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The Day Today Comes to Haiti

I’ve found watching the news coverage of the Haiti earthquake and its aftermath to be quite unsettling. George Alagiah and company stand at the airport anchoring the whole news programme repeatedly telling us how food, fuel and water are in terribly short supply and that people are dying because of the shortages. Would that be the sort of food, fuel and water that news anchors and their attendant crews are consuming? And would space on the flights out to Haiti be better filled with aid than with the size of TV crew required to present the whole bulletin remotely.

By all means send reporters out to show the scale of the problem but it seems completely unnecessary for the news to be presented from the disaster area — morally dubious in its prurience.

This co-incided with the first episode of Charlie Brooker’s new series of Newswipe  on BBC4. I’m generally a great fan of Brooker, though I occasionally find his rants too grating when he drops the self-deprecation and gets too high on his moral horse. In this episode he exposed the irrational faddishness of the editorial decisions made on television news and the pack mentality that seems to have infected news decision making since the advent of 24 hour news channels. There really isn’t much logic in the importance placed on stories — if it fits a particular narrative it gets coverage. It’s not much different from superstition in the middle ages.

Truth often ends up imitating fiction and our news media seems to resemble the ludicrous parodies that Chris Morris produced in the 90s — ‘The Day Today’ and ‘Brass Eye’ (the special of which I have on DVD as it’s not very likely to be repeated).

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I Love Jeremy Vine

When I get the opportunity I love to listen to Jeremy Vine at lunchtime on Radio Two — I even started running at lunchtimes partly so I could listen to his show.

Part of the appeal is the mix of serious discussion with the absolutely ludicrous and including the whole spectrum in between.

Vine is also the heir to Lesley Crowther, when he presented ‘The Price is Right’ (‘you’re a frozen food salesman, how wonderful!)  in his ability to sound completely sympathetic and sincere to his interviewees but also planting the merest hint that he might not be as totally straight with them as they might thing. That may be entirely unintentional but I like to think I pick up more than a slight touch of irony.

Today’s showis a great example of the subject matter. We are promised: an earnest discussion on the power of supermarkets over the agricultural industry; a guide to the little known but now controversial country of Yemen; an item on meditation and how its practice might help people overcome depression; and a discussion on the ex-mayor of Preesall who, no doubt due to the ubiquity of his photgraph on the web, is now famous for his conviction for breaking into houses and stealing womens’ underwear! I’m sure the last item will be a sensitively handled debate on people inclined to transgenderism by proxy and not a cheap excuse for a few Carry On Film type jokes.