It’s not difficult to see why people’s interest in the mainstream media is collapsing. Here’s the BBC dealing with today’s major issues on its front page:
Melania Trump’s White House snub: Appalling or good parenting?
The revelation that Melania and Barron Trump would not be joining Donald in the White House in January has raised eyebrows in some quarters, and garnered praise in others.
The president-elect has said Mrs Trump and Barron will move to Washington “very soon, after he’s finished with school”, but has not put an actual date on the move.
A family choosing not to move with the father’s new job because of schooling is a “snub” according to the BBC.
William Seale, a White House Historical Association historian and author of The President’s House, said President Grover Cleveland’s wife, Frances Folsom Cleveland, only lived in the White House during social season.
…
“The concern of children staying back to finish school – that’s more typical than not,” Mr Seale said.
“It seems not very unusual to me that she would want the child to finish this year of school. I don’t find it very surprising.”
The BBC had to consult an author and historian specialising in American Presidential families in order to learn that this is a non-story. But first they took heed of, erm, a random Twitter user:
“First Family resides in White House as a symbol of our country to us and and the world,” wrote one Twitter user, Pamela Benbow. “Melania Trump’s decision is appalling.”
This is what the BBC would call “balance”.
[I]t is not out of character for Mrs Trump, who has repeatedly stressed that Barron, 10, is her focus – staying at home during the campaign to care for him in Trump Towers.
What a bitch, eh? Get this on the front page, quick!
That sound you hear is the bottom of the BBC’s barrel getting a hard time…
That the BBC is not fit for purpose is nothing noteworthy these days. It is as if they cannot understand why their brand of socialist rhetoric matters so little to people. There are whole chunks of ‘auntie’ output that I refuse to watch, not least of which are the so-called ‘news’ programmes. Biased doesn’t even begin to describe it.
A tip: if you listen to BBC news on TV with your eyes closed, or doing something else and not taken in by the images, you can really detect the sneer in the ‘newscatsers’ voice if something as abhorrent as Tories, Trump, or Brexit comes up. But socialism, illegal immigration, lefty-despots and welfare really makes them purr with delight.
Perhaps it shouldn’t surprise me. Years ago the father of a girlfriend of mine worked at the BBC, in lighting and he would — whenever he watched any television, which was rare, he would of course watch the lighting (this is the same I suppose as me: having worked in newspapers and magazines I tend to pick them up to look at things like typography, layout and use of white space. Yeah, I know, we are all dweebs in our own disciplines). He did tell me though that no one he knew who worked at the Beeb actually watched the programmes; they all had far more engaging things to do with their time. I could sympathise: at one paper I worked at the editor was furious when he learned that no one on the editorial staff actually read the bloody rag they produced each day. It was just a job, not a passion, for the hacks.
On the subject of not watching TV, it is amusing how many celebs who appear on various TV shows always gush about how they utterly love this or that show and never miss it. Amazing for if they work in TV they simply don’t watch any of the dross if they can avoid it.
By the way, on the matter of TV shows, I was talking to a maker of ‘reality shows’ once and he told me they deliberately wound people up to get ‘better TV.’ One thing he had done is when filming a man whose workshop was the model of organisation to the degree that every tool was hung up on its outline so he could find it, was to hide a spanner that was needed. The man went apeshit that someone had moved it, but the cameras rolled and with judicious editing, the guy looked like a lunatic. But hey, great TV, what?
For ‘newscatsers’ read ‘newscasters’ On second thoughts, I was right first time.
And she’s got funny eyes. Have you noticed?