Pie in the Sky

Hello all,



A couple of months ago I posted a tweet on my Twitter page (which I'm shamelessly linking to here), saying,

People want to sack Kay Burley. People are laughing at Adam Boulton. Sky - When you BECOME the news, you're doing it wrong.

This immediately became the most re-tweeted tweet I'd ever posted, implying that other people, like me, were also fed up with Sky "News"'s take on events at that time. More than 1000 people complained to Ofcom about the clash involving Boulton above, and a further 1000-odd complained about Kay Burley's shocking "interview" with a protester:

(Though this did lead to this fantastic moment, in which the protesters made their opinions of Sky News very clear).

This kind of "news" coverage (the inverted commas are getting tedious, so I shall stop, but you get the idea) is quite common in America, where pundits like Bill O'Reilly and the monstrous Glenn Beck have made their names by being bullies dressed up as journalists. There is no attempt to dress the news as anything other than propaganda, and as a result, gaining facts is a tricky business. But in this country, mainstream broadcasters must be impartial, and our news is the better for it.

Some important facts must be added at this point, that may or may not have relevance. Sky News is, ultimately, owned by Rupert Murdoch, at that time a prominent supporter of David Cameron and the Conservative Party, who owns many newspapers who proclaimed their support publicly in the run-up to the General Election. He also owns FOX News, the home of O'Reilly, Beck, and many of the most significant right-wing propagandists currently working in America. His son, James Murdoch, is the direct head of News Corp's dealings in Europe, and is non-executive chairman at BSkyB. He is also the main reason for Murdoch Snr's switch from Brown to Cameron. This information might lead us to assume a bias is likely, BUT it does not make it inevitable.

I was disappointed when Ofcom decided to reject the complaints leveled at Sky News. For me, both of these incidents show clear journalistic bias. David Babbs, the director of the movement behind the protest, seems barely able to speak three words before Burley shouts at his pointlessness and tells him to go home and watch it all on Sky News (nice plug, there, Kay). And at what point did anyone vote for a "Hung Parliament"? The only people claiming you could actively vote for a Hung Parliament were the Conservatives, though I would argue this is more an inability to grasp facts rather than a deliberate link. However, it is, whichever way you look at it, shockingly poor journalism.

Boulton's outbreak is less serious than Kay Burley's crimes, if much funnier. It weakens your integrity as a journalist if you are unable to counter arguments with anything other than shouting (rather like John Sweeney getting angry at the Church of Scientology), and so again can only be seen as bad journalism. His constant point-scoring techniques make him sound more like one of the politicians he interviews than an impartial onlooker. Even if we accept that, as an interviewer, he must take the other side of the argument, it is clear from the footage that he is trying to undermine Alastair Campbell's arguments, rather than challenge or highlight them.

If Ofcom are not going to censure such poor journalism and partial broadcasting, there remains only one solution. As the protesters themselves shouted out on Sky television, "Watch the BBC"!