Showing posts with label oscar speeches. Show all posts
Showing posts with label oscar speeches. Show all posts

Blair speaks and the BBC tells you what he said

Yet again, the producers and journalists of BBC Television News have demonstrated their superiority complex when it comes to covering important speeches, giving far greater coverage to their own mediated reportage than to the speech itself.

Last night's news that Tony Blair had made his first political speech since standing down as prime minister took up 188 seconds of the BBC 10 o'clock News - which seemed fair enough

Except for the fact that only 19% of the coverage (36 seconds) was of Blair actually speaking.

The other 81% was devoted to telling us what he said and/or what others thought about it.

Most important in all this, of course, was the BBC's political editor, Nick Robinson, who had more to say than Blair, Cameron and Clegg put together and managed to bag almost half the coverage (48%) for himself.

Does it matter that the BBC increasingly prevents us from hearing what our politicians have to say, preferring to give far more weight to its own reporters telling us what they said?

Regular readers of this blog will know that I think it does - for reasons touched on in some of the posts referred to below.

But am I alone in being irritated and worried by this kind of reportage?


Related posts on UK media coverage (or lack of it) of speeches

Judge Sonia Sotomayor’s Oscar acceptance speech

Being nominated for a seat in the US Supreme Court is presumably the American lawyer's equivalent of an actor winning an Oscar. That at any rate was the impression given by Judge Sonia Sotomayor as she started to list all the family members on her thank you list (see below for an edited clip or HERE for further details of her family tree).

Like Kate Winslet at the Golden Globe awards, though in a more measured tone, she ignored Paul Hogan’s advice on speeches by winners: “.. it’s a good tip to remember the three Gs: be gracious, be grateful, get off.”

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