Bahrain, F1 and Journalism
Motorsport journalist Joe Saward is, in my opinion, one of the finest sports writers to be found. In recent months, he’s been blogging regularly about Formula 1’s Bahrain Grand Prix, discussing the politics surrounding the event.
His most recent blog entry, coming post event, is a lengthy opinion piece where he essentially changes his opinion about what is going on in Bahrain. It’s too wordy for sure and I get the feeling it’s primarily about getting something off his mind, however it’s also an interesting insight to the way different journalists work.
If you don’t have the patience to read it, or his previous posts on the topic, I’ll sum it up by saying that Joe is less than happy about the reporting going on from major news agencies and found it doesn’t tally with what he experienced (his pre-attendance view being very negative). This doesn’t surprise me; these days the mainstream press seem to do anything to stir up controversy and seem to spend little time doing proper journalism.
The old Channel 4 series Drop the Dead Donkey seems to be more appropriate now than ever before. Not so long ago there was a truly dreadul Panorama piece on BBC 1 about computer games which was abysmally researched, utterly one sided, and was worthy of the Daily Mail at its finest. Actually no, because it was just completely powder puff and crap - it was basically just 30 minutes of utter rubbish masquerading as a serious piece of current affairs output.
The game industry being one I know well, it did make me (and others I know) wonder about the rest of their output. In fact, I’ve since been told that other episodes have been similarly problematic.
I’ll end this post by pointing out that Sheffield DocFest, one of the world’s top documentary festivals, takes place in June. I know some great documentary makers who’ll be there; if only they could be in charge of major news and journalistic output…
