BBC, aaaaaaaaaaaaaargh!
Oh dear. The BBC and Nick Robinson really got it wrong today – but in a way that epitomises one of the dreadful habits of modern journalism.
Running live coverage of the (hugely elongated) Labour leadership election result, during the middle of the second round results being read out the BBC cut away to Nick Robinson talking about how he didn’t quite know what to make of the results for sure so far. Rather than reporting the news, the BBC gave us a commentator telling us they didn’t know the news.
The love of having commentators tell you what you are about to see, what you are seeing and then what you have just seen frequently hugely squeezes out any chance to actually see for yourself.
But to do that even when the commentator doesn’t know? Very poor editorial judgement.
Aye, I switched to Sky (of all things), who were not only showing the results uninterrupted, but also, and this seems obvious to me, displaying them on screen, I came downstairs to watch instead of listen on the radio, there was no point in doing that for the BBCs coverage.
Now, the way the Labour lady read the results out was terribly thought through, slowing down unnecessarily an already slow process.
When Sky does better than the BBC, then there’s a problem. I did of course switch back when they put Boulton on, I can only take so much.
It was worse than that – it was Nick Robinson making a prediction that David M would win based on the first preference votes, thus giving a wrong prediction for something to be announced less than two minutes afterwards, which must be some sort of record. Like Mat, I also switched over to Sky.