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From Kevin Marsh:
Not everything went right this week.
It started to go a bit squiffy when Jim got the wrong end of the stick with this newsletter thing again and started writing each one out by hand and popping down to the Today pillar box to post them one by one 鈥 though I imagine your local postmen and women will get a bit confused at a bundle of buff envelopes with addresses like -
furrymonkey@mycomputersjustcrashed.co.uk
So, sorry for that 鈥 I鈥檓 sure Jim鈥檚 letter from last week will turn up eventually, though.
Then there was that business with the Archbishop of Canterbury: you鈥檒l remember, I had to cut a section of the interview John did with him last week. Which was a pity: I got a bit of a fanging for it from the Any Questions audience and from some of the gentlemen and ladies of the press 鈥 though the apparent inability of some of them to get the simplest things right is, frankly, disappointing. They wouldn鈥檛 get jobs here, I can tell you.
One chap even masqueraded as a former editor of Today to deliver himself of some addled view of why everything that everyone did was stupid and why he鈥檇 have done it all much better - but he can鈥檛 have been who he said he was because he got every single ascertainable fact as well as his final judgement wrong.
The point, of course, is that the 成人快手 is different from any other news organisation. A small circulation magazine can play fast and loose with the facts if it wants to 鈥 let鈥檚 be honest, no-one who matters will notice. A big newspaper baron can turn a blind eye when his paparazzi stick their lenses into peoples鈥 private lives or their hacks bend and manipulate what people say to them 鈥 circulation figures forgive all. The 成人快手 is different because fair dealing and trust are two of our most important values. So when circumstances conspire - as they did in the case of the Archbishop - to leave an interviewee thinking rightly or wrongly that he鈥檚 been enticed into an interview he would have refused to do if asked outright, then someone has to balance the journalism of that with fair dealing and trust in the 成人快手.
This time that someone was me.
Of course, some journalists felt able to write lengthy pieces about how they had got right inside my head and were able to tell you authoritatively why I made that call and what I was thinking at the time. Apparently it was all to do with Lord Hutton which is a bit odd because I鈥檝e gone through everything on Lord Hutton鈥檚 website again and can鈥檛 find anything about the Archbishop of Canterbury at all.
In all of this, life 鈥 or what passes for it - goes on.
The saintly Ed spent much of the week hanging round the stage door of one of the Vatican chapels trying to mug a new cardinal to snatch his berretta 鈥 he鈥檇 gone there on the back of a rumour that the Pope intended to make 39 new cardinals but had named only 38 and therefore there was a chance鈥 well, turned out not to be.
Sarah has been doing those things that mothers to be do 鈥 like slumping with her feet up in the corner of the kitchen eating peach and coal yoghurt, sighing loudly when another homosexual bishop-to-be is wheeled on to be interviewed.
And Jim, meanwhile, has been inhabiting 1983 - sharing with Michael Ancram memories of the 鈥淛im Mortimer鈥 moment in the election campaign of that year: obviously, everyone in the office was far too young to remember the 鈥淛im Mortimer鈥 moment... when the then General Secretary of the Labour Party told journalists that Michael Foot 鈥渨as the leader of the Labour Party鈥 鈥 a fact that, until that moment, had not been in doubt, and which caused one of the assembled pack to dub Mr Foot 鈥渁 leg-end in his own lifetime.鈥
Inhabiting somewhere even longer ago - Mark Coles, who explained to us on Wednesday morning that 鈥渞ock鈥 was back. 鈥淩ock鈥 apparently is something that people used to do in the 70s and it鈥檚 good that it鈥檚 back because it means that a lot of confused people with permed hair and wearing flares can play air guitar without feeling quite so foolish.
Listen again to the report.
John?
Kevin
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