Trump victory sees the silly season in full swing
‘NOW on BBC Radio 4, we ask whether the election of Donald Trump means destruction for the planet.” That teaser for the environment show, Costing The Earth, sums up the giddy, hyperbolic tone of much current reporting on the President-elect. The silly season has given way to Nutty November.
The interview on Tuesday’s Today With Sean O’Rourke with Raheem Kassam, editor of what RTE described as the “controversial ‘alt right’ website, Breitbart UK”, showed a media which has yet to come to terms with the new order.
O’Rourke ran through a checklist of cliches about Trump — immigration; the wall; gun control — but Kassam calmly and good-humouredly defused them all, even adding helpfully: “I am not an ‘alt right’ guy — I’m a small conservative.”
Treating mainstream conservative ideas as deranged and dangerous is what helped create the Trump backlash.
That divide was nowhere better illustrated than children of minorities were being bullied "right across America" in the wake of Trump’s victory. Kassam asked for any evidence beyond a few isolated anecdotes.
“There was a pretty detailed piece about it yesterday in The New York Times,” the RTE presenter said. “That bastion of truth,” laughed Kassam, before pointing out that the media was “terrifying people intentionally” with scare stories and then acting surprised when it worked.
O’Rourke’s faith in the liberal media as a natural voice of authority is part of the problem – and it goes hand in hand with a wider ‘Nanny Knows Best’ attitude.
Oliva O’Leary’s weekly talk on Drivetime was devoted to measures in the forthcoming Public Health Bill designed to curb alcohol abuse. She ticked off the usual arguments, before concluding that the bill ought to be supported.
Nowhere, though, did she address the question: Will it actually work? This world view, where saying and doing what looks virtuous is what ultimately matters, is also part of a wider political malaise.
Following his death this week, the tribute to author William Trevor on Monday’s Arena on RTE Radio 1 offered a good introduction to his work.
Critic Eileen Battersby summed up well how Trevor’s Irishness and “rootlessness” went hand in hand, and his line about how “the most exciting part of writting is cutting" should be engraved into law.
Radio 4's Cinema's Secret History, finally, explored where Welsh actor Richard Burton got his famously rich, expressive voice, lamenting the loss from modern film of voices such as those of Burton, James Mason and Cary Grant.
I’m not sure great voices have disappeared — Morgan Freeman certainly has one; Samuel L Jackson and Christopher Walken, too — but on radio, it seems the days of distinctive voices are definitely gone, which is odd in a medium which relies on it every minute of the day.