On that fake ceremony
…by the always-authentic David Akin.
Me? I don’t like any of it. It stinks. It makes the Sun folks, many of whom I know and like, look bad.
Now, as I pointed out to another Sun chum, there is an essential falsity at the centre of everything that TV news does: asking you to pretend to type at your desk while they film you, asking you to pretend to be walking down a hallway to your office, asking you to re-create some event or statement, because the cameraperson arrived too late to capture it. Others have written about this, more compellingly than I ever could.
There was no excuse for this mistake. News should be about truth; it shouldn’t be about fakery.
And, so, the next time one of the Sun’s many newsroom critics is hovering above a quote, looking to pretty it up – or clipping a bit of tape in a way that they know will create an entirely different meaning than what was intended – that should remember that axiom, too.
