Sorry to make my first post for a couple of weeks a meme. I was much busier than I expected last week, and with a grand prix this week my blogging activities were focussed on vee8. I’ll still be busy this week but Steven Hill has tagged me in a meme and these are quick posts to do so I may as well do it.

I have to say where I was when each of these events happened.

Princess Diana’s death - 31 August 1997

I was in bed. I first heard about it when my brother came into my room wanting to play the PlayStation but ended up watching the television a bit instead. At first I thought it must have been the Queen Mother who had died, and when I found out it was only Princess Diana I struggled to see what the fuss was about. Never liked her.

Margaret Thatcher’s resignation - 22 November 1990

No recollection whatsoever. I did know of a time when Thatcher was Prime Minister, and I of course remember John Major being in charge. But I remember nothing of the transition.

Attack on the twin towers - 11 September 2001

I remember this very clearly. I was at school in my German Writing class. The first time I realised something was up was when the lesson hadn’t started after we had been sitting there for ten or fifteen minutes. Our teacher was constantly moving between the classroom and the staff room. I didn’t mind because German Writing was my least favourite subject at that time.

Eventually our teacher wheeled the television through and said, “I’m going to show you this because it’s very important and there will be a lot of consequences” (or words to that effect). I was a bit peeved that he chose ITN over the BBC, but never mind. One of my strongest memories is the fact that one certain person in our class particularly struggled to grasp what was happening. In retrospect, I suppose he was right to be so sceptical of the idea that people would be mad enough to delibrately crash planes into buildings.

Of course, we did not get any learning done in that class. Of course, not everyone’s teachers wheeled the television through like ours did. I suppose most teachers will have been completely oblivious. It was the major talking point among my classmates after school, but people from other classes thought we were tacking the mickey.

It was also strange going home, and I got the feeling that I could kind of tell who knew what was happening and who didn’t. I remember seeing a few people driving cars who obviously looked like they were listening to what was happening on the radio. When I got home my parents were both in the living room watching the television (my dad had the day off for some reason that I can’t remember). I carried on watching it for around two hours.

England’s World Cup Semi Final v Germany in - 4 July 1990

I have no recollection of this match in particular, but I was aware of Italia 90. I liked the mascot, ‘Ciao’! I also took in the design of the graphics used during the matches — an early example of my interest in television presentation.

President Kennedy’s Assassination - 22 November 1963

I was 23 years away from being born.

I now I need to decide who to tag:

• Onebrow
• Jack Deighton
• MatGB
• Colin Campbell
• Mr Eugenides

So what was the top news story on Friday? Of course it was the Olympic opening ceremony. Doh! Silly me!

But what else was in the news that day? An output editor on the 6 O’Clock News BBC News at Six, Katy Searle, had a tough job picking a story.

So what else? The housing market and the strains of the credit crunch continue to claim a good slot on the Six. Today’s repossession figures are startling and on another day, could easily be our lead story.

For those of you who look beyond our shores, strong pictures of fierce fighting in the disputed region of South Ossetia will be explained and analysed. Not a natural story for the Six? With Russia threatening a robust response, it’s right to be in the show.

So apparently a war in Europe “not a natural story for the Six”. And on top of that Katy Searle feels the need to justify the possibility that the story will even be in the programme! That is despite the fact that this important story was listed behind the “credit crunch”, a “news” story that is now a year old. Jesus. Does the BBC really believe people are this stupid?

Do people tune in to the news to watch the news, or do they tune in to the news to watch highlights of a ponced-up dance routine which they can also catch earlier in the day, later in the day and on a relentless cycle on BBCi? Let me sit down and think about this!

It kind of sums up why the 6 O’Clock News has not been a bulletin to take seriously for several years now in my view. Of late is has been shaped to become the “news” for people who don’t actually want to know the news.

This post includes some stuff that I might have written about in yesterday’s post if it wasn’t getting late. Plus, I had gone on and on for 1,000 words already which is quite enough for one post.

Chris Applegate said on Twitter:

One thing more tedious than the Olympics is people droning about how tedious the Olympics is. Turn your TV off and go out, you fucking bores

That is a sound principle and one that I agree with in general. The problem with the Olympics is that you can turn off the TV and go out all you want, but unless the place you go out to is an uninhabitable cave, the Olympics are impossible to avoid. Things like Big Brother or even US Presidential elections don’t get this bad.

Shane Richmond gets to the bottom of the problem with the Olympics:

What irritates me is that the media believes that we all subscribe to this fickle frenzy. So the Olympics breaks out of the sport pages and bulletins where it belongs and takes over the actual news too. I appreciate that the Games coincide neatly with silly season but is it really news that the opening ceremony (a) happened and (b) was spectacular? Both things were exactly what was supposed to happen, which probably makes them the precise of opposite of news.

What really gets me depressed is the fact that while this expensive shindig was going on in Beijing, two European countries were on the brink of war. And yet what was the top story in the news? This fucking stupid Stalinist fancy dress party. BBC News 24 had the two stories in split screen! I mean for fuck’s sake! Talk about priorities.

Several months ago I changed my default radio station to the BBC World Service precisely so that I could avoid the stupid “news” stories served up by Radio 5 Live and the other domestic stations. Yet the World Service has been banging on about the Olympics non-stop, 24/7, for the past three months — and that was before the games had even started! I am sick of it.

You see, my real problem with the Olympics is that it is a giant political event masquerading as sport. If it was sport I would probably quite like it. But it’s not sport at all. You can even see this in the BBC’s presentation of the opening ceremony. Who took charge of the broadcast? Sport journalists? Hell no, it was Huw Edwards and Carrie Gracie, two BBC News stalwarts. For me, that just says it all.

The only reason the Olympics opening ceremony should be a legitimate news story is to highlight how much money is wasted by governments on this pathetic political exercise. Do I care that 2008 drummers had fancy drums that lit up? Do I fuck!

Ideas of Civilisation has written a really interesting post about the state of the Scottish blogosphere compared with the dodgy comments that get posted on The Herald’s website, Scotsman.com and the like.

The Scottish blogosphere is indeed, by and large, a pretty good place for a debate. Nowadays it is probably dominated a bit too much by SNP supporters, but I think the debate is usually pretty respectful. IoC asks, why does this respectful atmosphere not cross over into the mainstream media comment sites?

The answer is that they are mainstream media comment sites. As I have pointed out before, trolls, flamers and knuckle-draggers are attracted to MSM comment sites like flies on a shit. The blog spEak You’re bRanes, a blog I mention many times, does a good job of compiling the most ridiculous comments posted to MSM outlets.

The thing is that IoC is right when he says that the debate in the Scottish blogosphere is good. But this isn’t peculiar to Scotland. The debate in the blogosphere world-wide is also good. Meanwhile, the phenomenon of extreme comments in MSM websites does not just exist on Scottish websites (although Scotland does have a distinct phenomenon with its ‘cybernats’). It is known to media outlets the world over, and even some big websites such as Digg and YouTube.

So why is there such a difference? After all, the point of blogging is meant to be that it’s really easy to get involved in. So why don’t people with poisonous views pollute the blogosphere so easily?

The answer is that it’s so simple to avoid poisonous people in the blogosphere. Does someone have a terrible blog? That’s okay, because no-one will read it. Knuckle-dragging extremists find that they will reach a far wider audience if they post on a website like Scotsman.com or the BBC.

There is another answer. Even though in theory it is easy to set up a blog, the reality is slightly different. You still have to put in quite a lot of effort. It can be time-consuming and you have to come up with the goods to make sure people read it. If you are not interested in having a genuine discussion, you will soon find that blogging is quite costly. But for those who are willing to put the effort in for there to be a good debate, the pay-off can be good. For this reason, bloggers tend to be more articulate, reasoned and intelligent than your average Have Your Sayer.

Does this mean that we should give up on the idea of having comments on the BBC’s blogs or The Herald’s political stories? Far from it. All you have to do to improve the nature of the debate is create the right mechanism to ensure that the cream will rise up.

Websites such as Digg and YouTube have implemented a voting mechanism in an attempt to get rid of trolls. You can choose to give a comment a ‘thumbs up’ or a ‘thumbs down’. The BBC’s Have Your Say has a similar voting mechanism. However, this doesn’t work in my view. In fact, if anything, it exacerbates the problem. It just makes the comments section even more of a hotbed of demagoguery — the loudest attention seekers, not the most reasoned and articulate, will grab the most votes.

Some websites are just lucky enough to have a good audience that respects debate. The Economist’s website is said to be relatively free of HYS-style trolls. That is probably due to the target audience of the publication. I suspect many HYSers aren’t even aware of the existence of The Economist and if they are, they aren’t interested in posting there because it’s not a publication for them.

However, for the more mass-market audiences of the likes of the BBC, The Herald and The Scotsman, it’s too late to do anything about this. They made a decision long ago to appeal to the masses, so its audience will have that demagogic element that will be reflected in the comments.

Another alternative might be to force users to post under their real names. It is generally believed that once people’s cloak of anonymity has been removed, their online debating style becomes more respectful and considered.

On the other hand, many bloggers and commenters have genuine reason to wish to remain anonymous. And, barring the universal adoption of an OpenID-style system, it would be nigh on impossible to police. A decent ‘middle ground’ option might be to place OpenID comments at the top of the thread and hide the anonymous comments towards the bottom of the page.

Another possible solution is simply to make it costly for the ill-informed jokers to take part. For some, it may be an anathema to make people pay to post comments — almost against the culture of the web. But it needn’t be.

There is one big website that is known for having decent comments sections that avoid the numbskullery of sites such as YouTube — MetaFilter. There it costs $5 to post comments. That is a one-time life-long fee. Pay $5 and you can post to your heart’s content. There is also a one-week time lag between signing up and being able to post.

This ensures that only the people who are interested in contributing properly get involved. $5 is quite a small fee for those who really value MetaFilter, but it is enough to deter time-wasting trolls. A one-week time lag also prevents people from just posting a crazy extreme rant in the heat of the moment. Just like blogging, MetaFilter is costly for the time-wasters, but beneficial for those who want to make a genuine contribution.

The solution for the MSM websites if they want to clean out their comment sections is therefore to somehow create a mechanism that makes it costly for extremist ranters to post, but makes it beneficial for those who want to take part in a reasoned debate.

Perhaps a MeFi-style one-off fee or a time lag might do the trick. If you had to pay, say, £5 to open a lifetime account on Scotsman.com to allow you to post, you might just go for it if that £5 was enough to deter the ranting trolls. It could also be a handy (though potentially small) additional source of income for the media outlets.

IoC’s issue isn’t just with the media websites though. It’s also with the Scottish Government’s website. If a government website becomes an outlet for extreme views, that is undoubtedly a problem. The Scottish Government’s “National Conversation” has been accused of being “a chatroom for cybernats“. That was probably always inevitable. After all, a “conversation” about independence initiated by the SNP is bound not to last long or be very meaningful.

Nonetheless, I have to applaud the Scottish Government for going ahead with the project. To have user-generated content on a government website is pretty big stuff if you ask me and it’s probably the right thing to do — engaging the citizens in the policy-making process and all that.

But the contributions have to be meaningful. I’ve not been following the National Conversation very closely. Skimming through it just now, it doesn’t look too bad, but obviously it’s caused concern among some.

Perhaps for user-generated content on government websites there should be an expectation that you do not contribute anonymously. I think that is probably a reasonable expectation for someone who wants to take part in civic society. People who write a letter to their MP or MSP or another figure in public office can’t expect a reply without supplying a name and address. The Government’s e-petition website also requires you to enter a name and address. The authenticity of some of these names is questionable though.

Perhaps future projects like the National Conversation might require people to supply real names and addresses (not publicly viewable of course) in order to participate. This would remove the cloak of anonymity and improve the likelihood of there being a sensible debate. Looking at the National Conversation website, it looks like most (but not all) participants are contributing under their real names anyway. Still, it’s a thought.

There is an amusing video on YouTube of a couple of people giving a running commentary over BBC News wondering why they haven’t mentioned the earthquake (via Media Monkey).

The people in the video make some amusing comments, although they do exhibit the worst of the victim mentality that a lot of people in this country have. An inch of snow has fallen and it is the end of the bloody world. A train is five minutes late and it is an abomination that would never have happened under British Rail. An earthquake has hit us, woe is me. Etc, etc.

Maybe the guys in the video were being ironic when they kept on shrieking, “There’s been an earthquake! Hellooo? BBC? There’s been an earthquake!” But it wouldn’t surprise me if a lot of people genuinely were enraged when the BBC didn’t cover the only interesting that has happened in their dull little lives. I have heard that Radio 5 Live has had a record number of text messages. That doesn’t surprise me, 5 Live being as it is the country’s premier forum for self-important people with anal passages in place of their mouths, wanting to phone in and describe how the world revolves around them.

Victoria Derbyshire’s programme in the morning was even worse than usual, amazingly enough. The callers I heard all said much the same thing. “My house was shaking! I thought a lorry had crashed into my house!” “I was lying in my bed and I was woken up. At first I thought it was a burglar. Little did I know that it was something even more serious!” YAWN

So parts of England got the shakes. Big deal. The stories about it on the BBC News website are a parade of mediocrity.

“The room just started shaking” Shaking?! How will you ever recover? “The quiet market town at the epicentre of the earthquake recovers”. Yeah, recovers from a few toppled chimneys!

The only casualty from the whole episode appears to be one poor man with a broken pelvis. While I certainly would not like a chimney stack to fall on top of my pelvis, it isn’t exactly September 11 in terms of casualties.

So I am not surprised that BBC News decided not to give it so much coverage. It is worth bearing in mind that after 0100 BBC News 24 ceases to be a UK service. What we get in the UK is essentially a simulcast of BBC World. As such, it reflects a global news agenda.

This is the way it should be really. UK news seldom breaks during the night, and there are few people in the UK watching at that time of night anyway. News channels are notoriously expensive to run anyway. I know certainly that Sky News makes a loss.

It would be difficult for the BBC to justify spending license payers’ money on a near-useless overnight UK service that would be watched by very few people. The BBC has a 24 hour UK news service anyway — it’s called BBC Radio 5 Live. From what I heard of their coverage, they did a pretty good job — as you would expect from the Up All Night crew.

If BBC News 24 / BBC World were to slavishly cover the earthquake like Sky News did, the majority of the BBC’s viewers scattered across the globe would have been equally indignant as the people in the UK complaining about the lack of earthquake coverage. I can just imagine people around the world uploading their commentary onto YouTube. “5 on the Richter scale? I have taken naps through that!”

People across the world look to the BBC as a source of authoritative world news. A piddly wee earthquake in Lincolnshire just doesn’t cut it. If it was an exclusively UK service like Sky News then you would indeed expect them to cover it. But it isn’t, so you wouldn’t (or at least shouldn’t).

I did actually watch a bit of Sky News’s overnight earthquake coverage and it was indeed execrable. In fact, the video I have embedded above highlights the completely different approaches of the two channels and why Sky News falls flat on its face so often.

BBC News might have been late to mention the story, but notably they got it right. They did not spend longer than required on the story, and they got the important details such as the epicentre correct. Meanwhile, Sky News were showing a map with Birmingham and Manchester pinpointed. Why? We don’t know. Sky don’t care about getting it right, as long as they can convey that something is happening — NOW!

In fact, Sky News’s coverage of the earthquake highlights everything that is wrong with 24 hour news. Media Monkey highlights their typically insightful coverage:

Sky News interviewer Faye Barker: “So, what were you doing when the quake shook?” Eyewitness, or should that be earwitness, from Lincolnshire: “I was in bed.” Barker: “Oh… [Pause]. And would you say it felt more like a juggernaut or a freight train going past?” Woman: “Er… a freight train.”

Sky News is also rightly being criticised today for a truly disgusting interview conducted by the diabolical Kay Burley. She was previously famous for her measured response on September 11: “If you’re just joining us, the entire eastern seaboard of the United States has been decimated by a terrorist attack.” This week she asked the wife of recently convicted serial killer Steve Wright the following question:

Do you think if you’d had a better sex life, he wouldn’t have done this?

What a vile question to ask. Not surprisingly, the interviewee burst into tears upon being asked that question. Imagine having that thought running through your head — “If only I had sex with my husband a bit more, those five prostitutes wouldn’t have been murdered.”

Unity, Jennie and Mitch Benn say all that needs to be said.

If BBC News lost respect for its slow response to the earthquake, goodness knows what Sky News must have lost.