The BBC: sanctioning ignorance?

I know the Today Programme is not Schnews or MediaLens, but compared to the Sunday Breakfast Show on BBC1 with Bill Turnbull and Sian Williams, it is a beacon of critical thinking. This morning, the presenters sabotaged a brief piece on Web2.0, the aim of which was to make a complex, specialist topic intelligible to a general audience.

A 15 second video trailer was played as Bill Turnbull said something to the effect: "If you want to bring your old website up to date you do it with what is coming to be called Web2.0 technologies. Here is Spenser Kelly to tell us all about Web2,0." Then just before cutting to the piece, with the camera back on him, Bill said with a deprecatingly snide tone, "I almost said: what ever that is?" Thereby, almost not saying it. To which Sian replied, "I don't know anything about web sites."

The short Click piece then played. It following a website owner wanting to bring his site up to date using new social networking technologies. We were introduced to widgets for importing user content and placing community features on old-style websites. For a specialist it was extremely simplistic, but it did try to make a complex topic interesting to people who are not specialists in the field.

Then, as the piece ended the camera cut to the weather presenter (I did not get her name: blonde, floral print skirt) who simpered and giggled about how she did not know anything about the Internet, either. A good effort was thereby framed into irrelevance by three presenters, whose job is to forge a bond of trust with the audience, saying that it was alright to be stupid about this topic.

But consider the hypocrisy. All three work for one of the most complex organisations in the world, using advanced internet technologies as a matter of course: visualisations, virtualisation, live data feeds; the BBC has embraced many aspects of Web2,0 technologies. These presenters DO know a lot more about the internet than their audience. They must have been pretending to be stupid for some rhetorical effect. I can only assume this is an intentional sanctioning of an anti-intellectual, uncritical approach to complexity.

I say intentional because it would be in the power of the producers to slap down such pseudo-populist, unthinking rhetoric. The fact that it was the social internet which was so framed, I believe is not particularly relevant. The same sort of framing could be applied to any complex topic: is it OK to be stupid about, say, the economy, immigration, the causes of war, or anything else you do not want to think about? Or better, just react with the reactionary herd.

Equally the same piece could have been framed by the presenters positively: "I wonder what web2.0 means?" "My kids all use YouTube." "That was interesting. I learned a lot." Why wasn't it?

Why sanction popular, anti-critical, reactionary attitudes to anything?

Bad behaviour for a public service broadcaster.