I’d ban news programmes asking random people on the street what they think about a certain subject.
It adds nothing, especially as they often don’t seem to have a clue what they’re talking about.
It's infuriating!
I enjoy things like Gogglebox, where you get a flavour of how other families are watching their telly, that can be entertaining - but I hate the way that news programmes do it - especially as it tends to be a reporter walking around a fairly deserted marketplace in some Brexitty place (Grimsby, Stoke), where the only people around at ten o'clock on a Tuesday morning are pensioners, so the town looks like it's represented only by that demographic of people (reinforcing the idea that other people will have about the place - there are young professional types, there are people with a variety of viewpoints, but such people are generally working at that time of the day, so the rest of the UK thinks that your town's only population is rent-a-quote pensioners
(what I'd find more interesting would be a current affairs version of Gogglebox, where we watch the same people reacting to political news each week - we'd be able to see how their opinions change over time - we'd get a balance of different backgrounds/ viewpoints - we'd find that some people are quite open/tolerant on some subjects but quite reactionary on others - we'd find that some people who's views chimed with ours on some stuff had very different opinions on other things - it might encourage people to see beyond their echo chambers - I don't mind listening to the views of other people - I like to keep abreast of what my "opponents" on a subject believe and sometimes it's enough to get me to change my mind - what I object to is the way that the Vox Pops tend to focus only on the low hanging fruit of "sticking a microphone in front of someone going into Wetherspoons in the morning" which reinforces stereotypes about how certain provincial places are populated)
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