Can the Beeb get any lower?

Mike Smithson over at politicalbetting.com is mad, and rightly so, after watching the clip of the BBC’s coverage of the 2008 local elections I am stunned. How could anyone in their right mind think that this

is either an appropriate or even mature way of covering an election of any type?

I only caught bits of the coverage on Thursday night as I was with friends and as one does in these circumstances I was chatting away most of the time, only looking at the summary of the seat allocations at the bottom of the screen. Even this, I thought was poor especially when compared to the coverage CNN are able to give to the Primary’s in the USA - Say what you like about US politics, but the TV channels at least cover it properly. As a side note friend of mine was flicking (initially) between the Beeb’s coverage and the coverage from Sky news and he reckoned that Sky’s was by far the better.

As Mike Smithson states, the BBC should have a long hard look at how it deals with its election coverage as the corporation is infantalising politics, no wonder people feel turned off by it. I would start by stripping out people and gimmicks such as Jeremy Vine , the old election graphs were one thing, but cowboy hats, crap American accents and the basic undermining of the point to elections - to elect, rather than to entertain - is something else entirely! They should look at Sky’s coverage, CNN and Fox coverage in the US and actually the ITV coverage of the last election (it was far better and more up-to-date than the BBC’s).

I don’t think its out of order to say that the Python teams “Election special” was less ridiculous than the crap being fed to us by the BBC.