December 18, 2009 · 8:51 am

my soundbite shame

As a rest from The Girl Who Bought a House & Some Ikea Furniture Although Actually She Was Really Violent & Subversive I’m reading Nina Power’s excellent & thought-provoking One Dimensional Woman. Also enjoying Nina & Lara sharing their experience of Being Serious On The Radio. My experience of radio is limited to interviews in the 80s & 90s. Interviewers would start out enthusiastic & end up puzzled; mysteriously enough, though I was clearly the author of the book, I couldn’t produce a soundbite appropriate to their preconceived notion of it. Some had been smart enough to prepare themselves for this cognitive dissonance by not reading it. TV is worse. TV interviewers sit you down with a go-cup of really bad coffee & inform you in naive good faith, “This what we’re going to be saying about the subject under discussion.” While you’re trying not to reply, “I wouldn’t talk about it in those terms even if you felt able to offer me a date with Audrey Hepburn in Paris in 1960,” they add: “& we thought you would be perfect to contribute because of the clever thing you said recently about X.” But how embarrassing! What you said about X was in fact not that at all! It was the opposite of that! & it was about something else! Once they see the mistake, give them their due, they’re off quite quickly with their good faith intact to look for someone else who’ll say what they want to hear.

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5 Responses to my soundbite shame

  1. MikeM
    December 18, 2009 at 9:53 am

    Thanks for the cheer, Unc – found this raised a chuckle after one of those bad starts to the day. I have had but two brushes with the world of journalism – and even this limited experience has me thinking why we believe in this fiction of freedom of maneuver for a so-called free media, beats the heck out of me. As you say, you don’t even get good coffee.

  2. matrixless
    December 18, 2009 at 12:16 pm

    As Chomsky said, the media corporations are in the business of making money and producing lucrative propaganda. Their rags are mostly paid ads disguised as news. Of course, everyone knows all that already. Paradoxically, few people act as if they did. How many have heard about the “climategate” scandal, for example? Is it a scandal if nobody hears about it? This is the top question being asked in the private rooms of various news corporations around the world at the moment. (And that’s just one example from the past couple of weeks.)

  3. Lara
    December 18, 2009 at 12:23 pm

    And at the Beeb, you have to pay for it.

    Now, Mike, which is your favourite book? We’ve got twenty seconds left. Oh, and why? And please, keep it tame. This is a daytime audience.

  5. uzwi
    December 19, 2009 at 9:52 am

    Well, Jamie, I’d say that the disaster novel, in its new guise of the novel of apocalypse, has made science fiction more popular & relevant than ever. People’s worries about pollution, overpopulation & the environment have led to a real interest in what might happen to them when the lights go out, leading to the possibility of a second series of Survivors. Science fiction can service this need like no other fiction, & certainly better than science itself, which can’t now extricate itself from political debate & has therefore, predictably, been beaten out of the ballpark by a bunch of greasy morons who can barely add up unless it’s money. We sf writers are all looking hard into the future, Jamie, like a kind of shamanic media: the 5th Estate. Will that do? Oh, & my apocalyptic novel is called The Committed Men & I wrote it in the Historical Period, 1970. Thanks.