And I'm Not Talking Fox, I'm Talking The Good Old BBC

[poliphilo]

Sharon is "fighting for his life"- that's the reigning cliche. But how do they know? Sharon is in a coma; he's not doing anything- and if he is, it isn't visible to bystanders and certainly not to Our Special Reporter Camped Outside The Hospital (poor sod) or his Anchor. Maybe Sharon is longing to just get on with it and pay the ferryman and is furious with the doctors who are holding him back.

I don't know if the standard is getting worse or it's just that I've tumbled to their tricks, but I'm always catching myself shouting at the newscasters these days.

Comments

[butterscotch711.livejournal.com]

Australia's ABC, which is in a lot of ways like a child of the BBC, has started using these kind of cliches in its news services, and treating stories in the higly emotive ways that very commercial news services do. Particularly in the last year or two there's been a big shift in the way the ABC does its news, I wonder if it corresponds to any similar shifts at the BBC?

Having recently come through this very situation...

[jubal51394.livejournal.com]

With my mother I'm a little familiar with it.

The odds are that IF he wakes up he will have considerably less brain function than he needs to be "The Sharon" that the world needs him to be. They are most likely doing everything that they can do and that money can buy. But mostly they are buying time to keep "the world according to Sharon" from falling apart while the understudies scramble.

If his heart is beating and his lungs are working one could define that as "fighting for his life". You don't think that reporters should be saying the truth, which probably reads more like, "He's as good as dead."

You want the news guys to say something radical that might turn the world into chaos before he's even dead, maybe?

Reality sucks and most of us common folk are just not ready for it.

I checked a few of my links and found...

[jubal51394.livejournal.com]

The reigning cliche here is "clinging to life". Interesting difference, huh? We Americans must want something sightly different from you Brits? Ya think? Maybe we have more Jews... Do we?

These are the ones I read. I especially enjoy seeing al jazeera's perspective on all of the very same news. I suspect that the truth is somewhere in between. *S*

http://www.cnn.com/2006/WORLD/meast/01/07/sharon.main/index.html
http://www.cnn.com/2006/WORLD/meast/01/06/sharon.main/index.html
http://english.aljazeera.net/HomePage

I have only the three network news agencies on my TV so I don't bother with televised news anyway. They all tell me the same stuff.

[dadi.livejournal.com]

Hehe..cultural differences. Here in Italy it is "L'agonia di Sharon".. Sharon's agony. Southern folk understand more about just suffering in silence...

[lblanchard.livejournal.com]

The standard is getting worse.

We used to have the worldwide breathless round-the-clock vigils when great heads of state were in trouble and that was that. Now we have them for every child who tumbles down a well.

That's not to denigrate the personal tragedy of the child and its family. But if you go over the top for everything, what's left when you really need to go over the top? Someone in a coma "fighting for his life", that's what. In a less media-saturated age, he would have been clinging to life, or some such construction tending more to the neutral.

I shout at the news, too, but from the vantage point of my own -isms. How come any time Bush is about to announce some good news, the verb to describe it is never "announces," or "praises," but "trumpets" or "touts", verbs that carry the baggage of flackery? Why can't our allegedly objective media find some objective words to describe what they're describing?

[happydog.livejournal.com]

I don't know if the standard is getting worse or it's just that I've tumbled to their tricks, but I'm always catching myself shouting at the newscasters these days.

I have the same problem, as does my wife, which is why I try to get my news from online or radio. The TV stays pretty much stuck on the Cartoon Network; I don't know if they have that across the pond but it's a 24-hour cartoon channel. It keeps my blood pressure down.

[cybersofa.livejournal.com]

Yes indeed, complete waste of time sending Our Special Reporter to interview Our Middle East Editor outside the hospital, when the only available information was the hospital bulletins which could have been read out by a studio presenter.

The interesting story here is surely Sharon's successor and his ideas and policies, and for that, as ever, you have to listen to the radio.

[silent-mouse.livejournal.com]

Oh, how I pity the poor Special Reporter Camped Outside The Hospital! It's raining like crazy outside, cold and windy, and there's no place to hide from it (except going inside, but I suspect they won't let cameras inside, and poor Special Reporters seem to have to go on air every other second or so).
A friend of mine, one of those Special Reporters Camped Outside The Hospital (or at leat one of the reporters that sent the first night there), says that the media has to keep up with the public's constantly growing appetite for news, even though there are no news (and he personally hates it, as it makes him to lose sleep and get wet for nothing). But I'm not sure about the public's appetite - most people I know don't need the 24-hours live broadcast from the hospital entrance. Or maybe people I know do not represent the regular "public"?