Where have the spikes of yesteryear gone?


A man has a product that’s neither original nor distinctive which he’s trying to shift in a saturated marketplace. The TV company he works for invites him onto one of its magazine shows to plug the product. He sits down with the programme’s editor and together they cook up something topically and typically “controversial” for him to say. He goes on air and says it.
You are a journalist. Question: is this “controversy” a genuine story? Your answer is? No? Of course not. How could it be?
According to The Times, Charles Dickens once wrote this in defence of journalists and journalism: “I would venture to remind you how much we, the public, owe to the reporters for their skill in the two great sciences of condensation and rejection.”
Would you agree that the journalist should not just be a scientist of rejection, but has an absolute duty to reject the fake, the phoney, and the cynical manipulation of the channels of publicity for commercial or political ends?
Shouldn’t every journalist (even those who worked for that interested party, the BBC, if they were journalists of integrity) have spiked the story of Jeremy Clarkson saying that striking public service workers ought to be shot (in case you hadn’t noticed, Christmas is coming and Mr Clarkson wants to sell us his latest DVD’s)? And shouldn’t they likewise have ignored the noisy clambering onto the bandwagon of other interested parties with selves to promote?
Alas, multiple channels and 24-hour news have destroyed both of Dickens’ journalistic sciences.
Give Radio 5 or Sky News or BBC News 24 a Press Conference which, once upon a time, might have made a lucky 90 seconds in a slow bulletin, and they’ll gratefully surrender their airwaves to its interminable entirety. So much for “condensation”.
Give almost any journalist, staring distraught at the yawning acreage of output ahead of him or her, a “controversy”, a “survey”, a PR stunt, a howl of concocted outrage from a pressure group or the fart of a fading celebrity, and he or she will roll over and fire up engines of hype, masquerading as objectivity. So much for “rejection”.
Où sont, comme j’ai dit, les spikes d’antan?

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Westward, TSW and the Cadbury ghost

Image
[Archaeology: Westward/TSW complex, Derry’s Cross, Plymouth, 2011. Rubble covers the old studio and transmission areas; I used to work in an office by the four windows at the back; the canteen and bar ended where two vehicles are parked; new executives arrived triumphant and departed bruised just beyond the upturned tray, old drink can and squashed plastic bottle] It annoys me that I never met Peter Cadbury. I arrived at Westward TV shortly after his final defenestration, which was rather like going on an exchange to a foreign family who’d just concluded a vicious divorce. On one side were the remaining and new management: the parent left in possession of the home. On the other, the staff: his orphaned children. Enmities. Flashes of inexplicable anger. Sarcasm. False smiles and denial. I’d never before experienced anything like this (nor have I since). What was it about? “There is, I suppose,” I’d said to Ronnie Perry, the MD, at my interview, “no chance that you’re going to lose this
Read more

Leveson: Billy Bunter to testify?

Image
“I say you fellows, budge up, what? Room for another posterior on the old Chesterfield, I’d say.” Harry Wharton groaned. The former Captain of the Remove, now Director General of the BBC, couldn’t work out how William George Bunter, aka the Fat Owl, had wangled himself membership of the Garrick Club. “But that,” he’d murmured to Bob Cherry, when Bunter’s name was first posted, “is just damn’ symptomatic of the way the world’s gone.” Cherry, ever the loyal Patroclus to Wharton’s Achilles, was beside him now, sipping a green chartreuse. The friends had lunched on Dover Sole with minted peas, fondant potatoes and an icy Chablis, chewing over matters of weighty media portent – for Bob had become editor of The Guardian , and the old pals therefore now held between them the principal engines of bien pensant news manufacture and the shaping of enlightened popular opinion. Bunter, the aforesaid posterior straining his pinstripe to such a width that the vertical line of stitches between his b
Read more

It was nineteen years ago today...

Image
The wooden eggs are still there on the roof, a perch for seagulls and an enigma for the young. The vertical metal lettering at the front of the building, however, has been obscured by four fat blue discs. Lorraine Kelly and Mike – Mike who, for heaven’s sake? I sat with him at lunch in the Camden Bistro while he raged, close to tears, I thought, at the injustice of the auction in which TVAM had been stripped of its franchise. Now I’ve forgotten his name. Nineteen years ago today, October 16, I was in Plymouth, sitting in an office with Nick Smith, Pete Colebrook and Tom Goodison. It was a grim morning, soot-coloured clouds rolling down from the Hoe. We were watching the internal TV service. Harry Turner, our MD, stepped up to the microphone. “We’ve lost,” said Tom, before Harry said a word. And we had. TSW was history. So were Thames, TVS and TVAM. We went to a pub called The Bank and got drunk on Mr Bass’s bitter and Mr Bell’s whisky. Mike Morris. Thank you, Google. Apparently he we
Read more