And blinking, she stepped into the light… 14.07.
First off may I just thank the rock I have been living under for the past, mm, month or so for being a very comfortable – nay, cosy – rock. You made for a nice hiatus, you sweet hiding place, you.
Secondly, can I say OMG MICHAEL JACKSON.
N-n-n-n-n-n-n-noo don’t stop reading there, because I also want to say WHAT THE EFF, MEDIA? Not to denigrate the former man’s musical talent (13 going on 30 would have been nothing without that thriller scene, and every dad dancing at a wedding worships the ground Billy Jean walked on) …but it’s pretty interesting to see that news networks are still so scared of Catholic-esque brimstone and hellfire and “bom-bom-bom-bom” that they avoid anything but a gushing eulogy. Oh, no, wait, I tell a lie. One channel did show the Bashir documentary. That bizarre piece of work that it was. Hardly honest, hard-hitting editorialising, was it?
Then again, maybe my experience of Jackson coverage was different, having been in the US at the time of the news breaking. Was there any neutral coverage in the UK? …Anyone? I could youtube it and get on the Googs, but quite frankly I have more than enough to do today, and just looking at one network’s coverage wouldn’t be enough of a decent cross-section for me.
*cough*geek*cough*.
…Which leads me onto my second topic that I randomly plucked out of thin air: THE 24 HOUR NEWS CYCLE.
I’ve had enough. I’ve had enough until someone figures out how to reinsert the local news into the 24hour rehashing of…the same three topics. I mean (and once again, I was in the US at this point, so we might as well call this the American Edition) for about five days straight all I heard about was Obama crushing a small defenceless fly who only wanted to sit on the head of awesomeness for a bit. Poor thing. It only ever loved him, and look what it got.
And then after that was Mark Sanford’s turn to have his squidge-making letters read out. Constantly. Every day. The reporting of which, by the by, is a whole other blog post I possibly will write, because it the mix of old-fashioned reporting and new-media-backstabbing fascinates me.
Oh but not to worry, because it was interspersed with a little (lot) of Jacko’s death, and I think somewhere in there, there were a couple of civil riots in the world, some plane crashes, some homicides, and Harry Potter.
What’s the world coming to when I have to rely on my Reuters twitter feed for my daily dirge and dismality? That’s not a word, by the by, but I think it should exist.
I love media, I love the news, and I love having access to it when I can’t sleep and I’ve finished my midnight snack of marshmallows and the odd go-ahead biscuit I found in the cupboard…but if it wasn’t for the t’interwebs, I feel I’d literally know all of five things happening in the world, and the rest of the UK, at any one time.
So if the larger news corporations could just make like the BBC and contract out some local journalists to brush their hair and make a 2.50 summation reel of how many angry small business owners there are in their area at the last count, that would be great. Cheers.
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