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Want an impartial account of the McCain-Obama debate? The BBC offers this analysis.
[McCain on Putin] I would say in America it plays much better as a tough-guy sound-bite, suggestive of a president who knows how to stand up to Moscow.
Mr Obama’s answer on Russia rambled quite a bit and veered off into a dissertation on the need to develop alternative energy sources - not his first of the night…
But it felt a little bookish and laboured - you could sense which reply would play better in American living rooms.
This isn’t analysis, it’s web-filler - with a little stereotyping thrown in. A case of something you could write, rather than should. Not exactly value-added reporting, unless you want to gauge a British reporter’s prejudices about what ‘plays’ in America’s living rooms.
{ 1 comment… read it below or add one }
That BBC piece was quite lame. And as you say, it wasn’t reporting. It wasn’t analysis. It wasn’t history. It was license fee supported sleepwalking.
I spent more than two decades in the classic mainstream media before repositioning my career to freelance for highly specialized business media and subscription online media. So I was ready. I made a note to watch the whole debate myself, to avoid being deceived by the media filtering process. And I knew that if I needed to check out any of the factual statements offered, I would research them myself on the web.
I didn’t leave journalism. The mainstream media left journalism.
REG CROWDER
Freelance Financial and Investment Writer
London, England and Brittany, France http://www.journalistdirectory.com/journalist/TgTQ/REG-CROWDER