As is of course true for all the discerning and distinguished, I have a favourite BBC News article. I don't claim to have found the best, or most deserving, or most useful; I wonder how many would consider it worth anything at all. The article is on their website.
Its headline reads: "IT nightmare is anagram of no-signal village's name". I have to admire the editorial decision to omit quotes around the anagram; this headline joins a large and growing list of headlines shortened or unpunctuated to an extent such that they become little parsing challenges — a dropped pair of commas is enough to leave me scratching my head for nearly a minute wondering how to isolate away all verbs but one into sub-clauses.
The article itself is one more demonstration of the BBC's withered capacity for telling stories about systems rather than individuals. The lack of mobile coverage in an area where people live, decades after the technology became ubiquitous, is an injustice; specifically, a systemic injustice. There's no bad guy here; I could try to claim Thatcher's responsible for this, but she's one person, and it takes more than one person to destroy a plan to build much-needed infrastructure. She's also been dead for a decade (honk) and Itteringham remains devoid of signal.
It's not lost on me that the BBC as an organisation is unprepared to speak truth to power for a whole load of fascinating and terrifying reasons, but even armed with such expectations I find myself reliably, repeatedly, baffled by the quality of the journalism. While one might have previously chosen to obscure a systemic issue behind some personal stories, as though this were just another in an arsenal of tools built to dissemble and deceive, I wonder now if a systemic analysis of any issue at all is now completely beyond them. The skill simply isn't demonstrated anymore. Events and analyses can only be reported if they can be presented as messages delivered by some politician or some think tank or some arrogant CEO. Individual testimonies are load-bearing in articles that fail to cite the studies that begat their headlines. The most egregious example by my reckoning is an eight minute long video report titled "Why Crossrail is running so late" that took great care presenting the agonies of business owners who blamed the delays for their misfortunes, but never actually explained what had caused these delays. The BBC's Tom Edwards dons a hard hat and hi-vis and marches into the unknown for his scoop, and in the depths of Bond Street station he finds the man with the answers; the managing director himself, who can definitely tell us why Crossrail is delayed. Tom doesn't even ask the question. It's really quite something to watch.
But, you see, this is why I have a favourite article. Because Paul Moseley, Norfolk political reporter, went the extra mile to craft this image:
It includes the caption, "a digitally-altered representation of how the Itteringham village sign could look, if you rearranged the letters". I love it so much. It's got the classic AI-generated piss filter. There's an attempt to make the sign look weathered but it's fallen short of the amount of damage visible on the actual sign pictured just beneath. The article's information density is so low I can't reasonably complain that it's pushed the important bits downward. The article wants you to take away the fact that an apt anagram exists somewhere in the real world, and it wants you to take away nothing else.