I appreciate TV has gone way over the top when it comes to it's pre-program warnings of strong language, sex scenes, images that viewers might find disturbing, violence, sexual violence, scenes that children might find scary which usually come before a Harry Potter film which I suspect every child in the country has already watched several times , the list go on. But over the past few days or so the BBC has reported the family held in captivity, husband, wife and three children and initially the family on their release were shown in their entirety yet shortly after the kids were shown obscured by camera trickery. The same thing happened with the child of the soldiers widow who was shown slumped over his coffin who Trump was shown to be insensitive in a phone call. Suddenly the child's face was blurred when shown in BBC TV reports yet not on their webpages, inconsistent or what? But the best this week happened in the Channel 4 program Countdown where dictionary corners Susie dent came up with the word gobshite with the latter part of the word being bleeped out yet the word in its was shown in the letters board behind Rachel Riley. So hearing the word is a no no reading the word is fine?
I'm not sure this has anything to do with political correctness, seems more related to tv and film regulation and some inconsistency in the application of those regulations. Bear in mind that it is up to C4 and the BBC to decide when to beep out some words.
My rationale for this would be that, generally, they only show the word board for a couple of seconds, and if in that time a child can read the word and vocalise it into a swear word, then they probably already know it. This is speaking from experience with two kids. But yes, I completely see what you're getting at. I was going to argue that it's in the dictionary, but it seems most swear words are now...?
I think that is far to deep for Channel 4 given the overwhelmingly banal programming on this Channel. I have actually asked Channel 4 for an explanation via their Facebook page and an email but not unsurprisingly I have not had a response. I also asked the BBC for a reason why they blurred out the children's faces in their two different TV reports but did not do so on their we pages, again not unsurprisingly I have not had a response but the BBC rarely respond to criticism as in their eyes they can do no wrong, you only need to watch the farce that is Newswatch to confirm that.
Do you actually feel strongly that one of the actions in either case is wrong? Or just find the inconsistency/perceived hypocrisy annoying?
