Channel 4 – cliché and class prejudice
Channel 4’s Dispatches documentary, “How the rich beat the taxman,” plumbed new depths in cliché ridden journalism and the recycling of hoary old myths.
When a director is reduced to showing long lingering shots of his reporter doodling at his keyboard, you know immediately they don’t have many moving pictures to show the viewer. This is doubly embarrassing as the reporter in question is Antony Barnett, an investigative reporter with a solid track record in print journalism. (That’s the medium where words matter more than pictures.)
Barnett relies heavily throughout the entire documentary on the opinions of Richard Murphy and John Christensen – the leading lights, correction -the only lights, in the Tax Justice Network. This organisation, however, is not the major institution it appears to be. Google Streetview reveals that TJN’s global HQ is nothing more than a semi-detached house in Chesham, Buckinghamshire. More fool Dispatches for giving them so much prominence.
Feed Entries