It’s time to catch up. Now playing it safe. Plain and
simple written-down analysis of all I haven’t done or done as if it had never
been done, to all intents and purposes.
The feature:
I chose this feature on Barbra Streisand. Why? Because I
love her so much and because a piece on musicals has to incorporate music, and
that’s a technical aspect with interesting content to analyze for the exercise.
The program it’s called El Musical, in Radio 5, Saturdays at
17:35 and Sundays at 16:17, so I take it’s a very short program or a section
inside another program.
They start with news on the European tour of Barbra, and then
they move to her biography, focusing more on the past than in the piece of
news. When and where she started her career, biggest hit, some details on her
personal life...
The whole feature develops with her song ‘People’ in the
background, which is played louder at the beginning and after recalling it as
one of her most iconic tunes. Then the speaker presents/goodbyes himself and
the song keeps playing for the rest of the program, approximately 45 seconds.
Overall, the informative component is very high, keeping it
in an objectively descriptive style. There are no sound effects, the editing is
very simple and lack of complications and the music used is 100% related to the
topic since, as I’ve said before, the only song played is directly quoted. In
fact, it feels like the purpose of this feature is to talk about the voice and
style of Barbra, so choosing to balance the speaker’s text and the song itself would
be a very effective election.
My analysis is on an editorial by Carlos Herrera,
broadcasted during his program “Herrera en la onda,” which airs daily from 6
A.M. to 12:30 P.M. in Onda Cero, one of the most important radio stations in
Spain. The show itself focuses on discussing topics of general interest such as
politics, economy, etc. News in the end.
Why did I pick this specific commentary? Because I found the
structure and the boldness when it comes to giving an opinion (absolutely
biased with not even a glimpse of trying to be impartial) particularly
interesting.
The commentary revolves around the hot news of the day. It
can be divided into four sections, each one focusing on one piece of news. The
first one would be an antiterrorist operation, treated not in depth. The second
one seems as the most important of the commentary since the taxation issue is
the one the piece is named after. Herrera discusses the reform of the fiscal
policies of the Government from a more informative perspective, explaining the
main points of the actions taken.
Even though, as I’ve said, the part focused on taxes should
be the longest inside the commentary, the third topic is the one that I found
more analysis-worthy. Herrera looks driven by his face-forwarded opposition to
the independent movement in Cataluña, so he dedicates more time on this
subject, and less impartiality, for the record, talking about the independents
as lunatics and other adjectives too pejorative for me to quote.
And to wrap with the commentary, there is a fourth issue
that I find personally insulting. How can a prime-time program treat with equal
(or even more) importance a soccer game that the aforementioned topics? The
music goes louder, everything very passionate about an issue that’s not an
issue at all compared to terrorism and the population being sucked the blood by
the Government once again. But I guess that’s the perk of the commentary, that
each speaker distributes the relevance of the things they talk about as they
please, isn’t it?
To finish with, the point I wanted to make clear with this
analysis is that the key is making the commentary personal and from the
speaker’s perspective and opinion. And in this case, it totally serves the
purpose.
