Liberator’s blog: A question of priorities

Monday, 17 June 2013

A question of priorities

Today’s second post is also about dumbing down and the BBC. It concerns this evening’s BBC News at Six on BBC1 TV. This was tonight’s running order:

The leading news item was the conviction and imprisonment of TV presenter Stuart Hall for sexual abuse.
Second on the bill was the G8 summit in Northern Ireland and the civil war in Syria.

Is Stuart Hall really of greater importance than Syria, by any measure?

The News at Six is the BBC news programme most obviously worried about ‘relevance’. This is evident in the programme’s tendency to pad out stories with meaningless voxpops, in the facile belief that its viewers can understand news only in anecdotal rather than conceptual terms.

Even so, this is the BBC, remember, not a salacious tabloid. And unlike the News at Six, on the BBC News website the G8 summit currently leads the Stuart Hall story.

So which of these two news stories is actually more important? You decide.

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