Re: Social Obstacles, RP & good old Cook


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Posted by Peter Ceresole on October 22, 2003 at 09:50:24 from 80.177.22.49 user PeterC.

In Reply to: Re: Social Obstacles, RP & good old Cook posted by Prue Eckett on October 22, 2003 at 02:22:26:

I stand corrected re polls although a couple of your points in your postings gave me cause to wonder: amazing accuracy in political polls/choice of media people prefer to use for information/entertainement.

I'm not quite sure what you mean there; I was only referring to pre-election polls, because there you get an immediate check on the accuracy. And the record of by-election and general election predictions, in terms of votes cast, aren't bad at all.

As for the choice of media, all I know is that a long, long series of opinion surveys over many years have always come up with the conclusion that the main source of news information for most of the population is not newspapers, but TV news. So it might even be true. However, unlike an election result, it's hard to see how you could check that objectively.

But given the bias of newspapers whose principal task is transparently to promote the agendas of their proprietors, it seems to me that it's simple good sense.

I wonder why then the media, TV especially, has plummetted in the lists of things 'people want to do'

Has it? Again, hard to check. But I agree that the sight of the endless parade of mindless crud on multichannel TV may well be depressing. However, if you check what people actually do, as opposed to what they say (always a good idea) then all I know is that the queue of young people wanting to join the BBC as trainee journos, to do proper telly, is as long as it ever was.

When AR was a young journalist things in the print field were no better. There were some reputable papers but in general most of it was rubbish, and looking back we can see a huge farrago of lies, unsupported opinion and propaganda which nowadays would be much more thoroughly challenged- probably by television journalists. I think in those terms we have it much better now...

But it's interesting that even in AR's case, although his sympathy for the revolutionary cause is understandable, he never realised that the leadership, including Lenin, were absolute monsters, real ogres of history. They controlled their media so thoroughly that it took decades for the reality to come through.

But having retired from journalism myself, I can absolutely understand why he wanted to write his children's stories. Although they were obviously a huge effort, not only did they handsomely pay the rent, they were also a beautiful antidote to the dreadful times he was reporting.


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