A musing on the programme 'The View'.

The View should be renamed A View, because that's all it is - a view (or a series of views presented by women). If it were an actual view, I doubt it would be very clear - it'd be cloudy out and all the scenic beauty would be obscured by dense fog.

Also, the English version of the programme - Loose Women - is so called because each of the presenters has had too many children for their own good.

Another year, another...

Another year, another chance to mindfuck the entire population of Great Britain. Several hundred more goons unrepresentative of the British public are about to get a chance to go on TV and exercise their pipes - alongside the two most repulsively annoying men in broadcasting (and I don't mean Piers Morgan and David Hasselhoff).

The panel - Cowell, Walsh, Minogue and Cole - will give equal measures of grimacing and applause as the never-ending stream of cretins streams in and out of the audition room (or at least the cretins that we get to see).

You'll have more chances to see fat, common women shout and bellow at the judges; more sob stories of young men, injured men and women, and single parents; more young, good-looking TV fodder in the shape of young men and male bands; more tits and flesh in the shape of young women and girl bands; and more token appearances from teenagers singing like they've shit in their mouths and old people singing ditties from the 40s and 50s.

Enjoy the fucking show, Great Britain!

Stephen Colbert giving Bill O'Reilly a well-needed arse-kicking (January 2007).

Bill O'Reilly: WHO ARE YOU? ARE YOU COLBERT OR COLBERT?
Stephen Colbert: I'm whoever you want me to be, Bill.

Stephen Colbert (at beginning of clip): I spend so much time in the world that actually is spinning, that to be in the 'no-spin' zone gives me vertigo.

Jon Stewart on the O'Reilly Factor (December 2004).

For those of you who don't know of Bill O'Reilly, listen up. He heads his own show on the Fox News Channel - or, as I like to call it, Deathstar News - called the 'O'Reilly Factor'. He's a smug bastard and he's so right-wing he makes most right-wingers look left-wing. He's also a perpetual liar. For those of you who may think me a liar, please, please, please read Al Franken's 'Lies and the Lying Liars Who Tell Them'. I hope this is enlightening. One thing's for sure, though: Bill O'Reilly will scare the crap out of you (he looks like some forgotten-about Wes Craven creation) so please make sure your kids aren't present in the room. If you're interested, look up Glenn Beck and Sean Hannity, too.

Please note:

Look at how Bill pulls that statistic from right out of his arse. Cannabis is illegal in 48 of 50 American states - the exceptions being California and New York State. (However, the criminality status of cannabis has been successively reduced in 15 states after a ruling in an Oregon case in 1973 - including New York and California, of course.)

Surely, the only way to monitor people's dope-smoking habits would be to illegally spy on them, thus breaching their human rights. No, wait... isn't that what Bush did with the US Patriot Act? (I don't care what any of you think about marijuana - it doesn't harm anyone. People tend not to get into traffic accidents or fights when smoking dope; they mostly tend to get very mellow and hungry. On that note, I'm feeling a bit tired. Now, where did I put those doughnuts?)

Anyway, Bill made up that statistic purely to try to pin something pejorative on Jon's show. Well, I'd rather have my show be watched by 'stoned slackers' than middle-aged, angry American men who all own guns; are fathers to daughters called Jolene and Lou-Ann, and who drink Budweiser. Anyway, let's try to keep the discourse civilised.... Fuck you, Bill O'Reilly! Fuck you in your old, wrinkled stinker!



Here's a related video from Charlie Brooker's News Wipe. (Try to get your hands on the whole series. I wrote an article on News Wipe, too - it's in my April section.)



I submit that most Christians are 'good' people, but Fox News is motivated by a corporate, neo-conservative agenda and causes non-American people to view American Christians with an unfair degree of polarisation. Fox is accomplishing the opposite of what it intends - it actually intends to incite racial hatred, fear and bigotry within America, and it's becoming more preachy, hostile, crazy and un-Christian by the minute. It's only a matter of time before Bill O'Reilly walks into work with a 12-gauge and shoots everybody. Watch this space!

Jon Stewart on CNN's Crossfire (January 2006).

A run-down of Charlie Brooker's News Wipe.

Charlie Brooker has done it again! After three brilliant series of Screen Wipe Charlie has set his satirical eye on the news of today and how it has developed into what it is. After five episodes, I've found myself entertained, tickled and often scared witless by each programme and eager to watch the sixth and final episode which will air on BBC 4 next Wednesday.

Charlie has focused on how news anchors have changed, how the objective slant of news has changed to fit with today's more emotive and subjective ways of reporting news, how citizen journalism has grown, how the G20 Summit was reported, how news isn't so cut-and-dry these days, how science is abused in the news, news in America (and how it's presented), how negative stories seem to dominate and how news graphics have developed over the years.

With regard to anchors, he looked at how the former male-dominated, dull approach has given way to unisex co-hosting with a much more informal, chummy, friendly approach. Most regional news anchors - or, as we would say, presenters - these days guffaw around in front of the cameras like idiotic twerps, whereas national news anchors seem to present the news with such an air of seriousness it looks as though they may explode with the leaden weight of presented matters at any second.

In 1984, a series of famines in the Afar region of Ethiopia killed many, many people (between 40,00 and 80,000). We were treated with images of pot-bellied, malnourished children and, generally, people in immensely depraved squalor. This prompted the single 'Do They Know it's Christmas?' and the subsequent Live Aid appeal. This enabled British people to show their charity and donate cash. In '89 the Berlin wall was brought down, and everyone was happy - up until that point news was biased in as much as it knew to focus mainly on affected parties. But then a few certain events changed the face of news for ever. The Rwandan massacre showed how neither the Hutus or Tutsis were victims, but how both parties' inhumanity had led to the deaths of millions of their own people. Then on September 11th 2001 we were treated to Die Hard-esque scenes in which two jets were plunged into the World Trade Towers in New York by Islamic extremists. Now, the news just seems to purvey the despicable nature of man, with accounts of school shootings, war coverage, murders and other deviant goings-on dominating headlines.

With the death of Diana, a public outcry encouraged the Queen to address her death. Some would say that her death marked a turning point in news coverage when a minority group of demanding, emotional and demonstrative people encouraged reporting to become much more subjective. Now, whereas bystanders used to be questioned only if they witnessed important news events, bystanders seem to be quizzed hither and thither until we now feel that news isn't an objective thing at all, but subjective accounts of objective events presented in a seemingly objective manner. Also, citizens seem to have an active part in news with today's mobile phone culture. Images of 7/11, the explosion of the Buncefield oil depot, the 2004 Boxing Day tsunami and other such events have given scope to people to submit their own footage. But this sort of stuff hasn't always got news value.

In early February 2009 two days' worth of heavy snow brought England to a stand-still. This enabled thousands of people to send in their happy, zany, irrelevant snaps to the BBC which were subsequently published online - all 35,000 of them. This then turned into a small, human interest story due to the huge number of submitted photos. But why? It's not news. But should it be separate? Do people even care these days? Are they aware? This is just one point Charlie goes after.

I would suggest watching every episode of the show if possible as it contains many gems. But, apart from that, it's also hugely enlightening and entertaining - with spots on American news and such right-wing nut jobs as Bill O'Reilly, Glenn Beck and Sean Hannity.

To watch the compilation episode which aired last night, use the following link: http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b00jhp50