All in the game

I hate having to make political posts - not because politics is not important, but often it tends to achieve very little. The BBC has blanket coverage on it website and you can read about it here. Whilst it’s worrying to see the transportation through which I have and will travel attacked like this (this will not make an iota of difference to wheter I will travel on the tube, terrorist attack is still one of the least likely ways to die), It should not come as a great surprise, the underground system is, I suppose, the most vulnerable to attack. This is also a time to keep a sense of proportion and not overblow the impact of these attacks.

Sometimes watching the blanket news coverage that I see on the BBC, there is a sense I get of the reporters wanting to exaggerate and make it bigger than it is. The deaths of any people is terrible enough. I just hate it when reporters urge all their guests to somehow give them death tolls that are ever increasing. There is a mix of morbid fascination and bizarre self promotion in being the first to get the exact death toll. This is sickening. I think one of the ills of blanket coverage as opposed to bulletins are there are these tonnes of reporters all over the place who often arrive after all the action has taken place and thus have no live action to report upon but have the cameras ready to roll. Rather than taking their time to assess the situation and providing a cool and rational analysis, reporters are forced to parrot for hours on end the same thing they said 10 minutes ago as though it was new news. Thus if each time they are asked to report, and they have news in terms of increased death toll, or wild speculation on the perpetrators of the attacks or ill informed reports from the scene of the action, the greater the justifications of their jobs. Get all these stupid reporters out of here. For every ambulance or police worker there seemed to be ten news reporters parroting the same ill informed crap again and again. I think bulletins, followed by a news programme at a specified hour is more than sufficient. This blanket news coverage is not at all useful and at times like this, I believe, harmful.

I hope they catch the terrorists and try them appropriately. However, a sense of proportion is called for. In Iraq the joint actions of the Americans and British forces has estimated to have cost the lives of about 10,000 civilian Iraqis. These terrorist attacks, possibily caused by the presence of British troops in Iraq (wild speculation I know),have cost, so far, the lives of 38 Britons. Absolutely not a justification of the terrorist attacks but a sobering thought …