A few days ago, on the BBC's "This Week", Michael Portillo said a few things which few would have dared to voice. He pointed out the appallingly one-sided nature of the coverage of the death of Nelson Mandela, singling out the BBC for particular criticism. He also criticized the way in which the BBC had despatched a vast army of reporters and others to South Africa, all effectively at public expense, in order to join in on the global media extravaganza.
Portillo did not decry Mandela but what he did do was to draw attention to the adulatory nature of virtually all of the media coverage, which ignored his life before his release from prison in 1990; that he was not a man devoid of faults was never mentioned.
Mandela was a communist terrorist and was imprisoned for the consequences of those beliefs and consequent actions. The way in which the global media has fallen over itself in its attempts to outdo its competitors in its adulation of Mandela is sickening. The way in which the likes of Obama and Cameron competed for attention at the memorial service, equally so.
When I was at school with Portillo, we were never close even though we were in the same class. When he began to climb the Tory ranks, I found him increasingly unlikeable. However, since he quit the political scene, he has become an increasingly sane voice in an increasingly mad world and I now look forward to his televisual appearances. On this occasion, he astonished me with his comments and views, which mirror my own precisely.
A world which thinks only of media celebrity needs an occasional voice of sanity, and Portillo provides that. More power to his elbow.
No comments:
Post a Comment