Directory of Lost Causes

I used to have a vague respect for British newsreaders. I used to think they were probably alright people - decent, impartial folk with a bit of nouse. But no more. I really do believe that the television news has gone downhill in recent years.



I think I'll start by reproducing here an extract from an e-mail I wrote to a friend recently. I hope she doesn't mind. I have all the bad habits usually associated with writers, and one of them is storing correspondence to be used later as raw material for writing. Anyway, here is the extract in question:

It's true I do have a lot of anger (as our American cousins would say). For some reason it tends to come out on my blog. Probably because I hardly ever express it in my daily life. I was watching the news today, and I wanted to kill the reporters. They're such morons. The news has really gone downhill in recent years. They say things like, "With the fleets of three nations here, the sea resembles some ancient ocean." Why does many ships equal "ancient ocean"? And it's just such a redundant comparison. "The sea" resembles "an ocean". Are these people really professional reporters? They are cunts. And this evening one of them talked about a nuclear reactor being "a ring of metal shaped like a doughnut". Shaped like a doughnut? So, that would be a ring, then, like you said in the first place, you despicable cunt. I hate these people. Worst of all is the way they all say "Briddish" now, instead of "British". They should definitely be killed for that. And their reporting just isn't objective, anyway. There was a report about Emperor Akihito visiting Saipan to pay his respects to those who had fallen in battle there, and the reporter said something like, "But the event became merely another celebration of nationalism, with Shinto priests flown in from the notorious Yasukuni shrine, which glorifies war. There are young Japanese coming to the beach to swim, but they are not thinking of the horrors of war, and they are not interested in the lessons of history." How the fuck does he know? Has he personally interviewed them all?

So, I get very frustrated when confronted by evidence that the world is being run by morons. And it comes out on my blog. Please forgive me.

And I hate Tony Blair. If any further evidence of his evil was needed, we have the ID card bill that he's trying to force through.

I would very much like to 'name and shame' the news presenters in question, because it seems to me they are representative of a new rotten-ness in our society, but unfortunately I can never remember their names. I believe all the above examples, however, to come from BBC scum, because that is the channel we normally watch for news in our house.

I would like to conclude by saying that what prompted me to write this entry was not the BBC, however, but tonight's ITV news. On there, a Muslim cleric was interviewed by the presenter.

If anyone can tell me the names of the cleric and the presenter for sure, I would be very interested. The presenter asked the cleric if he unreservedly condemned the recent London bombings. He said that he did, and that he condemned all violence, whether committed by the terrorists or by Western powers in foreign countries. At the end of the programme, this presenter stated that the cleric had refused to condemn the bombings unreservedly on the ITV news. In other words, the presenter is a liar. Whatever the cleric privately believes, he certainly condemned the bombings. I suppose the implication is that if you condemn our Western violence, too, then you are not condemning the bombings, because our violence is good, and no one should dare to put it on an equal footing with the terrorist violence. In other words, the presenter is ITV scum.

This kind of thing seems to be more and more common recently.

Anyway, at least Ken Livingston has the balls to stand up and tell the truth - the bloody obvious truth. Good on yer, Red Ken.