For anyone who doesn’t know, I’ve avoided all professional journalism for precisely one week now, not watching any TV news or current affairs, not listening to the radio, and not buying newspapers. The idea is to find out whether I can stay in touch with the world without relying on mainstream media at all. Tizzy sent me an email with her top three stories of the week, which will be posted here up later on. First of all, I thought I’d do a quick 3-paragraph roundup of the week’s news as I’ve seen it from the blogs.
Obviously, the weekend and the beginning of the week was dominated by strikes, protests and secondary action in which Gordon Brown rued the day that he said “British jobs for British Workers”. This seemed to lead to an interesting debate on the nature of the BNP and their place on the political spectrum, as well as some wider comment on Britain’s place in the EU (which everything seems to lead back to in the end).
The story which has been gathering the most momentum has been that photographing a policeman seems likely to become a criminal offence in the next few weeks. Technically, it’s ‘taking a picture that is likely to be useful to terrorists’ that is the problem. This argument has been escalating for years1 be but it seems only to be getting worse. In other news, The Guardian are hypocrites.
I was pleased to be able to read this from Lord Elvis concerning the BBC’s reporting of Carol Thatcher and her ‘golliwog’ comment, because it contained all the information I needed and nothing superfluous or overdrawn. I can’t really imagine what the TV is like with stories like that and like Clarkson’s comment about the PM (awesome).
Lastly, Obama met Tony Blair, before he met Gordon Brown – though for some reason the humiliation of our Prime Minister just doesn’t seem like news to me.
Other than that, there was a lot of snow midweek, but I didn’t need to listen to the news to know that (and my boss insisted on telling me about every BBC report about a person who had died in the snow – honestly, what use do I have for this information?) It seems the most important story of the week was Phillip Schofield’s Hedge, talk of which began on Twitter, although the amazing bus slogan generator was certainly right up the agenda. Here’s my effort, in case you’re interested.
To be honest, I don’t feel like I’ve missed a lot (I even heard the sad news that Jade Goody has been diagnosed with cervical cancer), although obviously I don’t really know. If someone knows of a mainstream story I didn’t cover – one that’s interesting, relevant and worthwhile, I’ll be interested to know2.
Thoughts and observations:
- It’s true – you can go without the news. I don’t feel out of touch or lacking in knowledge at all after a week without the mainstream news. However…
- The amateurs aren’t very good at information. Part of the way blogging has developed is that rather than explain the original story, you simply link back to it and then carry on the conversation. When you don’t follow those links back, you don’t find out much about what has been happening. Only its effects and deeper analysis. That’s a little disorientating at times.
- News is everywhere. It’s actually pretty tough not to accidentally watch or listen to the news. I know that sounds strange, but it’s true. Radio reports interrupt the flow of music shows. A lady tried to force a Metro on me every single morning as I get off the bus. Newsagents paste cryptic phrases on boards outside the door (for no apparently reason). We’re surrounded by current affairs That’s life.
- I don’t miss the TV News, but I miss the online journalism. I don’t miss the TV News at all, but a lot of the opinion stories, the random comment and suchlike is really very good. Below is a list of all the articles with professional sources which I wanted to read over the past week, but couldn’t thanks to this experiment. I’ll decide tomorrow if I want to keep it going into another week. To be honest, I think I’ve already proven my point to myself!
The Man Who Made Obama – Esquire
Bitter Brew: Opening a Coffee Shop Destroyed My Life – Slate Magazine
I LEGO NY – New York Times Blog
Boris Johnson bumped for Harriet Harman – Telegraph Blogs
That Buzzing Sound: The Mystery of Tinnitus – The New Yorker
Eminem: Fall and Rise of a Superstar – The Independent
Conservatism Is Dead – The New Republic
- I figure I can be forgiven one mainstream source there – the linked article was first printed in The Guardian on June 4th 2008 and is simply the best comment on the psychological association the general public seem to have between photographers and terrorists. [↩]
- The innane mutterings of celebrities or the families of royalty or politicians don’t count, incidentally – not interesting or relevant [↩]
I checked out your link to Guido’s take on The Guardian. Fair point, though this is a series going on for two weeks, so we’ll wait and see if they ‘fess up.
However, the real reason why they began the exercise was due to their recent court case with my (not) favourite supermarket, Tesco. This has been expanded by Private Eye over the last couple of months, outlining the way Tesco pay certain taxes to HMRC. I’m choosing my words carefully here since Tesco are very sensitive about negative press, so I won’t be reminding you about Dame Shirley Porter for no good reason.
ladytizzy
February 9, 2009 at 3:28 pm