I’m still struggling with my free Chinese Phrasebook that came with this morning’s Times (if you bought it in a WH Smith), but in the meantime here are two excellent pieces from today’s Guardian.
First up is a G2 cover story on the Gillian McKeith. Now I’ve never seen an episode of You Are What You Eat, but I’ve seen all the spin-off foods on supermarket shelves and clogging up space at Holland & Barrett. Some of this “nutritional” information that’s being spread about really needs debunking, and Dr Ben Goldacre – he really is a doctor – is the man to do it. And one of his Bad Science readers has forced McKeith to drop her “Dr” title on the basis of how her “PhD” was acquired (distance learning via a non-accredited US institution).
The other piece is a full page in Media Guardian about the rise of quiz show gaming on the radio (free reg. required). This is something I was moaning about only the other day, as it became clear that Chris Tarrant’s return to commercial radio was as a presenter for one of these shows. Personally, I’m staggered that a professional broadcaster like Tarrant would agree to present such a low-rent show. Granted, I haven’t heard it yet, but we’re still talking about a genre of programming that relies solely on listeners paying to play. Gambling, in other words.
In the Media Guardian piece, contributors say that they’ll have a higher level of trust with listeners than TV shows like The Mint. Why? This is exactly the same, except it’s on the radio, and by the sound of things, it’ll be in more peak time than most of the TV shows are. Times are tough in the radio advertising market, but this is not the way to go – it’s short termist, and loses all the trust listeners to radio stations do have.
One mistake in the Guardian piece is that the author has been taken in by a station’s name – Classic Gold Digital (my emphasis). While it certainly does appear on DAB radio sets, it’s a station that’s mainly heard on AM stations around the country. They’re no more or less “digital” than any other station. Statistics from the DRDB about how many DAB radio listeners there are in the UK are spurious. On average, 16% of radio listening is through a digital platform (around half of which is DAB listening).
[UPDATE] Returning to the Goldacre piece:-
Andrew Collins is an excellent writer who maintains a blog. I read the first volume of his memoirs a few years ago. These days he’s a fine radio presenter on 6 Music, he’s film editor of the Radio Times, and a columnist on Word magazine. I respect him an awful lot.
However, he has profoundly different views to me on people like McKeith. If you’ve got a while, read his thoughts on the Goldacre article, and most importantly, make sure that you read all the comments underneath. Collins returns frequently to address those comments.
It’s interesting to try to understand how the “other side” thinks, and how rational person might be so mislead. Still, when was the last time you fundamentally changed your views on something on the basis that a pile of commenters were oppposed to you? I guess what actually happens is that your views become ever more entrenched.