Sitting in my peaceful (still a bit damp) village in Sai Kung I can watch the outside world via high tech broadband tv and one of the channels piped into my lounge is Sky News. In an illogical yet regular way I watch Sky Weather each morning before I leave home. I can venture out into the wilds of Hong Kong streets happy in the knowledge that its raining in the north east and a little overcast with a chance of rain later in Watchet.
I am irritated, daily, by the tone of Sky News. Their overly dramatic and narrow view of world events feeds its audience with a tabloid mentality, an skewed point of view with an unbalanced emphasis on celebrity and scandal with a smattering of the real news watered down to the essentials. They claim they have been awarded prizes for their news reporting although this must be for breaking news or perhaps the more technical standing up news while holding a laptop.
Yesterday was a big breaking news day. I watched live coverage from the City of London of protesters using the G20 Summit to bring attention to their cause. That varied from anti capitalists who burnt an effigy of a banker hanging from a traffic light to an anti carbon trading group who feel strongly enough to camp out and play music on their solar powered music system all day. The Sky-copter and the bat-boat, whoops I mean the Sky-boat had been deployed to get as close as possible to the protesters although they were just no where near as good as the camera men on foot who could take close ups of flustered policemen linking arms and keeping the surging crowd encased in a particular are.
For ages they showed a bloodied headed protester goading the the police. The point being he was a single person in the crowd in a small area but good old Sky News made it seem like the most important thing connected with the G20 - never mind Barack Obama and his meeting with The Queen or the Russian Prime Minister, Medvedev, meeting Gordon Brown. Oh no the breaking live news from Sky is some insignificant broke with a cut on his head.
Then they found Russell Brand amongst the crowd and attempted to interview him on his views and philosophy and motivation to attend the protest. If they had ever listened to Brand they would know that he is planning his own revolution and over and above that has zilch interest in politics. Mr Brand was predictably disappointing but luckily another scuffle broke out near by so they were off to film up the nose of a protester and, hopefully, find a bit of police brutality - at least a bit of blood.
