Isn’t it terrible how today we are exposed to so much idiocy, not least through the BBC, just because of the cult of celebrity?
The response to the post David made about “most disliked” BBC personalities just shows the flip-side to the pursuit of celebrity- which is that many people are sick of their inanity.
This blog is about bias, but there are some intersecting themes. Sometimes a comment is made and reported not because of newsworthiness per se but because of celebrity. How can a journalist be balanced starting from a statement like “Chefs should be fined if they haven’t got ingredients in season on their menu.”? Mussolini, Hitler, would have been proud of such high kitchen standards.
If your ten year old brother said it you’d tell him to shut up, but if Gordon Ramsay said it, and you were a BBC journalist, it’d be “news” (there again, who made G.R. except the BBC-led media establishment?).
Two lines of criticism have been picked up by the BBC, unworkability! and trade for poorer countries, but as Neil Reddin points out, the biggest of all is missing: the freedom argument.
“See what was missing? Of course, there was no mention of consumers making their own choices over where their food comes from. Individual freedom and all that. Hard to believe that the BBC, an organisation funded by a mechanism that gives its consumers no choice, could miss that one *cough*.”
The idea of an eff-mouthed Scots Gordon lecturing anyone about anything is an absurdity.
Why it’s almost as if the professional twa+ had a book out last wee,k and was seeking to say something controversial so that the tax funded BBC could give him free publicity.
But that couldn’t be true could it?
The point about how it is what is not said that sets the agenda is a good one.
I’ve never understood the fascination of Gordon Ramsay. Why do we celebrate what is, after all, a supreme example of bad management?