Sal Paradise wrote:
The problem is Clinton - a truly incredible individual, his presentational skills are second to none, all the rest are very pale imitations of the master. He showed the way - sadly...
One could suggest that that went back to JFK. Which to some extent may mean that what we're actually talking about is politicians in a TV age – and particularly those who have grown up in that TV age.
Sal Paradise wrote:
On the Guardian - not disputing your point - but the fact still remains it has every much an agenda as every other daily paper. Much of their stuff is very agends-driven, poorly researched and poorly written allbeit in words beyond one syllabul.
I'm far from the biggest fan of the
Guardian, and think some of their stuff very sloppy, together with also intensely disliking their (or at least Rusbridger's) obsession with giving so-called 'rad fem' bigots a platform. But you can have an agenda – or at least a philosophy – and still produce much better journalism than is being seen widely these days. As the late Robin Day once said: "There are only two newspapers that tell the truth: the
Financial Times, which has to tell the truth for the business community, and the
Morning Star, which has to tell the truth for the workers."
One of the problems has been the blurring between report and editorialisation. Should be a no no. But it affects almost all papers. I remember being introduced to the
Telegraph in the late 1980s – a really good paper. You didn't have to agree with all it's op-eds – which were clearly defined – to appreciate its breadth of reporting, for instance. But there's a reason that even regular
Telegraph readers are now calling it the
Maily Telegraph.
The obsession with celebrity is another problem that crosses boundaries and has now infected the broadsheets. And the petty crassness of some articles. In the
Guardian a week or so ago, because restaurant critic Jay Rayner had tweeted something about never having had a dishwasher, he was asked to pen a whole piece on that vital matter. FFS.
Although I will say, in the
Guardian's favour, this week it at least it managed to be the only one of the papers I caught up with that had not (deliberately or otherwise) misunderstood Hilary Mantel's
LRB lecture and then tried to whip readers into a storm over it. The
Mail and the
Sun were the worst for that, but the
Telegraph and
Independent were not far behind.
And that – to me at any rate – also illustrates the dumbing down, where so many people read what the papers had said and assumed that that was correct, and then went and used the internet to blast Mantel, sometimes in downright abusive terms. It didn't occur to their dim little minds to actually find and read the original; their knees were a-jerking too much by that stage. And then, of course, you get both Cameron and Miliband feeling the need to add their fourpenneth. Now either neither of them had read the original and simply took the tabloid version at face value – or they had read it and didn't understand it; or they simply went with the populist approach. None of those options is remotely good.
And this is without considering the non-print news media.
