Listening to the views of the ignorant is a turn-off (From Bucks Free Press)

Listening to the views of the ignorant is a turn-off

2:21pm Friday 4th July 2008 in

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IT USED to be the case that the airing of extreme and ill-informed opinions was restricted to a group of cronies propping up the bar in the local pub or cabbies projecting their world view pronouncements over their shoulders, as caricatured in the movies of decades past.

Lack of knowledge or expertise in a subject used to inhibit the majority of the population from making sweeping public statements on issues of the day in a forum in which they were not sure of the reaction or might expose themselves to ridicule.

Would that were still the case.

I spend a lot of time travelling in my car and, preferring, on balance, the spoken word to music as a companion on my travels, I mainly listen to Radios Four, Five Live and local stations.

But the omnipresence of the phone-in on a topic of current interest has started to infuriate me to the point of despair.

They rely far too heavily and frequently on the current obsession with encouraging a naïve public to air its prejudices and lack of knowledge or understanding - to entertain the rest of us, presumably? "Listen to the morons! My goodness we're better than them!"

I marvel at the patience of the presenters who must surely be struggling to nudge their callers away from the parallel universe they inhabit, in which every opinion but theirs is unworthy of consideration and in which their uninformed bigotry is apparently acceptable.

I listened last week (briefly) to a Cro-Magnon man with access to a telephone who attempted to convince us that unfair treatment in the workplace was a myth.

His justification? It was illegal to discriminate on grounds of gender or race.

Therefore, it could not be happening; otherwise, the mighty weight of the law would have fallen on the perpetrators.

Nothing the perplexed presenter could say in words of one syllable could shift this unicellular organism from his position, so he continued to trot out his muddled mantra until I opted for another radio station.

Conversely, when someone who knows what they're talking about - and I don't just mean "whose view coincides with mine" - comes on any programme, they are always cut off before they have finished.

Why is it that radio programmes invite guests to comment on items of interest in the news and then consistently fail to give them enough time to do it?