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Smile! You’re live on German TV

You don’t need to know German to get this. I’ve already complained about the blogs on N24 before, but here’s a new irritation. Michaela May, who styles herself as Chief Political Correspondent of the 24-hour news channel, regularly updates hers (one thing to her credit). Slight problem though: it’s not really a political blog – I’d describe it more as a few pieces of babbling small talk. Let me show you a typical example; here’s part of an eight year old's text message today’s post:

Gestern hab´ich Ihnen ja schon berichtet, dass ein Kollege der Zeitschrift Insight da war, um über uns zu schreiben. Das Portrait soll im Januar erscheinen. Gleichzeitig "zünden" wir in dieser Woche eine weitere Stufe in unserer Öffentlichkeitsarbeit: Es wird eine N24-Pressemitteilung geben, in der wir unser Projekt "BlogTVnachgefragt" vorstellen! Wir sind damit einzigartig im Netz und das muß ja auch mal gesagt werden :-)!!

A bit more:

Damals stand man noch auf, wenn der Lehrer in die Klasse kam. Es wurde viel auswendig gelernt, einen eintrag in´s Klassenbuch nahm man noch ernst…Gute alte Zeit?????? 😉 Bis später!

Now, as i said, you don’t need to understand any German to see what I’m getting at. Looking through the post, I have found:

– one spelling mistake

– twelve exclamation marks

– three examples of more than one exclamation mark together, just like you’d do in a creative writing task at primary school

– one instance of six question marks in a row, rather like a Facebook wall post

– one smiley face

– two smiley winks

This woman claims to be one of the leading political journalists in the country — Germany’s Adam Boulton, if you like. Well, could you imagine Nick Robinson littering his blog with smileys, winks and babble? I suspect not. How can we respect a news channel with a Chief Political Correspondent who behaves like this?

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