Cock News

Sally Nugent, a television sports presenter, was recently drafted in to present the BBC Breakfast News and attracted a few headlines for accidentally saying 'cock' when she meant to say 'pocket'. The Daily Record claims

viewers took to Twitter to point out the embarrassing gaffe during a report about fake pound coins. Sally said: “When you’re walking around with a couple of pound coins in your cock – um, pocket...” Eleanor Head tweeted: “Oh, Sally Nugent.. your first time giving BBC breakfast news and you say cock rather than pocket on live television! freudianslip.” And Tim Marben said: “Four pound coins in your cock...” Oh, BBC Breakfast, you please me no end.”

A quick search of Twitter reveals no user by the name 'Tim Marben' exists; there are a number of users called Eleanor Head but none of them tweeted about Sally Nugent. It appears that the Daily Record decided to add an angle to the story by pretending people were talking about it on Twitter. Which they are not. There's only one tweet about Sally Nugent, to do with her legs. She's the new Angela Rippon it seems. Here's an edited version of the moment:

Slips by female newsreaders that get a lot of publicity often relate to sexuality, usually penises. From earlier in the year this was getting a lot of attention:

Meanwhile this newsreader seems to associate policing with masculinity:

Male newsreaders also enjoy explicitly referring to the penis:

Gayness as a disability, newsreaders as ideological mouthpieces

I love this one because it shows how newsreaders are so often on auto-pilot, detectable from that special 'newsreader' tone of voice which appears to encode ideology through interpellation. The slip is made by the anchor on the left of your screen:



What is happening here is that a story about a blind man climbing a mountain is misreported as a gay man climbing a mountain. Its as if the newsreader drops in something from the stock mainstream categories of 'unusual' or 'disabled'. So, in this case, the auto-pilot slip allows us to speculate on how this mainstream media might regard homosexual love as an impairment, or at least as a category not normally associated with 'normal' enterprises like mountain climbing.

I think the key lesson here reminds us the media considers newsworthy abnormalities, even when they get it 'right', as part of a stock list, a social construction of conciousness. For once, the existence of ideology encoded in standard news speak is revealed by this slip, since both 'gay' and 'blind' appear to be on this list.