James Naughtie, discussing internships and work experience on this morning’s Today programme:
“You’ve raised the point about companies getting people to work for them for nothing. That’s one side of it. The other side is you get an army of people who are given an opening, an entrée, into the, y’know, professions or quite well paid jobs by being able to work for nothing because their families can afford it and perhaps if the family has got a connection whether it’s a business connection or a friendship, what you end up with is an absolutely almost monochrome band of people who are gonna end up in the best jobs because they’ve got the experience and they all come from sort of middle class professional backgrounds.”
And where did James Naughtie’s son do his work experience? Newsnight.
(Naughtie JR’s twitter account – Sarah Palin appears to be a favourite topic. Almost monochrome band of people – politically, yes.)
The opening couple of paragraphs from an essay by Naughtie JR. Bet you can’t guess what he’s writing about before he finally gets round to mentioning it:
In 1969, the American radical feminist Carol Hanisch produced a paper called ‘The Personal is Political’. Already a veteran of civil rights and feminist groups such as New York Radical Women, Hanisch was troubled by the separation of women’s personal experiences from the work radical feminists were doing to dismantle the large-scale gender order. She emphasised the importance of discussion and sharing of experience between women, not least in disposing of the ideology of self-blame. ‘Can you imagine’, she wrote, ‘what would happen if women, blacks and workers…would stop blaming ourselves for our sad situations? It seems to me the whole country needs that kind of political therapy.’ To her, gendered personal problems were micro-level experiences of macro-level political power, disguised by such an ideology as nothing more than selfish worries. Collective action, at the turn of the seventies, was the key to overthrowing such opression – but the first step was sharing and examining those concerns which ideologies tell us to keep unexamined and private.
The radical feminist revolution of the far left never arrived and, arguably, neither did the awakening of political consciousness that Hanisch was advocating. Many women in this country now have a personal and political agency far beyond what they and their predecessors enjoyed in the early seventies, but many would argue that, in our neoliberal times and at the end of the unspeakable decade we’ve just departed, the personal is as political as ever – yet the link often remains to be made. In fact, the examination and display of that which has long been held personal and private now dominates our public culture. We forget how regimented that public/private boundary used to be, and how crucial it was for maintaining power relations (like ones of gender) that we’ve only begun to challenge comparatively recently. We still too often fail to observe how currents swirling around the private/public border shape our everyday lives.
It’s impossible to talk about all this without bringing in the transformative power of technology, and that’s exactly how Beyoncé addresses the issue in her recent ditty ‘Video Phone’…
He’s only just getting warmed up by this point. Read it all here.
I lost the will to live, long before I reached the end of Naughtie the Younger’s incomprehensible garbage. Now I am going to find a bridge to jump off. Goodbye, cruel world.
For the record, Naughtie, m’lad, “gender” is a linguistic term and has nothing to do with biology. The word you’re looking for is “sex”, but that became unfashionable because of those “radical feminists” whom you turn into such a fetish.
Lefties who try to censor the language – now, where have I ever seen that before?
I give up. What is he writing about?
The video of Beyonce’s song “Video Phone”. I think.
He seems to be saying that Beyoncé’s booty shaking is some sort of apotheosis of feminist activism.
Monochrome? Monobrow, more like….
How awful – every bit as boring, long-winded and pompous as his father.
Nepotism and hypocrisy at the stinking BBC…. well what a shock!
PS Good scoop, btw.
Why does our government use our tax money to hire so many public school types on great wages at the BBC to provide us with tons of trash TV and radio?
Danny Cohen, with his private school education and his double first from the state funded Oxford University is now in charge of giving us such dumbed down rubbish as Eastenders, Casualty and the Lottery Show, having previously shown his flair for junk TV manufacturing at the awful BBC three.
When the government is prepared to spend tax money on paying clever people big wages to do such pointless, vulgar and damaging things it is no wonder the country is in a mess.
It all makes sense now. Only the correctly educated, such as Cohen, are qualified to make television programmes which properly address the working classes.
Justin Webb, Naughtie’s cohort on Today, is the illegitimate son of a BBC presenter. Even though the old man had no influence, ol’ Justin still ended up as a prominent Beeboid. It’s in their genes.
One friend of mine said to another, ‘You work at Smithfields (meat market), any chance of a job?’
‘Nah. mate, it’s all union down there’.
Oi Nastie, any chance of doing a programme on union/labour party nepotism. You could get Lord Two Jags of KFC Bargain-Bucket to present it, or perhaps the former Shadow-Chancellor with no GCSEs. to front it.
Aw c’mon, Bup, I won’t hear a bad word said against Nastie.
I mean who can forget his forensic demolition of Iagreewithnick, opening with the devastating,
‘So, Chancellor, what message have you got for the nation today?’
Oh lighten up you guys!
I for one love trying to “guess the question” every time that our Jim tries to interrogate the nations great good and worthy liberal totems and icons in its truest sense. I mean-and this is maybe a hypothestical notion- that Jim manges to hide any point to his questions amidst a veritable torrent of verbiage,red herrings, speculations and non-sequituers and always-well possibly-in their broadest or even narrowest sense for all we care!
Truly a Jeremy Hunt of a uselass padded plumped up Tartan tosser from Tosserland. Naughtie is just the wannabe poet and appreciator of fine wines,good books and classical music that the useless eaters at the top of the Beebs food chain seek to be! He has a hinterland and is very much the effete good Nazi that might have handed Churchill his port had he not made a good living under coarse but pragmatic old Adolf!
Silly me-I digressed and went walkabout in maybe its literal or truest sense-ah stuff it!
How come YOUR son gets a freebie to the USA as opposed to someone elses that did NOT work for the Beeb already?
I think the various right-on demos abounding has made it BOGOF day, double-standard-wise, between the BBC and its print sister and soul-mate, the Graun.
Or maybe they do actually believe they are unique, and hence what they say needs to have no bearing on what they do.
We’ve had Marcus ‘Man en route to Mars’ Brigstocke who ‘only’ flies it seems to work, rest or play, Tuscan Polly showing solidarity with UK Uncut on issues her own employers benefit from, a couple of Labour tools allowed to spout on ‘government’ transgressions when their party was the one in power, and Andrew Marr outed as a ‘talent’ whose market rate makes him ill-equipped to read out selective twitter-sourced outrage on fat-cat salaries.
I reckon his show and the Big Question that follows may need to steer a cautious path through ‘safe’ areas and careful guest and question selection.
Impartially, of course.