A warm welcome to my new blog.This morning the broadcast group watched a programme where four of the top British broadcasters were interviewed by Tony Benn. John Humphreys, Jon Snow, Nick Robinson and Jeremy Paxman were featured and a number of interesting issues were raised.
A news presenter's job is to 'hold up a mirror to reality', according to Jon Snow.
He went on to say that the current state of political apathy was caused by 'a firewall of PR in politics' where politicians' actions are led by their PR people. Quite a statement to make.
I think if politicians were brave enough to tell the truth (not the half truth) then engagement with voters, or more to the point non-voters, would improve. Let me give you an example, I think if Gordon Brown had acknowledged that the reason for not calling an election was that the polls weren't sufficiently in his favour, then he may well have come out of what The Sun called the 'brown stuff' smelling more rose-like! You can tell when people aren't talking straight and the interview he did with Andrew Marr was painful to watch because you knew Brown was trying to hide behind the idea that he had a chance to show the country 'his vision for change'.
If this concept of a 'vision for change' was genuine and not PR-led, it's still a poor excuse because an election is surely the ideal place to do so.
So in conclusion, I concur with Jon Snow.
Please feel free to comment.
Nice to see you've joined the blog thang. I only use it for Diskant - here's a good way to track down some of my record reviews if you're interested. Been doing some fantastic, experimental stuff - improv music, weird "library sounds and cosmic jazz", etc etc. Have a look!
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