Is it news?
BBC: Blair admits resignation mistake:
UK Prime Minister Tony Blair has acknowledged it may have been a “mistake” to announce he would not be serving a fourth term in office.
“People kept asking me the question so I decided to answer it. Maybe that was a mistake,” he told Australian radio after attending the Commonwealth Games.
Later Downing Street said what he meant was it was a mistake to expect the announcement would end speculation.
I can see a couple of possible reasons why this might be newsworthy: Downing Street can’t help living up to their reputation for spin, backtracking what Blair said; and the sheer idea that Blair has admitted to a mistake about anything.
But this off-hand, drowned out comment doesn’t affect public policy one jot. It also doesn’t even have an implication for the increasingly tedious and over-written “will-they-won’t-they” question about when Gordon Brown - John Major to Blair’s Mrs T. - will take over. So why is it the top story on the BBC, the front page story in theguardian, and all over Sky?
Because news isn’t about what’s in the public interest, just what’s of interest to the public - no matter what values any news provider sets out in their mission statement.
It’s the same reason we get football results in prime-time buletins and not, say, the national table-tennis results. Football only gets that position through popularity not any kind of need-to-know.
Comment by Nimbos — March 27, 2006 @ 11:26 am
Slow news day?
Comment by Gavin Whenman — March 27, 2006 @ 12:04 pm
The BBC, particularly, should be above this nonsense — they should be reporting facts, not convoluted opinion and expansion on the very irrelevant comment that Blair almost didn’t make (but for the interviewer’s timing).
Comment by Gavin Ayling — March 27, 2006 @ 1:21 pm