Demonstrating, perhaps, my MBO (Master of the Bleeding Obvious*) skills, here are my recent contributions to coverage of the ongoing Madeleine McCann saga. From the Associated Press:
And playing commentator tag in Time with Charlie Beckett:
For earlier posts — from May — see here and here.
Mark Thompson writes about trust in the BBC. After condemning the children’s programme editor who apparently believed a poll had been rigged and changed the name of a cat (yes, really), Thompson lets off senior BBC manager Alan Yentob for filming reaction shots to interviews he didn’t actually show up for. Yes, according to the D-G, filming yourself nodding to non-existent interviewees doesn’t represent “any kind of bad faith or conscious effort to deceive.”
How bad does bad faith have to be? Was it unconsciously deceptive? We know Thompson thinks what Yentob did is wrong, because a couple of paragraphs after absolving him of any blame, he says:
it’s my view that noddies and actuality questions should only be included if they formed part of the original interview.
If I worked for the BBC, my moral compass would need re-magnetizing.
On BBC Radio 3 last night talking about the ethics of TV editing — if you want to listen, it’s here.
The Britney Spears Allure story has attracted a fair bit of attention but I was slightly gobsmacked to see this admission in one comment piece:
Britney, pop star and mother-of-the-year candidate, apparently agreed to pose for the cover of Allure and to sit for an interview with writer Judith Newman.
For four days Newman chased the pop princess around Los Angeles. On the first day Newman was in a cab on the way to an interview location when a last-minute call from Spears’ publicist postponed the interview and re-scheduled it for the next day.
The next day Spears ditched Newman again. And so it went for the frustrated writer. She never did get the cover interview and had to fake her way through a long piece on how she didn’t get the interview.
I’ve been there. I once had to fake a story on supermodel Cindy Crawford after her obnoxious publicist ended our interview three minutes after we started.
These fake stories can be fun to write, particularly if you are allowed to vent your hostility toward the interview subject, and the Allure writer did an exceptional job. Her prose wasn’t nearly as angry as mine would have been after four days of trying to nail down the elusive and inconsiderate Britney.
Check out the last two paras…
