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
- Mediated speeches: whom do we really want to hear?
- Obama's rhetoric renews UK media interest in the lost art of oratory
- 'The Lost Art of Oratory' by a BBC executive who helped to lose it in the first place
- Is the media no longer interested in what goes on in parliament?
- BBC discovers the 'Lost Art of Oratory' (again)
- Political speeches can still make a big difference - like changing the date of an election
