Why can’t people praise local journalists without trashing national broadcasters? It’s not a zero-sum game after all
The prime minister’s hour-long personal demolition derby on regional radio stations on Thursday was rightly taken as an occasion to celebrate the skills of local BBC breakfast presenters, who did a fine job of holding her to account and exposing the horrible yawning vacancies of her position.
Characteristically, those who praised the local journalists, however, also invariably used the example as an occasion to bash national broadcasters in comparison. I happened to be listening to the peerless Mishal Husain on the Today programme calmly eviscerating Treasury minister Chris Philp at the same time as I was following Liz Truss’s shaming performance on BBC Sounds. The conjunction was a neat dramatisation, for me, of our current obsession with binaries in all things. Both were exemplary pieces of broadcasting, but in our social media-driven world it is never possible for one thing to be praised without another being trashed.
