By Scott Creighton
The following is my response to Charlie Brooker’s yellow journalism piece from the Guardian. but first, a little background:
Charlie wrote this about the 2004 election “John Wilkes Booth, Lee Harvey Oswald, John Hinckley, Jr. - where are you now that we need you?” Wiki. He admitted later it was in bad taste, after the Secret Service gave him a call, and the Guardian pulled the article and made him write an apology in which he went off on some rant about having intercourse with kids at a cocktail party (he seems to make that kind of joke quite often. I guess it’s for “shock value”).
Currently Charlie has a show on BBC 4, which is a show, about other shows, and is in it’s 4th season with the number of episodes for the coming year “TBA”. Considering the timing of his little article here, and how it correlates to the release of the deeply flawed BBC piece on building 7, it would seem that Charlie is letting someone know that he is a team player before contract renewal time (wink wink, eh Charlie?).
But this isn’t the first time someone noticed Charlies penchant for towing the company line: in response to an article where Charlie ripped into a popular artist who painted murals on the side of the Israeli built wall around the Palestinian lands…
”…maybe Charlie is too much of a moron/self-indulgent character to even know that a despicable wall is being built all around Israel). … As wikipedia said that Cahrlie (sic) worked for the BBC, it should not surprise anyone that he conforms nicely to what his masters want. Artists should be non-conforming; challenging us beyond what we consider as ‘normal’ and that is exactly what Banksy does. The criticism here is very petty…” here.
Petty indeed. But let’s get to his “piece” shall we.
Charlie Brooker
The Guardian,
Monday July 14, 2008
“I’ve got a theory - an untested, unprovable theory - that the more interesting your life is at any given point, the less lurid and spectacular your dreams will be. Think of it as a balancing procedure carried out by the brain to stop you getting bored to death.”
Translation: People seeking a more accurate story about 9/11 than “19 lucky cave-dwellers with box-cutters”, have no life.
Let’s see how that holds up to the smell test, shall we, genius?
