No stone unturned?_其他_趣味英语-查字典英语网

No stone unturned?

“Unfortunately the way Gordon Brown and David Miliband have handled this case is bad news for the other two families. (Mr) Miliband is a total waste of space.”

But the Prime Minister defended the handling of the kidnapping.

“I can assure you that we have left no stone unturned in our efforts to release the hostages, to work with the Iraqi authorities to maintain our vigilance about what needs to be done, and to look at all possible means by which we could free them,” he said.

- The Telegraph, June 22, 2009.

2. Carl Bernstein wants me to read something first. Fortunately it’s not All The President’s Men – where you can remember the story, but not perhaps every last detail – but instead an article he wrote in 1992 called The Idiot Culture, which is helpfully republished on his website. It’s a densely argued four-page piece, which concludes “the media are probably the most powerful of all our institutions today; and they are squandering their power and ignoring their obligation”.

One hesitates to summarise though, not least because Bernstein is wary of simplification. His answers to questions are lengthy, nuanced, and he likes to emphasise the importance of “context”. But he thinks the 1992 article, written before the rise of Murdoch in the US, Fox News and phone hacking, particularly relevant today, as it describes the dominance of talk-show journalism and celebrity-driven news or, as he puts it, “the spectacle and the triumph of the idiot culture”.