Intrigued about why this conversation would irritate you?
Well just for you I have just listened to it again and re-lived the trauma. It irritates me because of the way the subject matter was dealt with, and the style of presentation.
First the style of presentation. I teach BA students how to give presentations, and one of the things I'm quite strict about is avoiding fillers like "um", "kind of", "y'know", "like" etc, for reasons of clarity and consideration for the audience. I lost count of the number of times the guy being interviewed, Amol Rajan, a paid radio presenter, said "kinda". But of course, being the UK, he phrases this as a class issue, and goes on and on about how he shouldn't have to sound posh to convince people that he knows what he's talking about. Having said that, he fills his phrases with unneccessarily long words (the piece ends with an out-take of him explaining "perspicacity" to a couple of cooing female members of his team) which presumably isn't him trying to sound posh, but trying to sound clever, which is ok. He goes on about "being myself" ("that's wicked"), about how much money he's earned and how rich he is which he deserves to be because he's worked hard for it, "I plead guilty to being a graduate and I take pride in it", etc etc.
I listen to podcasts to keep up to date with current affairs, and other podcasts in this series do that, so I wasn't prepared to hear a self-obsessed millenial banging on at length about his views on his self-assigned class and other hang-ups. I found myself shouting "I don't fucking care" at my car speakers at regular intervals whilst he was going on about himself. Having left the UK 26 years ago to live in a country where everybody is lower-middle class, I get easily irritated hearing British speakers turning everything into a class issue. Germans can have a trampoline in the garden without it being a class indicator.
The interviewer isn't much better. Of course she has to declare that she is a woman (I guessed) and working class, and the pair of them go on smugly about that for a while. Duly taking her seriously as instructed, I was surprised to hear her cooing over her male colleague's use of the word "perspicacity" at the end of the program. I expect that was an act of liberation or something.
They talk about what they wear and how they dress, Amol says "If you can combine dressing in a way that's really you with knowing what you're talking about ..." and I scream at the speakers again. I just want to hear about current affairs without having the personalities of the presenters constantly thrust under my nose. The smell is putting me off my driving.
All of the above has nothing to do with the subject of the podcast, which is "Who makes the news?"
When they finally stop talking about themselves and get onto that, ie "Is the way we consume news changing and who decides what the news is ...?", they make a few interesting points, but completely miss the elephant in the room and prefer to talk about twitter as if that's the source of all the problems. I start every day checking the BBC news website and have noticed the increase in click-bait headlines (phrased as questions containing no information), churnalism, celebrity gossip, and abysmal science reporting where ME news is either ignored, misreported or dictated by the SMC.
Our hero rebel man of the people with loads of money and not ashamed of it Amol then describes the BBC as a great trusted reliable source of impartial information, and suggests they should bring their editorial integrity to the platforms where young people are gathering. During his criticism of social media tweets, likes and dopamine addictive behaviour, not a mention of BBC clickbait headlines.
I scream at my speakers again.
So all in all a very enjoyable car journey, if you like being annoyed by a self-obsessed prick on the way to work, which I occasionally do, but not too often.
n that thread:
