Andy's Blog

Guardian headline: " This is a war and we are soldiers on the front line " BBC headline: " Tensions rise in Missouri " (Edit: Since this morning the BBC headline has changed to "Anger at crackdown on protests".) There is certainly such a thing as local bias - a riot in your back yard will naturally get more coverage than the same thing on the other side of the world - and, yes, on occasion, local media will blow a local story out of all proportion because making news is what they do. I also know that following people in a certain area on Twitter will distort your channels of communication such that distance becomes less meaningful, you become more directly aware in things that aren't necessarily as significant to you, or in a global sense, as they might be. I mean far be it from me to imagine that what happens in the USA is inherently more important than, say, the cease fire in Gaza or Russian convoys advancing on the Ukraine. If we judged glo...

It's easy to forget the thematic differences between the classic He-Man and She-Ra series. He-Man operated from a position of privilege. Yes, his kingdom was constantly under assault by the forces of darkness, but he was still functionally a prince ruling a kingdom under his father the rightful and just king. So occasionally he had to put on his invincible muscle suit and fight this skeleton guy who was trying to take his stuff. It's still a story of someone who is effectively punching down. She-Ra, perhaps surprisingly for what may be readily dismissed as a "girl's" show, strikes a markedly different theme. Rather than defending the top of the hill, Adora and her team are the last holdout in a world that has already been conquered. Though the effective tones of the series aren't so different, between the comic relief and the "Saturday Morning" restrictions, there's still an underlying distinction which is never so markedly shown* as in the ...