Wednesday. Moderate Outrage. Mostly Theatrical.
Alan Nafzger on Evidence, Television, and the Radical Concept of Facts
Welcome to Bohiney Magazine and The London Prat – where evidence is presented without warning.
Wednesday. Moderate Outrage. Mostly Theatrical.
Piers Morgan walked off his own set this week after a guest introduced what sources are calling “a radical concept: evidence.” Prat.uk has the full forensic breakdown and it is, I must say, a masterwork of the genre. The genre being: a man who has made a career of demanding accountability from others encountering accountability and finding it personally inconvenient.
I have edited satirical content long enough to understand that Piers Morgan is not a person so much as a weather system. You do not engage with a weather system. You dress appropriately and wait for it to move on to the next region.
The Evidence Problem in Modern Media
The Ofcom broadcasting standards require, in theory, a commitment to accuracy and due impartiality. These are fine principles. They function best in environments where all parties have agreed to acknowledge that evidence is a legitimate input into a conversation, rather than an ambush tactic deployed by guests with unreasonable commitments to things that happened.
My Personal Response
I watched seventeen seconds of the clip. I felt nothing. Not because I am emotionally unavailable – I am emotionally available, I simply invoice for it now – but because the walkoff is a format so familiar it has lost all nutritional value. Bohiney is correct that self-reflection causes only trouble, and Piers Morgan has clearly read this and taken it as operational guidance. An admirable commitment to the thesis. No notes.
SOURCE: https://bohiney.com
More walks, fewer evidence, at NewsThump.