Media Reporting

The view from the hill is a trifle obscured this morning as we have had the first real snowfall of the winter in Sheffield. According to the "forecasts" we were to expect heavy snowfalls throughout the night, but 1-2 inch of snow hardly constitutes  a heavy snowfall. Still more is "forecast" and so there is still a chance.

I have just finished reading The Silent State: Secrets, Surveillance and the Myth of British Democracy by Heather Brooke  - "The most important and entertaining political book you’ll read this year, by the journalist who exposed the MPs' expenses and changed C21st Britain"

I thought the book was a bit patchy in parts, but was enlightening. The chapter on the UK's judicial system made for some pretty grim reading. Many of the articles on my website rely quite heavily on the newspaper reports of the time. Many of these reports are both detailed and informative - in some cases they are basically verbatim accounts of events and testimony. We as a society owe a huge debt to the unamed journalists (and printers) who filed these stories for future posterity.

Sadly over the last twenty to thirty years the standard of reporting has plumetted. Nowadays in all types of media we tend to get a brief summary of events, and a lot of comment, opinion and analysis.And in many cases, information is either "amended" or witheld from the public on a variety of spurious grounds. How anyone can form sound opinions without accurate and detailed information is a mystery to me. But that is Britain in the C21st - give the public inadequate and inaccurate information and you are going to get  inadequate and inaccurate opinion.