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Lofty Matters: Tony Livesey 5 Live's Atomic Expert
by Felix Columbidae author, poet, scientist, media expert, seismologist Felix Columbidae offers his own personal opinion on the coverage of the Japanese Earthquake disaster by Tony Livesey on Radio 5 Live. A critique of pure reason! How on earth do these people get jobs in the first place? Perhaps it is because they are unemployable in ordinary human life, the residue of talent which floats around the edge of the glass of opportunity. Radio presenters! Has there ever been a more desperate incarnation of humanity than the late night talk show host? Thank God for Tony Livesey and the subtlety of his wit and insight. He certainly saves the day for the intelligent listener on the radio waves. This man has media quality and class carved into the very fibre of his radio being. Always intent on pursuing the cutting question to bring to life the contentious issue and express upon the listener the vital nature of his journalistic quality, Livesey Lives! Livesey's handling of the Japanese disaster, in which tens of thousands of people died, was masterful in the way he guided our attention to the NUCLEAR CATASTROPHE resultant from poorly planned power stations and disingenuous statements from the authorities. No-one wants to be swept away in the tide of the more mundane approach of ruined homes and lives standing upon the matchwood of villages because after we have watched the shocking surge which erased lives and communities all we were left with was mud and misery. How erudite was the decision to focus on the Japanese failure with their nuclear power strategy, that is a story to win a media award. Naturally there will always be cynics, the sort of people who want to challenge media genius from a position of personal inadequacy if not outright envy. These are the type of no good wasters who would say that a 9.0 Richter Scale Earthquake (which actually threw the planet Earth off of its access) was something of a special event. Such self serving moronic ne'rdowells would also bleat on about the fact that the quake itself didn't damage the nuclear reactors but that it was the tsunami afterwards that did the damage. Livesey is right to ignore such positions as the posturing of media illiterates. Livesey brings balance into this issue by just going for the fact that this is a nuclear disaster and radiation could be pouring out everywhere. Tokyo may have to be evacuated, people may glow in the dark and the Japanese agencies have not got a record of telling the truth about their nuclear facilities. You just can't trust them. As a radio journalist with a deep grasp of cross cultural understanding Livesey is increasingly subtle in his portrayal of the Japanese response to disaster. The uneducated may jump to the conclusion that this talk show host has not got a single clue about anything he says but that would be a very hasty assessment of this man's skills. Every listener understands that he is merely playing Devil's Advocate and that apparent stupidities are nothing more than journalistic guile. And what guile it is, it had me fooled for several days recently. As the BBC goes rabid over the NUCLEAR DISASTER story line, the views of experts that these very old reactors have functioned to design may be lost to the more ordinary pair of ears. A 9.0 Richter scale earthquake is an extraordinary event way beyond the scope of planning but those Japanese cities, towns, villages and reactors stood up to it and survived. What they didn't survive was the following tsunami, that was what did the damage, and even then time will show that the Japanese reactors exceeded design expectations a thousand fold in that event. Full Story Here To exceed such an event by a thousand fold is appropriate because as the BBC report said, this tsunami was a once in a thousand year event. Thank god it didn't happen in Britain because not only would there be nothing left but there would be no recovery plan, no military response, and no water or food for the survivors. As for our own reactors, well they would be heading towards the earth's core double quick time. No doubt that excellent journalist Livesey will question our abilities once he has stopped sticking it to the Japanese! I love Tony Livesey, he is the finest example of the true quality of late night radio talk show hosts, an absolute giant amongst very, very small people (much like the Japanese). Article Directory: http://www.articledashboard.com creativemythology.blogspot.com/2011/03/lofty-matters-tony-livesey-5-lives.html |
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