04.12.08
What I mean when I say that the BBC is full of jerks
On the car today, I was listening to the BBC news show on NPR. According to the report, an artist from Italy named Pippa Bacca was recently found murdered. She was some sort of political performance artist, and her latest act was to promote peace in regions of conflict by hitchhiking from Italy to Turkey wearing a wedding gown. Unfortunately, she didn’t make it there alive.
Now, the reporter doing the story was interviewing someone who was a friend of the late artist, and the end of the conversation went sort of like this:
BBC: “What was she trying to prove by doing this? What was the point?”
Guy: “She was trying to promote peace.”
BBC: “And what does her death show us?”
Guy: “It’s a tragedy, and there are bad people in the world.”
BBC: “Actually, doesn’t it show that she was wrong? That art can’t make a difference?”
This wasn’t the first time that I heard a BBC interview where I thought that the interviewer was pushing his own point of view and taking some thinly veiled shots at the interviewee’s views. The other time was when they were interviewing one of the Zimbabwe ruling party representatives and they basically asked the guy, “Why does your party suck, and why don’t you just stop cheating and play fair?”
Here in America, all the interviews are so embarrassingly soft, so maybe the way that BBC reporters do things merely seems mean in comparison. Even so, I thought it was cheap to say that a woman who died trying to make a difference was wrong, naive, and that art doesn’t make a difference. All of those things may be true, but you don’t gotta rub it in the face of her friend like that!