Reportage

Thursday, 28th August, 2008

I’m getting more and more pissed off with the news reporting that we’re forced to endure these days. A particular bugbear of mine is the BBC. Their television reporting is awful, but their online stuff isn’t any better.

Take these two articles for example.

As I read these articles (particularly the second one) it jumped out to me how much irrelevant padding material is used in order to reach the required word count, and I’m seeing it all over the place now.

I read news reports to get facts. I don’t need anything else, just the facts. Tell me what happened, when it happened, where it happened, and if possible why it happened.

In both of these news ‘reports’ there’s a mention of the victim’s impending GCSE results. I can’t see what relevance this fact has in any of these two stories. The first story is about a young girl that got knocked down by a lorry and died. The second story is about a teenage boy who fell from some flats and died.

The fact that both of these youths were due to receive their GCSE results adds nothing to the stories; it is there simply to pad out the story, so that the ‘journalist’ meets their required word count. The only other reason to put non-facts like this in a story is for the shock factor: they want the reader to feel that extra pang of guilt about what they’re reading.

It really annoys me.

And don’t get me started on Mihir Bose.

27

Aug

There’s two of them?

Wednesday, 27th August, 2008

Actually, there’s three (there’s another sister, Natasha).

I have never been able to put my finger on it, but for some reason, I find Kirsty Allsopp very attractive. I don’t know if it’s the posh accent, the dark hair, the voluptuous figure…or that whole package. I’m the first to admit she’s not a stereotypical beauty (she’s fat for fuck sake), but still, there’s something about her.

Then I happen across an article on the Daily Record’s website telling me about her sister Sofie taking over on Location Location Location when Kirsty went on maternity leave. Now, I occasionally watch Location Location Location, but I didn’t ever see any episodes with Sofie presenting it. I didn’t even know Sofie existed. So I Googled her, and she’s almost an exact copy of Kirsty!

How did I not know about this?

27

Aug

I’m shit at this.

Wednesday, 27th August, 2008

There you go, another four months passes without a single entry on here. And it’s not even as if I’ve had nothing to write about; in fact there have been quite a few occasions over the past few months that I’ve thought to myself “I must stick that on my blog”. Needless to say, I didn’t.

Anyway, I’m going to have another wee spell of posting stuff (hopefully) so here we go.