Hijacked by the people
Kate Chisholm rr he blogosphere is threatening to take over the airwaves and even the great Eddie Mair is feeling ruffled. Last Saturday, half an hour of PM, his five o'clock current affairs programme on Radio Four, was hijacked by 'the people'. Instead of running straight through till six, Mair had to break off halfway through to launch the new miniversion, iPM.
Mair has been reminding us for weeks now of the existence of the PM blog. 'Just log on to bee bee cee dot co dot u kay forward slash eye pee em' has been said by him so often that a hint of repetitive strain is beginning to enter his normally smoothas-velvet-cream delivery. Advertising what he (or rather his programme) has on offer has become part of his job description; he's no longer just a presenter of news, an interviewer, a commentator, he's also an interactive salesman. It's the only way to ensure that he and his editorial team can put together a programme 'shaped by listeners and bloggers'.
iPM (which will take over every week at 5.30) is not about what's happening in the news or the gathering of expert opinion to comment on what's happening in the news; it's all about listening to the listener (the `i' stands for interactive). All you have to do to take part is 'log on to...' and vent your opinions. So what did we have as top-of-theagenda on Saturday afternoon? Immigration and Enoch Powell. As Mair himself confessed on air, when they had started to put together the programme some days earlier, this topic had been at the head of the running order (following David Cameron's dismissal of the Conservative candidate Nigel Hastilow, for reigniting the Powell bonfire). But he and his team then realised that it had become 'old news' and wanted to drop it. But, no, said Mair, the listeners were fired up by what had happened and still wanted it discussed; bloggers rule, OK.
It was intriguing, then, that none of these so-called bloggers was invited on to the programme to speak about it; instead Mair interviewed Powell's biographer, Simon Heffer, and the general secretary of the Fabian Society, Sunder Katwala. It was as if the bloggers could not be trusted with such a tricky subject, guaranteed to inflame. Why, then, give it more airtime? Nothing new was said by either Heffer or Katwala; nothing about what Powell had really meant by his speech and why he had said it, nothing about why he was vilified, nothing about what Britain was like in 1968 and which social groups had been so offended by what he said, nothing about how immigration has changed since then, and nothing to take the debate forward into the next 40 years. Nothing, in fact, that was either news or newsworthy. For those frustrated by this lack of useful comment, we were reminded that 'a full version' could be found on the blog. But what did Eddie mean by 'a full version'? Something more meaningful?
Every few seconds, Eddie was forced to interrupt what he was saying to tell us 'There's always more on the blog', or to remind us of how to find it. It was as if the Fat Controller of BBC Interactive was sitting opposite him in the studio and forcing him to insert the word `blog' into every other sentence, or else.
Eventually the great Mair himself cracked 'Shut up about that blog!' he told his blogging counterpart, Chris Vallance. I was so surprised I had to listen again to make sure I had not just wishfully imagined it. But there it is at 8 minutes 56 seconds, just after an absurdly short item about `waterboarding', which we discovered is another word for 'torture', and is allegedly being used by US troops. Vallance had just introduced us to a clip from an internet site in which a journalist puts himself through a torture scene to see what it would feel like. It was so far removed from PM's usual standard of reporting that I'm not surprised Mair lost his cool.
Blogging, of course, has played a crucial role in allowing the people of Iraq to reveal exactly what it's been like to live through the chaos of war since March 2003, as well, of course, as in Burma, Georgia, Uzbekistan. It can be an invaluable tool, providing opportunities for freedom of speech in parts of the world where it is dangerous to speak out. iPM gave us `teethmaestro', a dentist in Pakistan who's been blogging from Karachi and Peshawar. He spoke to Mair about how it's the only way that he can tell the truth about what's happening to ordinary people such as himself. You cannot trust the official media. But, asked Mair penetratingly, 'Is the blogging you're doing telling what you believe is the truth, or is there a bit more activism about it?' Teethmaestro could not tell the difference.
Previous page
