Wednesday, December 09, 2009

The Lowest Common Denominator

I don't often catch BBC TV news, but when I do I am often struck by pointless on-scene reporting and presenters who almost reconstruct events for you, just in case you can't imagine it from their overly emotional language. I prefer the BBC website as it seems less sensationalist, more impartial and removed, but recently there seems to have been a slow slide to more emotive language and articles. For instance, a recent article on the royal harpist convicted of handling stolen goods described her as "hooked on heroin" and "in the grip of drugs", what's wrong with "addicted"? And today I read a story entitled Who was Arthur McElhill? I didn't know who Arthur McElhill was, so I read the story. Having read the article I have no idea as to why it was written and published on the BBC news site. It's a sensationalist horror story that is reminiscent of those cheap glossy mags that have exclamation marks in their titles and that has no useful conclusion.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

Hawkesby and Jacobs [TalkSport] always go on about the fact that tabloids cannot repeat their initial description of something in the subsequent article. For example, if somebody famous had choked to death on a pork scratching the second paragraph would describe how the 'media darling' had 'gasped for air' whilst the 'pig based snack' helped them 'to meet their maker'.

This BBC article seems like they practice the same style of journalism.