I suppose much of what blogging is about, is 'observation' - as one of my recent commenter's so astutely observed, it's the detail. This particular detail is a few days old now, but it has stuck with me and keeps playing across my mind.

Television round here is a fairly dull, piped in affair for the most part - 52 channels of fairly staid stuff. OK, so having the Premiership on live so many days a week is something I'd not have in the UK. The news channels though are limited to Sky News, BBC World and CNN, therefore nothing that is in any way out on a limb or massively thought provoking. And it is on the first of these that I found my detail.

For some reason, AM and I always seem to find ourselves watching this channel. I'm not sure whether that's because it's on channel 1 on the TV, whether it's because it looks glitzy compared with the others, but more likely that it's a better connection to home than the others. From a quality news reporting perspective though, it's bloody awful. The approach is easy to see, take any given subject, shake it like a terrier with a doll and then put it on the infinite repeat, but under no circumstances get to the core of the topic at hand, your audience wouldn't understand it - I have in the past, and probably will continue, to refer to it as 'Sun TV'.

In this instance, Sky themselves aren't really the point, it was an interview they ran with some UK government minister whose name escapes me. This was probably less than 24 hours after the Haiti earthquake struck and here in front of me was this minister explain what was being done to bring relief to the people of that country. It's something that should be celebrated that the UK, despite a recession to cope with, is able to muster the resources needed to tackle such a catastrophe and play its part in world affairs. I should have been able to feel that this was a positive thing I was watching, but came away feeling a distinct distaste for UK politics, as if that could be any worse than what's been witnessed in the last 12 months. What got me, was not the message, but the manner the message was delivered in - this guy was positively enjoying what he was doing! There was no sense of gravitas about it, just some guy who wanted to be seen to be delivering 'good news'. There was nothing about his manner that suggested he cared in any way, so what we got was a repetitive recital of numbers of rescue workers, sums of money and tonnes of equipment, all trotted out through an inane smirk. A government in trouble looking to put a positive spin on itself, ably assisted by a media channel that seems to see nothing more in a story than how best they can promote their own image. Wouldn't it have been nice to have posed the question "Minister, can you explain to our viewers why it is that you seem to be enjoying this..."

Non-Believers Giving Aid - Support for the Haiti Tragedy & Beyond