Posts tagged bbc

Alt timeline #1  |  Alt timeline #2  | Alt timeline #3

Even a novice blogger can tell you that posting headlines based on momentary snapshots of a fast-changing narrative are likely to mislead. Twitter is the stuff of unfettered news streams. Websites should be edited. 

So what is a reader to make of the headline above: “Gaza rocket fire kills Israelis”? What instinctive conclusions does such a snapshot invite us to arrive at? And is this a fair way of covering this story? [ BBC website screenshot taken at 10am today ].

We all have bias but the BBC clings to the figleaf of old news organisations that maintains objectivity is possible and can be protected no matter what. Its strategy here seems to be to suffocate whatever bias might exist behind the avalanche of changing data such a fast-changing story offers. It is a way of avoiding the responsibility to contextualise for fear of being obliged to tell a version of truth some will disagree with. And the results make its website appear either glib or biased. In my view, the latter.

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This is the tweet that kicked off the BBC’s latest suicide attempt. Clearly ill-judged, provocative and irresponsible, the tweet has since been deleted from the account of Iain Overton, who has also replaced the image of himself in the company of a camel, with a visual of desolate desert sand. Which is probably what the BBC hierarchy, or the Newsnight bosses at least, wish he could be transformed into. What possessed him to tweet as he did one can only surmise, but I am now puzzled that anyone should think to attempt to hide the evidence of it by deleting the tweet. As if …

* WTF is the Bureau of Investigative Journalism? [ Daily Mail ]

* Just how crap WAS that Newsnight investigation before The Guardian “came to the rescue”? David Leigh, The Guardian will tell you in the smuggest way possible.

Does anyone question our media-dominated culture with more charisma and wit? I can’t think of a more ambitious, thought-provoking commentator. Here is the trailer for his new BBC2 series which began this week. Love and Power tells of how we came to test the rational limits of laissez-faire; how our post-war culture came to be dominated by objectivist dreams of a stable economic and social environment facilitated by the machines & digital networks we could build. Admit it: ten or fifteen years ago you too probably thought it would last. Remember him? Starring: Ayn Rand, Alan Greenspan, Bill Clinton and the heroes of Silicon Valley.

The narrative is at times clumsy and on occasion the pressure of keeping everything within a manageable scale means the perspective is foreshortened uncomfortably, leading to inductive leaps that jar. But I can only forgive Curtis his lapses. At least he has the courage to tilt at the truly interesting windmills around and inside us. And as usual with Curtis, the visual landscape is hypnotically beautiful.

UPDATE: I’ve just finished watching the last of the current series and have reclassified Curtis’s work as “docu-dreams”, as much meditative ruminations as  cogent narratives. Television as performance art and a remarkable font for reflection.

* Episode 1, All Watched over by Machines of Loving Grace

* The Adam Curtis blog: The medium and the message

* It Felt Like a Kiss: How America Set out to Remake the World [ BBC ]

* As Astonishing as Elvis [ Jenny Turner reviews Ayn Rand by Jeff Britting, LRB ]