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April 16, 2020 - 3:34pm
Is the media doing a good job or is it failing in its role of holding the Government to account? On day 24 of Lockdown TV, Freddie Sayers talks to Alastair Campbell and Maajid Nawaz about the media’s performance during the Covid-19 pandemic. Have a watch above…
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SubscribeI think Maajid is great, but I won’t listen to a single word that comes out of Campbell’s mouth as he is one of the great evils of our time. As such, I didn’t watch this. All I will say is that the MSM seems to have been as ignorant and sensationalist as ever, which is why I have progressively abandoned it over the last 20 years.
It seems to me that the non-stop news cycle of briefings every day etc has had two main effects;
– It destroys the ability of governments to govern effectively as they have no time or space to respond to situations and develop the most appropriate response (we have known this for some time).
– It is also destroying the media, as they become ever more insane, shrill and unpleasant in their demands for information and the heads of ministers etc. I, for one, now avoid the legacy broadcast media almost entirely, and although I will look at the legacy newspapers online I will not support them financially.
It is all very sad.
Journalists are basicaly useless. They are mainly intent on catching the Government out rather than getting answers for their audience. For example, yesterday at the Government press briefing, the Chief Scientist displayed 3 slides, the third being a graph of the total number of deaths in various countries. Fairly useless graph, since what is really needed for comparison is the number of deaths per million. Not a single journalist picked that up.
Government communication is the way it is because of the media response they will probably get. A type of bunker mentality. Referencing Angela Merkel but the German press is a different animal. Campbell is culpable for much of this type of stuff