Sir, – With his support for the IRA, Muammar Gadafy was as much of an enemy to the British and Irish people as he was to his own – good riddance to him. – Yours, etc,
Sir, – Has anybody else noticed the media feeding frenzy around the slow and inevitable collapse of the Gadafy regime? Look at any news programme and the screen is full of anchors and commentators giving us the benefit of their wisdom on the Libyan situation. Ditto for the relevant radio programmes. It seems every station is assuming that whether Gadafy goes or not is the most important question for humanity and that, consequently, they have to try and out-talk each other, always in what appears to be a state of high excitement, to prove their mettle.
Every reporter on television appears to have a couple of men shooting guns in the air behind them when appearing on the news. A cynic might say it is all a set-up. Bang-bang and bluster are the order of the day. All this doesn’t enhance the media’s reputation – it shows the sound and visual media, with the honourable exception of the papers, produces noise and meaningless motion pictures most of the time, especially when there are too many competing television stations.
As an exercise in futility and waste of resources, the Libyan coverage by the media takes some beating. With minimum research, some PhD student should get a very good book out of it all. Then at least someone will get something worthwhile out of this media farce. – Yours, etc,