Journalists

A week ago while he was stuffing his common cold virus-smeared and latex-covered fingers into my mouth (he did an excellent job on my root canal and I didn’t get a cold) the dentist explained to me the new terms and conditions they will be working under from April 2006 (See Infection below). He explained the old and the new set-ups clearly, and I understood everything that he said.
On the BBC World at One on Friday there was a report on exactly the same thing by, I guess, a professional journalist. I tried to recognise in her staccato rambling the situation which the dentist had so clearly described. Zilch. Absolutely fuck all. The journalist’s story was a succession of uncontextualised and therefore opaque soundbites from various branches of “the authorities”, spattered with completely meaning-free links by the journalist herself. If she had the remotest idea what she was talking about she was clearly determined not to share it. Of course it is impossible for a news story to contain zero information, even if the information it does contain is attenuated and a long way from anything approaching the actual, but I reckon for vacuous gormlessness that news item was near the top of the pile.
It’s the second time I’ve criticised the BBC in a week, but in fact I’m a big supporter. The huge advantage this and other democracies have over dictatorships is nothing to do with a way of life or a sense of fair play or any of that self-serving crap. It’s because historically a huge system of checks and balances has evolved, an elaborate political immune system, of which the World Wide Web is a recent and now a vital component. The diseases this immune system partially protects us democracy-dwellers from are tyranny, torture, crime, false imprisonment, war; all the things that have also, along with the immune system, evolved within h. sap culture.
At the moment the Government, the Labour Party, the far right press are the principle vectors of these diseases. The BBC, though weakened by attacks from Labour for truth-telling, is still a voice, a vital component of the checks and balances. And in itself and at its best it is one of the great cultural wonders of the world, particularly BBC radio. It deserves the strong support of all of us who realise that (in CuriousHamster’s words) Orwell’s 1984 was not supposed to be an instruction manual.
That wasn’t what I started off to say. What I started off to say was that this garbled twaddle about dentists’ terms and conditions from News at One was by no means unique. The Guardian (another vital component of the immune system, despite the sneering of self-styled realists) often runs stories which can make no sense even to the person who wrote them. It seems that some journalists settle down to the keyboard without taking five minutes to work out the basic coherent structure of the situation, system, whatever it is that they are trying to tell us, so they write in a state of almost unsullied ignorance. Instead of description and explication, they seem to think that a jumbled and partial mosaic of surface features will do;and, such is their arrogant idleness, that if they can’t be arsed to understand the logical infrastructure of their subject matter, then nobody else could either. Any old garbage and a few buzzwords like implode and epicentre will do. And this isn’t just trainee journalists. Science stories are often written by a named Science Correspondent, and demonstrate that a named Science Correspondent can make just as much of a baboon’s arse of a story as someone straight out of journalism school. Don't they have sub-editors any more?