Tuesday 8 October 2013

Silence is golden

When I listen to news broadcasts I am always impressed by the fact that an important part of a journalist's job requirement is a capacity for verbal diarrhea. It helps them through those many days when nothing has happened and yet they have to keep talking. The best journalists have a talent for  making nothing sound interesting and above all exciting. It takes a brilliant imagination and the ability to make their flights of fancy sound profound. No wonder that some have to resort to hacking into people's private conversations to provide them with material, while others move on to writing fiction. They've already had the practice.

I have tried but failed to wean my wife off watching the news. To my mind it is almost always the same. Tsunamis are few and far between, as are dust clouds from volcanoes.  The Berlin Wall has only been torn down once in my lifetime. And you only have to think back to the first election of Tony Blair to realise that nothing changes. Zoos change the enclosures they use but the animals are always the same.

One of the benefits of the internet is that it takes seconds to scan the headlines and to be sure that, yet again,  nothing has happened. Even when something has happened reporting is always the same. The same bunch of talking heads are asked the same old questions and their comments could easily have been taken from a couple of books entitled "100 Useful Responses to Journalist's Questions" and "10 Heartfelt Reactions to Tragic Events".

I don't know if you ever watched "Drop the Dead Donkey". Ever since seeing Damien Day's on the spot reports I have been unable to take any foreign corespondent seriously. Even the hallowed Kate Adie.

But I digress. My point is that I have little to say other than the market is moving as expected and although we are getting close to the moment when something interesting may happen it hasn't happened yet. Maybe today will be the day. But we just have to watch and wait.





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