Thursday, October 30, 2008
Our socially destructive media: A little perspective
I didn't need a crystal ball to forsee this series of events. Russell Brand, no doubt still thinking his smutty rabbiting is cutting edge comedy, jumps ship, safe in the knowledge he has other projects to fall back on and that his reputation as a loose cannon is secure, if not in the ascendency. And his soulmate in dull witted nastiness Melanie Phillips crows about it. Is it just me, or do I detect a hint of self-satisfied smugness, as if our nannying crusader feels she had a part to play in all this? She certainly keeps referring us back to her turgid original column, where the only thing to really grab my attention was her crackpot idea that Brand derived a significant portion of his popularity from being left wing. She wishes.
Let there be no illusions, what Brand and Ross did was a criminal offence and qualifies as harassment. This is where the focus of any serious condemnation should be and is the only decisive factor that guarantees that they should be dismissed. Whether or not we should forgive their lewd comments or pardon their French is miles behind in seriousness, yet this is clearly what keeps Phillips awake at night, with her pointless whittering on about the BBC wasting our license payers’ money and all this fucking horseshit about the decline of our bloody culture. The BBC is never going to satisfy every viewer's needs, and being a business it has always needed to draw in large audiences, so it was doing what any company responding to the market would have done. Their directors were well aware that Ross and Brand were popular so it permitted them the vehicles and cash to keep hold of both of them. If watching a sisterhood of prissy nuns knitting and engaging in chit-chat about kittens and growing prize parsnips seemed like a winning formula they would have flooded us with that instead. Sad but true. Get over it.
The BBC has flagellated itself sufficiently in the past few days, giving huge prominence to this emarrassing story on its own news shows (though not as much as the smug airheads over on ITV, whose viewers might be forgiven for not knowing that there was serious fighting in the DRC, an earthquake in Pakistan and a global financial crisis, such was their opportunistic blanket coverage). In the midst of all this self-reflection it could be added that:
1. Brand and Ross now understand the gravity of their wrongdoing and will pay for it on many levels, and,
2. Despite the gravity, at least nobody died as a result of their actions
...which, according to the government's chief scientist Sir David King, is more than can be said for BBC's Today Programe and The Daily Mail, with their cloddish and unscientific campaigning against the MMR vaccine. Despite the vast, vast majority of scientists and experts stating that there is no link between the vaccine and autism (the minority being an army of one thoroughly discredited individual called Dr Andrew Wakefield), and scientific testing, the Daily Mail persists with its scare stories. King claims the shrill anti-MMR disinformation has scared many parents and "potentially led to a situation where we could have 50 or 100 children dying of measles in the UK."
This is the media at its most socially destructive. Given that existential threat, I certainly would want to see some strong action taken against any propagandist on the anti-MMR front, whoever they may be.
Again, no crystal ball necessary to guess who.
Oh, by the way, you can catch Russell Brand and his flat jokes on Channel 4 in about 30 minutes; his smut pure as snow now it is safely severed from any license fee handouts.
Let there be no illusions, what Brand and Ross did was a criminal offence and qualifies as harassment. This is where the focus of any serious condemnation should be and is the only decisive factor that guarantees that they should be dismissed. Whether or not we should forgive their lewd comments or pardon their French is miles behind in seriousness, yet this is clearly what keeps Phillips awake at night, with her pointless whittering on about the BBC wasting our license payers’ money and all this fucking horseshit about the decline of our bloody culture. The BBC is never going to satisfy every viewer's needs, and being a business it has always needed to draw in large audiences, so it was doing what any company responding to the market would have done. Their directors were well aware that Ross and Brand were popular so it permitted them the vehicles and cash to keep hold of both of them. If watching a sisterhood of prissy nuns knitting and engaging in chit-chat about kittens and growing prize parsnips seemed like a winning formula they would have flooded us with that instead. Sad but true. Get over it.
The BBC has flagellated itself sufficiently in the past few days, giving huge prominence to this emarrassing story on its own news shows (though not as much as the smug airheads over on ITV, whose viewers might be forgiven for not knowing that there was serious fighting in the DRC, an earthquake in Pakistan and a global financial crisis, such was their opportunistic blanket coverage). In the midst of all this self-reflection it could be added that:
1. Brand and Ross now understand the gravity of their wrongdoing and will pay for it on many levels, and,
2. Despite the gravity, at least nobody died as a result of their actions
...which, according to the government's chief scientist Sir David King, is more than can be said for BBC's Today Programe and The Daily Mail, with their cloddish and unscientific campaigning against the MMR vaccine. Despite the vast, vast majority of scientists and experts stating that there is no link between the vaccine and autism (the minority being an army of one thoroughly discredited individual called Dr Andrew Wakefield), and scientific testing, the Daily Mail persists with its scare stories. King claims the shrill anti-MMR disinformation has scared many parents and "potentially led to a situation where we could have 50 or 100 children dying of measles in the UK."
This is the media at its most socially destructive. Given that existential threat, I certainly would want to see some strong action taken against any propagandist on the anti-MMR front, whoever they may be.
Again, no crystal ball necessary to guess who.
Oh, by the way, you can catch Russell Brand and his flat jokes on Channel 4 in about 30 minutes; his smut pure as snow now it is safely severed from any license fee handouts.
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: 31/10/08 8:53 AM
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