Re: "Davos Income Tax Man" experience of BBC's This Week Archived Message Posted by brooks on March 22, 2019, 10:50 am, in reply to ""Davos Income Tax Man" experience of BBC's This Week" Very interesting. I copied Bregman's series of tweets to make them more easily readable, and because they are so relevant: Last night, I was invited to be on the BBC show ‘This Week’. I though that Davos was a bewildering experience, but this beat everything. A bit more background on how incredibly stupid the show really is. First they invite you to talk about your book, and pretend to be really interested in your ideas. Then they ask: ‘Can you make a statement about the European Union?’ Me: ‘No. That’s not my expertise.’ Producer: ‘Can you say something about the terrorist attack in Utrecht?’ Me: ‘No, that’s not my expertise. Didn’t you invite me to talk about my book?’ Producer: ‘Yes, we want to get into that. But what do you think about Brexit?’ A couple of hours before the show, they want you to do a video of 2 minutes in which you have to summarise all your ideas. (‘And can you say something about Brexit please?’). When you arrive at the studio, you quickly find out that nobody has actually read your book. The producer, the presenter - they all couldn’t care less. They don’t even have a copy. The show starts. They play the badly edited video, after which three right-wing dinosaurs - two of them politicians from the Stone Age - start teaming up on you. Clearly, not one of them has read a page of your book. They make up facts about inequality (‘hasn’t grown’) and the economy (‘never been better’). They change the subject every 10 seconds. They hardly let you finish a sentence. Then it’s over. This was the worst experience I’ve had with UK media, but after quite a few interviews in different countries, I think I can say that, on average, British journalists are the least curious of all. So often, being ‘critical’ is just a pose. The BBC is the ruling establishment's immune system. It instinctively identifies ideas like Bregman's as a threat to the elite economic order and immediately mobilizes to neutralize it. What the ideas actually are, whether they are credible, ethical, practicable, etc are totally irrelevant. The one criterion is whether they are approved by power. And since they're not, they're seen as a foreign substance that must be purged. It's worth checking out the abysmal Evan Davis Newsnight interview Bregman links to in one of his tweets. The condescending, mocking smile never leaves Davis' maw the whole interview as he asks such incisive questions as: "We're not going to live in one big, giant commune, are we?" https://www.facebook.com/rutger.bregman/videos/1948640975365363/ Message Thread: "Davos Income Tax Man" experience of BBC's This Week - Poster123 March 22, 2019, 9:47 am Extracted vid of interview A crisis of the imagination Aaron Meets Rutger Bregman - Tomski March 22, 2019, 10:41 am Re: "Davos Income Tax Man" experience of BBC's This Week - brooks March 22, 2019, 10:50 am Thanks, Brooks. Should've read this thread first, before posting above! ;) nm - margo March 22, 2019, 12:53 pm Re: Thanks, Brooks. Should've read this thread first, before posting above! ;) nm - brooks March 22, 2019, 1:14 pm Ditto! Nm - MikeD March 22, 2019, 2:24 pm   Searching