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Another Manchester Bomb?

Just to add to the bomb scare stories, there have been a couple in Chester: one of the main shopping centres got evacuated a year or two ago, and someone left his briefcase in the street a while before that, the controlled explosion resulting in prawn and mayonnaise all over Tie Rack. Goes to show that bomb scares aren't unheard of in crowded areas... there was even one at my school the first year I was there. They didn't have us look for it though! :)

As for censorship, the cops can impose a media blackout if there are no significant casualties and the bomb is small, I know of another case where this has occurred.
 
At the Warrington branch of a large stationery chain store that I used to work for one of the sales assistants found a note written on one of the Word Processors stating that there was a "bomb hidden in the tippex display".

They had to take it seriously and had the bomb squad down to search the building which turned up nothing.

Playing back the security cameras later it turned out that it was some spotty twelve year olds that left the message.

just goes to show how easy it is to start a panic. :eek!!!!:
 
Going slightly off thread, but can anyone explain to me how a story gets on the news?

Where I live we have very few major incidents, yet a good few years ago we had a guy who hacked two people to death, in their own homes, with an axe. The guy responsible would have been absolutely covered and dripping with blood, it said in the local paper.

Yet it didn't make it onto national news. It only just made it onto local news.

Just recently, we had a teenage girl disappear, actually from round near me, and when they caught the bloke responsible they found her body, in two separate houses and a river. Her disappearance made it onto local news, yet the discovery of her body didn't. It only made it into the local paper.

How did these two stories, the last one especially in the wake of the Milly Dowler case, not get more coverage.

I don't understand how these stories didn't make national news, yet there are always stories on the 6 o'clock news along the lines of a toddler drowning in a swimming pool in Swansea, or a man being hit by a car in Chelsea. Terrible news, yes, but national news worthy?

What makes a story worthy of the national news?

Apologies for the tangent, but this thread got me thinking.....Not always a good thing.
 
I've always wondered that Beast. When a woman in my office was stabbed in the underpass :p (painful place to be stabbed), it didn't even make the local paper, and she was quite seriously injured.
Where is Garrick, he's a journo?
 
Thanks. As long as I'm not the only one who doesn't understand.
 
The Beast said:
Going slightly off thread, but can anyone explain to me how a story gets on the news?



How did these two stories, the last one especially in the wake of the Milly Dowler case, not get more coverage.

I don't understand how these stories didn't make national news, yet there are always stories on the 6 o'clock news along the lines of a toddler drowning in a swimming pool in Swansea, or a man being hit by a car in Chelsea. Terrible news, yes, but national news worthy?

What makes a story worthy of the national news?

Apologies for the tangent, but this thread got me thinking.....Not always a good thing.
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I hope that this helps explain things a little. When deciding on what makes the news on television, pictures are often more important than content, no pictures can mean no story. Also there are often restrictions to what can be covered and what can't . the police may ask us to embargo a story for a day or two and by that time, a more recent story takes its place.
Next problem are the producers, executive producers and editors. If they don't like the story (and believe me, many regional news programmes choose to put out fluffy animal stories rather than harder hitting, more desturbing stories.
Next up is money...... Newer qualified Journos are cheaper than the experienced news gatherers of past.... if its not handed on a plate, then a, they haven't got the time, and b, they haven't got the nouse to find the stories.
But perhaps the biggest problem is with the nationals, too much news for two little time , but if things (apart from huge national stories) are anywhere above Birmingham, they tend to get overlooked at the ed's and exec's dont live there.
 
and believe me, many regional news programmes choose to put out fluffy animal stories rather than harder hitting, more desturbing stories
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At lunchtime, both our local stations carried different animal stories. One station had a new born Tapir, the other had a tiger that has to move to Holland. Mind you, local news is rarely big news, so some relief from everpresent crime is needed.
 
Local News Versus National -- Moo Baa

Part of the problem is pressure; national news outlets are besieged with reports and must cull on the fly as they constantlly crash their deadlines. They simply learn to funnel in soft, fuzzy news to pad things out -- less for them to think about, far less for them to worry about coming back to bite them in the ass.

Cynicism plays a part, too. When, in the late 1960s, the Huntley-Brinkley report aired, David Brinkley, arguably the most cynical reporter ever to become a newsreader, in a book about those times, said that he was disgusted. He just knew it would lead to more fluff and crap. Why? In his opinion, there wasn't enough worthwhile news going on worldwide to fill a half-hour show, let alone an hour's.

He may be right.

As for un- or under-reported local murdres and the like, there seems to be a new True Crime boom in stateside TV, with many shows using these pseudo-documentary styles to tell lurid tales of sordid crime. Maybe they're saving the tasty stuff for after hours, hm?

When news programs lost autonomy and were placed under the Entertainment divisions, suddenly ratings mattered, and the pressure was on, so today they tend to shove at us the news they think we want to hear, based on demographics surveys and polls, etc. Between doing that and shoveling propaganda, there is precious little time left for any local stuff.

Gore Vidal once invited us to make a simple experiment. Count, he said, the number of sentences used to "cover" each news item, be it yet another mid-east bombing / retaliation or a gory kidnap / murder, or even a Miss America's Dog Pageant. You'll find they average from three to ten sentences for the most serious stuff, with their "In Depth" reports perhaps going to 25 sentences.

Now consider how few words that really is.

TV is about pictures, yes. But for any kind of understand of any issue, one must read. Only by reading various print souces and printed editorial discussions can one even hope to keep up.

And who has the time?

And so we are sheep, and cattle.
 
The local BBC news tonight had both the Tapir AND the tiger!

Something else that annoys me on the news is, when in foreign parts, they often get a local with a smattering of English to comment on the situation, which usually comes out as a stammered "This very bad, very very bad...", taking up several minutes of airtime and not telling us very much at all that we didn't already know, since we can see that his house has been blown up/flooded/burnt down/whatever.

Surely the whole point of sending reporters to a place is to sound out local opinion and then summarise it concisely? Fine, interview the locals if they have something vital to say, and can say it clearly, but local colour for the sake of it is just padding.
 
Face Games

"Put a human face on it," is one of the standards of TV journalism and lazy or incompetent presenters -- it's hard for me to call them reporters -- simply grab the first willing dolt they find. Hence the "Very bad" sort of commentary.

It's all by-numbers, TV journalism. Show this say this do this make it this way must include this never show that.
 
Another bomb scare in Manchester

PARKING PARSIMONY SPARKS SECURITY SCARE

What with Selfridges stores popping up like mushrooms and David "bling-bling" Beckham and his brood (one of whom, young Brooklyn, was spotted wearing a £110 D&G belt this week) you may have thought that all the old stereotypes about northerners being cheap were well and truly dead - but you'd have reckoned without the spectacularly determined efforts of a certain Wayne Neale from Urmston to keep the old jokes alive.

This week, Mr Neale sparked a major bomb scare in Manchester city centre due to his reluctance to pay the £3 fee for using the nearby multi-storey car park, reported the Manchester Evening News.

Instead, in the name of economy, he left his Audi estate in front of the city's crown court building. But when a policeman noticed "a suspicious briefcase" on the backseat and "a discrepancy" on the number plate, the whole of the city centre was shut down and evacuated.

The alert was finally lifted when Mr Neale returned and asked the police why they were so interested in his car. "Obviously, I am extremely embarrassed," Mr Neale, 37, told the Manchester Evening News. The total cost of the alert is expected to reach six figures. Mr Neale has been ordered to pay his MOT.
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Not His Fault

It isn't and wasn't Neale's fault, it was the panic-prone policeman and the over-reaction his idiocy caused.

Mocking Neale and quoting him as saying he was "embarrassed" is just further egregious abuse.

He should sue them all up one side and down the other. Hey, why not? If they're going to react like Yanks, might as well ACT like them, too.
 
Re: Not His Fault

FraterLibre said:
It isn't and wasn't Neale's fault, it was the panic-prone policeman and the over-reaction his idiocy caused.
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If the policeman had turned a blind eye, and then the car later blew up (in front of the Court Building) he'd have been rightly accused of dereliction of duty, assuming anyone could prove that he had ignored the 'discrepancy'.

The police are there to protect us, and we have to accept a few false alarms as the price of vigilance, methinks.
 
Car Bombs

I'd agree the policeman may have acted as his duty demanded -- presuming it was illegal for Neale to have parked there -- and I was but joshing about the American-ness of it all. Operating on such bit "ifs" however merely keeps us all in a state of panic, and hysteria rules.

Calmer heads need to prevail, if such there be any longer.

The only way to be safe from bombs delivered by cars would be to ban all cars, and even then it's no guarantee.

If Neale parked legally, the cop over-reacted. If Neale parked illegally, then the car should have been towed. Suspecting a bomb was a leap in logic based on glimpsing a briefcase outside a building where briefcases have got to be common fare.

In any case, we live now in a sick, sad world and the urge to duck and cover grows stronger by the day, it seems. So there is no avoiding these things. As Guns & Roses sings, "Welcome to the jungle..."
 
The Manchester police, whatever their faults, had ensured that
the devastating IRA bomb did not cause loss of life. Their evacuation
of the area in this case was quite sensible.

This prize prat parked on the pavement. He had no tax and no
insurance. His registration number was (deliberately?) wrong.

He hoped to avoid a £3 parking fee.

If the bizzies had wanted to beat him to death, I would have looked the
other way. And the same goes for all the turds who feel they have a
right to park on the double yellow lines around schools.

Of course I may be getting just a tad reactionary these days. :mad:
 
Ah, Sidewalk

Well, if he parked on the sidewalk, then a lynching was the least he ought to have expected, yes indeed. The blighter.

Although I will say that three pounds for parking is fairly damned egregious in its own right. What ever happened to reasonable profits for resonable exchange and value?

Oh, yeah. Forgot.

Sorry.

Play on.
 
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