Keeping up

+ I wrote this last night. Is somebody actually reading my blog? I don’t want to alarm you, but an entire country has disappeared off the map. It seems that Venezuela should no longer be of interest to us – since we’re simply not getting any news from there anymore. How could this be? Has the invasion plan gone off the boil? Was it really true that the supermarkets didn’t actually run out of goods? Did BBC correspondents run out of bin scavengers to interview? Or are we simply being asked to wait a bit longer for the impact of CIA-led subterfuge to be felt? No-one knows. But my guess is that the Venezuelan counter-revolution will be in full swing again shortly, depending of course upon what else our attention needs to be diverted from. Today’s news is of course that a coup is underway. Whether it succeeds is yet to be seen.
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++ The BBC, or at least Radio 4’s PM programme is seeking listeners’ views as to how better to report politics. I’m not holding out much hope. The Beeb’s ‘Climate Change: The Facts’ came about 20 years too late, and I am wondering whether they will consistently and deliberately follow up its theme – or was it just a one-off tick box exercise? If I get round to responding to the call for listeners’ input I will merely ask for evidence based questions. If a politician (I choose Margaret Hodge, entirely at random) is invited onto a news programme merely so that she can rant about her opinions, then the least I would expect from the interviewer is to ask her for evidence for those opinions, and I would expect questioning to be persistent in that pursuit. If the evidence is not forthcoming, or is weak, or concocted, or is not fact-checked, or is unverifiable, then the whole interview should be binned. The same rule should apply to all political interviews. We should not be asking pols for their views, but for their evidence. If they haven’t a grip on this principle, they should be politically asked to eff off.