London and the media

I saw the words "London Explosion" on a Union Jack backdrop as I was doing some hi-speed channel flipping last night. I flicked back to look for details but they'd changed news story. That was early on in the evening. Of course by the time BB had finished and I hat put L to bed, I came out to see the whole mess unfolding. Hard to miss really: it was on four stations simultaneously, and there's only five. I suppose I watched for only half an hour or so. We saw Blair's first speech. I guess it was what you'd expect a leader to say when so few details were known. He just said stuff about the resolve of the British, about not giving up our freedoms or our way of life and about how we will not be intimidated by these barbaric acts. He said he would return to London that evening but that the G8 talks would not be postponed. A decent enough impromptu speech under the circs. But then we saw the mass-media wheels begin to turn. I think I was watching a BBC World feed. The images were on a loop: stuttered footage outside King's Cross, distant shot of a now-roofless bus, emergency services setting up tents and donning safety gear, then the newsreader started to go over Blair's speech. "Yes, we heard the Prime Minister say that the British people would remain resolute... he then went on to say he would return to London tonight from the G8 conference, which opened today in Edinburgh." Then, along the bottom of the screen, the little news ticker read "PM calls London attacks 'Barbaric'". And the newsreader then went on to repeat (again) pretty much everything the PM, and he, had just said. There was an interview with a man, who I assume to have been the head of London Transport, or some other such personage. He gave a statement saying that yes, there had been five explosions, the Tube system had been shut down and would remain so until further notice, and that people should not plan any uneccessary travel in the City. A journalist asked him to recount his version of events from the time he learned of the first explosion. He just gave this look... sort of shook his head a bit and said, 'Look, I've given a statement, I can't really give you any more details right now,' and walked out of shot. Immediately thereafter, the newsreader sitting at the desk, reiterated everything that had been said, as if it we needed it explained to us, while they rolled the footage of King's Cross again. "Unecessary travel into London to be avoided" said the ticker. Of course they're filling in time, until something concrete comes in, until all the questions have answers, until they know how many are dead, how many injured, until they've constructed a timeline of events, until they've done a computer-generated recreation of a bomb going off inside a train in the tube, until we know who planted the bombs, until... The Mayor of London made a speech. Probably the only speech I've heard post-11SEP01 that hasn't just been empty rhetoric about freedom and democracy, evil and terror. It was the most eloquent public speech I've heard in ages (the pollies don't make them like that here). And then we had it repeated to us by a newsreader. We turned off the TV and watched Desperate Housewives. I taped it the other night when C went out. I didn't want to watch any more. Not because I was shocked at what I saw, not because it was sad that it should happen in London, and not because I wanted to avoid the reality of what was happening in the world. I had to turn it off because I knew it would only be a short time until the Union Jack emblazoned with "London Explosion" was replaced with a photoshopped treatment of a wrecked Number 2 bus, with an overlay of a stiff-upper-lipped British businessman with a briefcase and a bandage round his bloodied head, and the words "London Blitz" with a big drop shadow, all of it in over-saturated colour and narrow-focus blur around the edges. I had to turn it off before the media inevitably claimed ownership of it. I think anyone who's been to London has some sort of emotional attachment to it. I'm no exception. So I had to escape the TV coverage while I could still think of Liverpool St. Station as I remember it; before my memory of it was replaced with some cnn- or fox-branded version of "terror central". I didn't need someone telling me this was a great tragedy; I kind of had that figured out already. This morning I turned on Sunrise to see if there were any definite numbers of casualties, fatalities. Kochie and Mel were both doing their jobs well, standing in front of an upright plasma widescreen (a tallscreen?) with a graphic of the inside of a tube tunnel and the words "Attack on London", they were looking very solemn and morose, talking in low, slow voices. I saw what I needed to see, then turned it off. I didn't dare switch over to Today. By contrast, I found the blogosphere to be an excellent source of bullshit-free coverage of events. I have little.red.boat on rss so I checked in there and followed the author's link to The Guardian's news blog which had some good links from there. The London Underground Tube Diary was excellent also. Blogs have reassured me that every bit of remotely newsworthy information doesn't have to be packaged as though it's an advertisement in order to be effective. In fact, the grass-roots stuff is probably more effective and closer to reality than anything we'll ever see on mainstream TV again.