First of all, let me apologize for being away from the desk for... well, ages! This might actually be a more frequent event and if you happen to notice that I'm away for a couple of weeks don't panic, I will post eventually. Bearing in mind that it's been a madhouse here I'm pretty sure that you can all forgive me. Hopefully.
I've been watching a lot of news lately, and by that I mean watching the 6pm national news then the 6:30pm national news on a different channel and then yet another news programme at 7pm on yet another channel... whew.
During this time I've been noticing some weird coincidences. First of all, the Pre-Budget Report came out yesterday with Alistair Darling saying we should all spend more. Cue the presenter standing in, you guessed it, a shopping mall!
But the thing that got me was when I watched the BBC 1pm news and during an interview with their political correspondent outside Westminster, a guy with a placard saying that Iraq was turning into World War 3 and a nuclear holocaust starting waving his banner behind the reporter's head. The thing about this was that the cameraman tried to surreptitiously zoom in to the correspondent's head to try and block the placard out of view. He did this so many times that you could practically count the amount of nose hairs that political man had.
The Beeb are supposed to be impartial so I guess this was only necessary - I was hoping to hear a little statement from the anchorwoman claiming that the views reflected in the report were not that of the BBC. But no, they must've just about avoided any sort of egg/face incident.
The punchline is that Mr. Protester did exactly the same thing on the 6:30pm news! How brilliant! I ended up egging him on to give the angry sign-waving a bit of welly but the report ended to quickly for him to get anywhere. What a shame eh?
Still, this news channel is supposedly a little less unbiased (er, well, that's actually arguable) so if we had more placard/camera interaction would the cameraman have attempted a similar zoom in strategy? I guess we'll never know, but the point is that maybe the news channels shouldn't be so touchy about little things like this? It was a peaceful protest, unlike the numerous times when football hooligans have shouted and started chanting like dummies just to get attention when some of these journalists go outside a stadium. He wasn't being noisy - what's everyone's problem?!
