'Working on it'

Obama's team has only one answer: we're working on it

I have to say I agree it is a bit early to be too critical, and 'we're working on it' does seem to be reasonable and even quite honest in the circumstances.

I just hope that they are, and the work proves of value.

Otherwise it may just go down in history as a US version of another joke phrase uttered a tad too often, and now to great, if bitter hilarity outside of parts of Westminster and BBC studios in the latter half of the last decade: 'I'm just getting on with the job'.

Many tend to think in response: 'Then, on current evidence, I really wish you'd stop'.

Matey, can you spare me our taxpayers' next 20p (x 10,000)

Newsnight

I have been trying to grasp the function of debt working successfully in capitalist/banking driven systems.

Seems it can, though I have always personally operated on a 'don't spend it if you cannot afford it' model.

But it seems this mysterious mechanism is mirrored in many ways with our media... at least some of it.

So much I hear is what I 'will' be told, derived from the gossip of 'reputable' sources, interpreted by 'serious' commentators who may or may not know the 'right' folk and/or be able to assess what they are saying is trustworthy.

Hence we seem to be in an era of news futures.

What if the PM did not end up saying what I was informed he 'would'?

Is it not more sensible to have news that goes out based on what 'is' as opposed to what, at best 'might be'?

Are the pols and some media so inter-twined that meeting a broadcast deadline seems to require making things up to avoid dead air: pre-PR PR?

In my business there is a saying: 'better to get it right than in a hurry'.

Though, so far, I am seeing neither promptness or accuracy from the politico-media establishment.

With the only victims being those whose pay and pensions are not under slightly different, and more secure systems.

I have also just had to write to the BBC Breakfast News to make a small but, to me at least, important point following an empathetic statement from Sian Williams:

That's '...how much MORE money the taxpayer is stumping up'.

I seem to recall we have already had our pockets dipped into already.

And Mr. Brown would be well advised to remember that they are not bottomless.

Addendum:

Just a thought (as I learn that 'we' are guaranteeing savings in Icelandic banks as their government isn't - can I get compo for my investing in a Zimbawean veteran's collective a few years back as they were offering 1000%?)...

If a major plank from our major planks is the principle that you don't give bonusses out as a matter of course to senior executives for overseeing p*ss-poor performances, might one wonder if that applies across the board?

Quangos, Local Authorities... a certain competition-free, yet commercially-active, publicly-funded, national broadcaster...?

I guess they couldn't really make a bigger hash than the gilded experts in the City, but I have to say I am not that encouraged that something cobbled together by some civil servant pen-pushers and a few pols of job-experience training is going to be that much better.

Gaurdian - Government to spend £50bn to part-nationalise UK's banks

Telegraph - Financial crisis: we need ministers who understand the City

Newsnight 2 - OK Prime Minister - what about the long term?

How to lose media folk and alienate voters even more...

'I asked them: "As you are the ultimate stewards of the financial system don't you owe the British people an apology for the fear, financial panic and silent bank run of the last 48 hours"

Gordon Brown told me that once I understood the long term aspect, the restructuring of the banking system involved here, I would "rethink the question".

I am none the wiser what all the rest meant, much less what our government is up to and how it will affect my family's future, but that little exchange is deffo joining a now sadly long and growing list I have (including gems such as pure conjecture being deemed 'emerging truths' and downright porkies being 'mis-speaking') of utter tripe ladled with obfuscation that I have ever heard.

As George Washington's Pop surveys the carnage in the garden and asks what the heck has happened, the wee moppet looks back and up, doe-eyed (or is that with a steely glint? Depends on your biographer, I guess) and, 'Poos... in Boots'-style, says: 'Let's just take a moment here, and once it has passed... and you have understood (you simple soul)... I am sure you will rethink the question'.

Don't know about 'sure', but the country is surely in some some slippery sets of hands.. oh... whoops!

Telegraph - Bank bail-out: Gordon Brown exposes the Tories at PMQs

Telegraph - Parliament fails again. So who will get answers for taxpayers?

BBC - Brown makes light of bank worries - It's good to laugh... for some, I guess

Your licence fee at work

Reporting the Games & Friday, 8 August, 2008

'...allegations by the Georgian President that 150 Russian tanks and other vehicles have entered South Ossetia.'

I know everyone is on holiday or at the Games 'reporting' sports, but it would be awfully nice to get some news of value from elsewhere?

Perhaps if there was a suggestion that the Russian synchronised invasion team was using steroids to help lift the shells?

I'm sure it's on the BBC somewhere, but I clicked on just now for an update on what I thought was the news channel, and ended up with wall to wall prancing ponies who, apparently, 'The hosts had spared no expense to put in a/c stables'.

The world can rest easy.

pps: Meanwhile, this from SKY, my new source of actual News: 'Russia On Verge Of All-Out War'

ps: Speaking of cutting edge news gathering, reporting and editorial, looking top right on this page* is there something I don't know?:

Reporting the Games
ADMIN USE ONLY Fri 8 Aug 08, 06:23 PM

'This is the Newsnight editor's blog, where editor Peter Barron, and some of his colleagues, will discuss issues affecting the programme.'

Farewell
Peter BarronWed 30 Jul 08, 01:39 PM
Ok then, I'm off.
After four years at Newsnight this is my final editor's blog. I'm off to Google

* I know the temp (sweet, isn't it. It's summer hols so news is in the hands of the work experience guys) has mentioned it in the first line of her piece, but one might have thought a week was enough to adjust the template to reflect reality:

'This is the Newsnight editor's blog, where there is currently no editor, so some of his inexperienced, rudderless colleagues will discuss issues affecting the programme and certainly nothing of world-shattering importance.'

Addendum: I find it 'interesting' that after 24hrs there is nothing to follow my comments. It's a pity wars don't take the weekend off.

Gaurdian - These two appalling sets of old waxworks utterly deserve each other

'By the time you read this, world peace should have broken out.'

I have been beaten to the punch much earlier and much more subtly, but may I repeat the unfortunate irony of this as I look at my SKY news:

'Russia On Verge Of All-Out War'

Indy - Georgia: Russia steps up 'peace enforcement' - Now that's a new one to add to my collection of interesting double speak.

BBC - Olympic overdose? - Well, she asked.

Well.. you asked.

It's a major international 'sporting' event that probably deserves a decent level of coverage for those who give a flying fig for contests between those whose sponsors can afford to tune them to ever greater micro-improvements in human endeavour.

Not the only thing on the planet. And certainly not worth draining a £3B+, tens of thousand-strong, publicly-funded national media entity of staff and money to the exclusion of all else.

However, this inconvenient war in our own geographical and economic backyard has at least highlighted that even though we knew the tea-lady was running the show at the weekend while editorial was on 'don't lie to the public; it's bad' training at a Cornish retreat, at the moment the entire BBC is in the hands of a security guard and a work-experience activist from Kingsnorth while all the rest are 'reporting' from the next 'fun' location in Beijing.

You are... the weakest link. I'd like my money back.

Another for the list

John Edwards scandal is about money not sex

'99% honest'.

It's like I tell my kids about Domestos; it may kill 99% of all household germs, but it's that 1% left you really need to worry about.

You say tomato, I say a red fruit-like thing that is not the same thing

An interesting exchange on the Newsnight news blog (the distinction is, apparently, now significant), as opposed to the other news published/broadcast by the national entity we fund.

Bank balance sheets become focus of scrutiny

Look at 13, 14 & 15 and then the reply from a rather defensive reporter in 16... and wonder about the mindsets at work.

'...if this were "reporting" then you would have a point. As it is, it is blogging. It is not meant to be award winning journalism.

And I am not reporting "unsubstantiated gossip" - I am reporting a...

Not sure I can get my head around this, not just as a possible official insight into national media broadcasting/publishing editorial definitions, but also consistency...:

'...if this were "reporting" then you would have a point[ie: not reporting]. As it is, it is blogging.... I am reporting [or...] a...'

So... is it reporting... or blogging, and what then is the difference as it still appears in print, for public consumption, from a BBC reporter on a BBC organ of news sharing?

I am to in future ignore all I read on these pages?

Addendum: I have had a reply:

21. At 11:15pm on 29 Jul 2008, PaulMasonOfNewsnight wrote:
In on-screen reporting you can pursue bar stool intelligence and try to stand it up as fact. With blogging, I think it's legitimate to explain what people are saying if it's relevant and plausible and doesn't libel anybody, and especially when as "sentiment" it is a material factor in events. If people are beginning to act on an idea it becomes relevant even if not true. I'm trying to help people understand the scale of private concern in the financial sector, is all.

I could ask what the heck he is trying to say, as it is almost Rumsfeld-Clintonian in not clarifying, at least to my satisfaction, how onscreen is different to blogging when it is from an official, national media reporter, and how he in nay case seems to have contradicted himself on this distinction on one sentence anyway.

I think it best to leave that masterpiece of doublespeak as its own epitaph. Then again...