There’s a new game in town, and it’s even better than Copyscape and all other ‘duplicate content checkers’.
It’s called Churnalism (the word has been attributed to BBC journalist Waseem Zakir), and was created by a group of journalists annoyed with peers who tend to reproduce anything that falls on their desks, sometimes without even rehashing it.
This site is intended to raise awareness about Churnalism, to help people identify Churnalism, and to encourage original journalism. As such, it will tell you, for example, that an article has been ‘71 per cent cut, 17 per cent pasted’ and the number of characters that overlap with that already published.
Alas, there is nothing similar to it ( http://churnalism.com ) for radio and television – because if there were, most of the words would be highlighted as ‘overlapping’. Indeed sometimes, you can practically tell who wrote a news item from the vocabulary and expressions used.
It is obvious that some card-carrying journalists, like some programme presenters, rely too much on their online translation services, and that they do not revise their work to see if it scans properly.
This rule, alas, was broken last Sunday by none other than the television station of the nation, when all ethos and ethics flew out of the studio windows. I write, of course, about the coverage given to the fatal accident that happened in Qawra.
Several years ago, a relative had been involved in a freak traffic accident, in which the car was written off and he emerged unscathed. An elderly relation saw the footage of the damaged car on TV and shortly afterwards, it became common practice to digitally blur number plates and faces in sensitive footage.
For all that, it had also been the praxis to avoid close-ups of people in certain situations, especially if they are not in a position to make informed decisions. That, too, appears to have been forgotten.
But I digress. In an effort to be smart and use an idiom in the vernacular, the newscaster described what happened to the victim’s skull; it would be improper to repeat it here. What made the whole thing even more sordid was the close-up that accompanied this statement.
Would the cameraman and journalist have done the same type of reporting had the victim been a family member, not an unknown foreigner? No amount of ‘the clips are likely to upset some people’ warnings will assuage the sheer coarseness of this type of coverage, which, moreover, showed no respect to the dead person or her relatives.
• I note that last Monday and Wednesday (at least) the recitation of the rosary was not broadcast after the 10 p.m. news bulletin on Radju Malta. Is this what listeners who looked forward to it will have to put up with, in the summer schedule?
It would seem that summer heat addles the public’s brains, as can be seen by the increasingly erratic telephone calls being received by some presenters. But producers and other people in the media are not immune to this condition either.
There are so-called ‘summer versions’ of programmes in which presenters repeatedly refer to those listening or watching from the beach – at times when the Dept of Health insists we keep out of the sun.
Then there are those infamous festa or locality programmes, shot in the open, where the presenter and his guests, audiences and the band either screw their eyes against the reflected light of the sun and swelter in the heat, or wear uber-casual clothes and dark sunglasses to try to assuage the terrible conditions in which they are made to appear.
• Peter Falk, Lieutenant Columbo to most, died on June 23. The first actor who had been approached for the role was Bing Crosby; rumour has it he declined because the commitment would interfere with his golf game. But could we imagine anyone other than Falk as the unkempt detective who got his man by wanting to know just one more thing?
One of the series’ tropes was that his wife Kate, as ‘the missus’, was never actually seen onscreen.
Not many people know that Mrs Columbo (Kate Mulgrew) was a crime-solving reporter on The Valley Advocate, a suburban weekly newspaper edited by grumpy Josh Alden. The eponymous series ran from 1979 to 1980, but unfortunately, this spinoff, meant to capitalise on the goodwill of the famous surname, did not garner the audience that Columbo had.
Indeed, producers tweaked a couple of things when they saw this – they changed the surname to Callahan, removed all references to the fictional detective, and changed the name of the series twice, from Kate Columbo, to Kate the Detective, to Kate Loves a Mystery. Nothing helped, and the series was pulled.
Most of us have watched the Columbo series on TVM, and we still watch episodes on Italian stations.
It would be a good idea for a local station to rebroadcast it, in memory of this excellent actor, or purchase the rights to broadcast Mrs Columbo which has her incongruously solve as many murders as Jessica Fletcher does in Murder, She Wrote.
• The Nista’ – Sharing Work-Life Responsibilities campaign continues to lumber on. This time, the man remains the prime breadwinner, for his job is full-time, while his wife’s is part-time. Moreover, his is flexible, so he can take time off when the child is not at a childcare centre.
Does this mean the wife works in a blue-collar job where vacation leave must be taken during shut-downs, whereas he can make up his hours during break, or by clocking in before and leaving after working hours, when he does go to work?
television@timesofmalta.com