The performance this morning at 08:45 of Amol Rajan was atrocious, I used to enjoy him on the Media Show but his personal qualities are proving insufficient to be fronting early morning news on bbc r4.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amol_Rajan
https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b006qj9z
Amol Rajan was interviewing Steve Barclay and made a complete mess of it, I would hope his bosses tackle this horrible treatment of Steve Barclay; this is a new low, is not acceptable. In my opinion Steve Barclay was quite in his rights to abandon and walk away from this horribly ‘loaded’ treatment. Steve stuck it out much to his credit.
I think there needs to be an inquiry and there needs to be an apology from Amol and from the bbc for this.
Amol needs to realise this is not a gladatorial engagement, you don’t pick up points for destroying your ‘enemy’ and you certainly must not promote your own emotive bent when the format is principally to deliver current news in an unbiased intelligent manner and in this case allow the interviewee impart of their best. This is not the place for a tabloid shock treatment.
In my opinion the UK sort of ad hoc muddled through with covid, in all fairness we were completely in the dark and anything like ‘lockdown’ was at first contemplation a real shock to contemplate and seemingly alien to anything any of us had experienced. We knew there would be casualties, this is sad and lamentable, but such is life (and death) and covid. Death I am afraid stalks the Earth and will take the vulnerable.
I see now we have a media bandwagon of stirring up passions with ‘accusations’ of groupthink and the leapfrogging to new insights all by means of hindsight. Of course hindsight will temper and modify our opinions, how else can this be, it will provide ammunition for critics but as stated already at the time in my opinion we mostly did the best we could in those uncharted waters. Better then than the USA under fairground trickster trump and the extraordinarily timid Dr Fauci and seemingly so-disengaged Deborah Birx; trump we may remember dumped the Dept for dealing with pandemics the first week he entered Office; or at least dumped by those pulling the strings, I doubt trump would ever have an opinion of anything other than his own self.
If learning from the past is so much in vogue among pundits then how was it of the foot and mouth crisis of twenty years ago the guidelines and basically the manual of operations learnt and devised from the previous foot and mouth thirty five years earlier by the Duke of Northumberland was totally ignored! Important lessons and methods such as burial on site being totally ignored. That particular Duke was very highly regarded, I doubt anyone knew more of husbandry and correct farming practices.
Personally with unfolding covid it jarred on me that mass event gatherings were allowed to continue for so long.
Likewise it seems to me inconceivable that some care workers were allowed to continue WITHOUT the covid jabs.
Dido Harding and the Track and Trace I think needs some greater scrutiny, the costs were bizarrely high yet a trifling twenty quid a week to the poor the Government seems ‘so important’ and needs to be cut in such a cruel, petty short sighted way; the longterm cost I’m sure will be far higher than any twenty quid.
Here we are with this mornings reaction … https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/live/uk-58880971
(However, jarring to see Cummins with his worn out violin being given a soap box to whine from, yet again).
climate-change-briefing 