You lucky ducks. We are replete - nay, verily, festooned - with a content cornucopia just for you.
We Start at the End
“Actin like life is a big commercial” seemed like a line worth nicking for today’s outro.1 And if you hate the Beasties you’re in the wrong parish, friendo.
Pass the Mic is the outro track for this conversation. Answers on a postcard about why -
best answer gets a set of steaknives pint on us.
Breaking
is the madman media survivor behind this show’s second-favourite newsletter, . So when we heard he has a new book out in a couple of weeks we were delighted he could give us a few minutes to talk meeja matters in the age of AI and climate consequences. Breaking: How the Media Works, When it Doesn’t and Why that Matters - despite my inability to stop obsessing about whether it is missing an Oxford comma in the title - is the magnum opus of Britain’s best observer of all things media since Christopher Hitchens went from Trot to Neocon.
We started with this excerpt, which is telling about our current media moment on a bunch of levels:
In August, 2022, shortly after she left the BBC after 21 years, but before launching Global's Newsagents Podcast, alongside her former BBC colleagues, Louis Goodall and John Sopel, Emily Maitliss gave the MacTaggart Memorial Lecture, the keynote address at the influential Edinburgh International TV Festival. She took the audience back to 2016 and explained:
“It might take our producers five minutes to find 60 economists who feared Brexit and five hours to find a sole voice who espoused it.
But by the time we went on air, we simply had one of each. We presented this unequal effort to our audience's balance. It wasn't, I would later learn the Ungainly name for this myopic style of journalism, both sizeism, which talks the way it reaches a superficial balance while obscuring a deeper truth. At this stage, I've never heard the term or indeed the criticism.
I just thought we were doing our job.”
The speech stretched my credulity so thoroughly that it felt like it'd done a full hour of hot yoga by the time it was finished. It was bizarre to hear someone who had until very recently been one of the BBC's most prominent political interviewers claim that she hadn't encountered the idea of false balance or it being wielded as a criticism of the corporation until Brexit and Trump.
Two years before the Brexit referendum, a year long inquiry by a UK parliamentary select committee concluded that BBC news teams consistently engaged in false balance when reporting on climate change stories. So for a senior news journalist to suggest that they weren't familiar with the concept felt like a very stark confession.
Head back even further to the misty, almost unimaginable, past of 2006, and you find Rob Corddry on the Daily Show, parodying journalists who bent over backwards to establish balance where there is none:
“How does one report the facts? When the facts themselves are biased from the names of our fallen soldiers to the gradual withdrawal of our allies to the growing insurgency, it's become all too clear that the facts in Iraq have an anti-Bush agenda.”
Meatless speech was rightly praised for highlighting the influence of Conservative Party appointees on the BBC, but it also contained a series of confessions about missing the elephant in the room. Even as the stench of dung must have been stifling.
In Conversation
00:35 Introducing Mic Wright
01:31 Technical Challenges and Interview Preview
03:13 Mic Wright's Dramatic Reading
04:16 Discussion on False Balance in Journalism
13:07 The Rise of Churnalism
15:14 Media Ownership and Influence
19:39 Tech Enthusiasm and AI in Journalism
32:14 Conclusion and Final Thoughts
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All the Outros
We also like outros. They’re a bit eclectic. But each one is there for a reason.
Pupdate
Thanks for the messages asking after Django2, Poppy, and Minerva. They’re drier but tired-er.
And yes, thanks, we’re aware we have too much stuff.
Not least because, as you’d expect,
is particular about music and his playlist is a must-follow on Spotify. At the time of writing it features as the finale:
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