Media News: a decision is not going to be made

Our local newspaper, The Wells Journal, occasionally comes up with such breath-taking headlines or stories that they cry out to be shared with a wider audience, as when it told us that a council official was about to walk along path that doesn't exist, or when one of its pre-Christmas headlines warned of a 'Busy time for postal workers' (HERE).

This week's Journal excels itself with the lead headline and opening lines of its front page story about something that's not going to happen and a meeting that's not going to take place - pushing news of a local murder trial (very rare around here, thankfully) on to an inside page:

City kept waiting for news about store
A decision on which site in Wells will be used for a new supermarket will not be made this week. Mendip District Council has decided to postpone a debate and decision on a new supermarket after a last minute application by the Morrisons chain...

READ MORE and/or keep up with the latest from the Wells Journal (?) HERE.

What's 'news' about Gordon Brown not answering a question?

The silly season doesn’t get much sillier than when the leading story on all of tonight’s leading news programmes on radio and television was the apparently astonishing fact that that Gordon Brown had not answered a question about his position on the release of the Lockerbie bomber during today's Downing Street press conference.

It raises the question of whether all our top journalists have been asleep since Brown first emerged as a leading Labour politician more than a decade and a half ago.

Otherwise, they would surely have noticed that he has never knowingly answered any question ever put to him - and that more of the same hardly counts as 'news' (for more on which, see HERE).

Media debilitated by swine flu news pandemic

I just tried (but failed) to catch up with the news by listening to The World Tonight on BBC Radio 4 at 10.00 p.m..

Twenty minutes into the broadcast and they were still banging on about the latest flu statistics, when a vaccine would be ready, government help lines, websites, etc., etc.

All of which could have been collapsed into a three-part list that would have taken less than 10 seconds to read out:

"There's more of it about, it's not very serious and a vaccine's on its way."

(See also What's the difference between a 'flu pandemic' and a 'flu epidemic'?)

Did the media ignore Hannan because they think speeches are 'bad television'?

A knock-on effect of Daniel Hannan’s speech is that this blog has experienced a ten times increase in the number of hits since starting to post comments on it a couple of days ago.

New visitors are very welcome and, as many of you are presumably interested in political speeches and media coverage of them, you might be interested in some earlier postings on the subject. The easiest way to inspect the full menu and access them is from the relevant page on my main website HERE.

One thing I’ve been concerned about for years may help to explain why the mainstream British media were so late (and grudging) in picking up on the story – namely that there seems to be a tacit conspiracy or agreement between the British media and politicians that speeches don’t make good television.

As a result, sterile and evasive interviews between top interviewers and top politicians have replaced extracts from speeches as the main form of political communication. And, if they show any speeches at all, you're more likely to see the speaker in the background while the reporter (in the foreground, of course) tells us what the politician is saying.

If you’re interested in more on this, you might like to have a look at two earlier postings:

Mediated speeches: whom do we really want to hear?
Obama’s rhetoric renews UK media interest in the ‘lost art’ of oratory

Daniel Hannan v. Gordon Brown at the European Parliament

Gordon Brown’s speech to the European Parliament yesterday got fairly wide media coverage, but there’s been little or no mention of a powerful response to it by Daniel Hannan, a Tory MEP for South East England.

Less than 24 hours later, Hannan’s speech has had 22,106 viewings on YouTube and has attracted 208 (mostly favourable) comments.* A link to the speech has also already appeared on the page about him on Wikipedia

If evidence were needed that it’s worth posting speeches on YouTube, as I recently suggested the LibDems should be doing (HERE), then this is surely it.

It’s also encouraging to see that at least one young British politician is capable of crafting and delivering an impressive 3 minute speech - and raises the question of why we don't get to see more of the European Parliament on TV.

* UPDATE 4 HOURS LATER: these scores have now gone up to 36,748 viewings and 833 comments.

* UPDATE 10 HOURS LATER: these scores have now gone up to 167,779 viewings and 1,660 comments.

* UPDATE 14 HOURS LATER: these scores have now gone up to 316,779 viewings and 2,787 comments.

* UPDATE 24 HOURS LATER: these scores have now gone up to 660,691 viewings and 4,560 comments.

Has talking the economy down become a dangerous self-fulfilling prophesy?

In previous blog entries, I’ve noted how depressingly keen the UK media is on talking the economy down (23 October 2008, 23 November 2008).

It now seems to have reached a point where any hint of talking it up will get you into trouble, even when the ‘offending’ words were prompted by a leading question from an interiewer.

Baroness Vadera was asked on the ITV Lunchtime News when she believed that the UK could expect to see “green shoots” and replied: “I am seeing a few green shoots, but it’s a little bit too early to say exactly how they’d grow.”

CUE - headlines:

MINISTER'S 'GREEN SHOOTS' GAFFE

GREEN SHOOTS: SHRITI VADERA'S ECONOMIC OPTIMISM SPARKS OUTRAGE

BARONESS VADERA UNDER FIRE FOR 'SEEING GREEN SHOOTS OF RECOVERY'

CUE - retraction/confession:

BARONESS VADERA REGRETS 'GREEN SHOOTS' OPTIMISM IN ECONOMY

Hardly surprising when opposition parties had been so quick to join the media in making such a meal of it:

"The Conservatives said Lady Vadera's comments showed ministers were 'insensitive and out of touch' with the reality facing millions of families. Vince Cable, the Liberal Democrat treasury spokesman, said that they showed she was 'living in a parallel universe'".

But are we really doomed to stand by and submit to one gloomy self-fulfilling prophesy after another from everyone on the public stage (with the possible exception of Baroness Vadera)?

And does all this prove that American sociologist W.I. Thomas got it right in 1928 when he said:

'If men define situations as real, they are real in their consequences.'