Saturday 21 January 2017

Say What?

At the top of the BBC's 10 o'Clock News coverage of the Inauguration, their man in Washington, the lugubrious Jon Sopel, pronounced it 'a scenario few thought scarcely possible'.
 Presumably he meant 'a scenario most thought scarcely possible' or 'a scenario few thought possible'. Seems the BBC is still so dazed and confused by the way the world is going at the moment that it's having trouble making sense - or the sense intended anyway.
 There were reports too that part of the live coverage was subtitled with captions from the children's drama series The Dumping Ground (with curious results).
 Ah well, this was never going to be the BBC's finest hour, and it is not to the BBC that sensible people turn at times like these. Me, I can't help it - I'm strangely addicted to the dreadful News at Ten, come what may.

3 comments:

  1. News readers -- to be distinguished from journalists who presumably know something about diction and syntax -- are often no too blame for their bloopers; between extemporaneous gaffs and poor input by staffers into teleprompters, news-on-camera people cannot be held to high standards. Note: American networks are no better than BBC; savaged syntax and damaged diction abound, only to be exacerbated by frequent misspellings within onscreen graphics.

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  2. I also enjoy C4 News. Unashamedly and, often, embarrassingly skewed in a lefty direction (they were amusingly hysterical when Trump got elected) but always interesting with its debates (pitting interesting people against each other) and in-depth stuff.

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  3. And some excellent political journos like Matt Frei, Alex Thompson, Michael Crick and Gary Gibbon who come across,perhaps against all the odds, as fairly even-handed..

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