Bloody BBC News Beauty Pageant Crap

Harriet Harman attempts to claw back electoral advantage by criticising the Bolshevik Broadcasting Corporation over its ageist agenda. It's the kind of desperate schtick you'd expect from a talentless New Labour cretin.

But this is what caught my attention:

In 2007, BBC Director General Mark Thompson denied the corporation's decision to remove then-58-year-old Moira Stewart from her regular news slot on Sunday AM was motivated by her age.

He told MPs on the culture select committee that Ms Stewart's "traditional" news reader's role, as opposed to a correspondent or presenter, had "virtually died out".

This one policy alone - replacing newsreaders with 'presenters' or (God forbid) 'correspondents' has guaranteed the dumbing down of BBC news. These news 'presenters' are lamentably ignorant of current affairs, politics or just about anything else. If they stuck to just reading out a script they'd be bearable, but the fact that they're required to 'interview' people and talk intelligently about topics of which they have no knowledge is insulting.

Thompson tries to weasel his way out of any responsibility for this change by making it sound as if it were a natural process (ie 'had virtually died out') when it is quite clearly management, and indeed industry, policy.

The other result is that news has become just one more branch of entertainment, with increasing emphasis on celebrities and sport. The female newsreaders have to be young and pretty and their male counterparts fairly unblemished, because it's all a bloody beauty pageant now.