Whaling: 'Theirs is a quiet slaughter'

An excellent report by the Guardian's Justin McCurry here on a whale slaughter in the fishing village of Wadaura. Personally I have little problem with whaling, though I think McCurry does an excellent job here in this piece of balanced reporting. He follows the golden rule of just reporting what he sees and hears and letting the material do the work for him.



I like the audio-slideshow format too: not radio, not magazine, not TV - but somehow captures something good from each. The single voice on the radio is awesome; its intimacy is quite powerful. It is what makes programmes like Alistair Cooke's Letters from America and From Our Own Correspondent, startling contrasts from the radio's normal chatter and clamour, so enchanting. (Actually now - thanks to the Internet - one can hear the original master, Roosevelt, in his famous Depression-era fire-side chats).

The slide-show format builds on all this, but with the pictures something else special happens - the narrator can pause. In these pauses the images continue to tick on, drawing you in, but a space is allowed for your own thoughts to surface, and to consider what's just been said. This space is rarely allowed in the more traditional TV media, though I guess this is what the News 2.0 lot want to change, with newslogs like Nick Robinson's to the Guardian's Comment is Free's big-blogger contests.

Speaking of From Our Own Correspondent, Richard Black's piece is another excellent treatment of the whaling topic, especially as he notes other culture's culinary outrages. His account of the Extracto de Rana in the markets of Peru, particularly sticks in the memory: live frogs liquidised with honey, malt and herbs to produce a 'healthy' tonic drink. Nice.