the question arises how in the world he holds onto his BBC job, being both crap and posh (the BBC hasn't consciously employed anyone without an impeccably egalitarian regional accent for many years now, barring a few superannuated institutions like Dimbleby and Paxman)) and that was just what I noticed in between playing Day of Defeat and rolling Js. But here's a thing. Going through the headlines of tomorrow's (ie today's) papers with an analyst, I was intrigued to note that he instigated discussion on the front page stories of The Scotsman, The Guardian, The Independent, The Times and The Sun. The Scotsman had bird flu, The Grauniad (first edition) had a link discovered that solved a mystery of evolution, The Indy had the peace protesters accused of terrorism (natch), The Times had credit card charges being "slashed" ... The Telegraph, which in its first edition ran with Gordon Brown's new retrospective "wealth tax", apparently didn't merit discussion of its front page story; instead presenter and pundit spent an animated couple of minutes discussing the story on page 3, which was a report that JK Rowling thinks girls worry too much about being fat and she'd never allow her daughters to become so obsessed with being skinny, which led the pundit to remark that JK was a "fine figure of a woman" and then hastily recant as though he could already hear the armies of humourless feminists sharpening their nibs. A good laugh was had by all and with a bit of luck no-one really noticed that they declined to comment at all on the front page story.
Am I ridiculous in finding that odd? Am I paranoid in considering it yet more evidence of the BBC's inherent soft-Left bias? After (rightly) working themselves up into paroxysms of righteous anger about the two sexagenarian women accused of terrorism for civil disobedience, are we to believe that they genuinely thought JK Rowling's opinion of our diet-obsessed culture was a more important talking point than a retrospective tax on wills that could impinge upon one in ten households?
Ken's latest wheeze, in his ongoing mission to be informally deified by London's bien-pensants, involves promoting his extension to the Congestion Charging zone (ie, his application of the screw to yet more small businesses in the name of buggering the motorist) with a poster that shows the London skyline, the left half of the picture in daylight and the right in darkness (or perhaps that should be, "the Left half of the picture in daylight and the Right in darkness"). The caption is "7am - 6.30pm". Now that the clocks have gone forward and summer's on the way it doesn't get dark by 6.30 any more, but Ken would never let the facts get in the way of an arresting image. The crowning glory of this image, however, is the C logo perched on the horizon, clearly intended, with its terribly subtle glow effect at the edge, to resemble the sun, rising above the city and imperiously burning away the frost and dew of congestion and immeasurably improving our lives the way all Ken's initiatives have, don't you know.
BBC News 24 is a pretty shambolic affair occasionally. The guy presenting last night stumbled over his words five times during a 90-second piece to camera (and when you consider that he is also frightfully well-spoken the question arises how in the world he holds onto his BBC job, being both crap and posh (the BBC hasn't consciously employed anyone without an impeccably egalitarian regional accent for many years now, barring a few superannuated institutions like Dimbleby and Paxman)) and that was just what I noticed in between playing Day of Defeat and rolling Js. But here's a thing. Going through the headlines of tomorrow's (ie today's) papers with an analyst, I was intrigued to note that he instigated discussion on the front page stories of The Scotsman, The Guardian, The Independent, The Times and The Sun. The Scotsman had bird flu, The Grauniad (first edition) had a link discovered that solved a mystery of evolution, The Indy had the peace protesters accused of terrorism (natch), The Times had credit card charges being "slashed" ... The Telegraph, which in its first edition ran with Gordon Brown's new retrospective "wealth tax", apparently didn't merit discussion of its front page story; instead presenter and pundit spent an animated couple of minutes discussing the story on page 3, which was a report that JK Rowling thinks girls worry too much about being fat and she'd never allow her daughters to become so obsessed with being skinny, which led the pundit to remark that JK was a "fine figure of a woman" and then hastily recant as though he could already hear the armies of humourless feminists sharpening their nibs. A good laugh was had by all and with a bit of luck no-one really noticed that they declined to comment at all on the front page story.
Am I ridiculous in finding that odd? Am I paranoid in considering it yet more evidence of the BBC's inherent soft-Left bias? After (rightly) working themselves up into paroxysms of righteous anger about the two sexagenarian women accused of terrorism for civil disobedience, are we to believe that they genuinely thought JK Rowling's opinion of our diet-obsessed culture was a more important talking point than a retrospective tax on wills that could impinge upon one in ten households?
posted by Novus at 10:27
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