Insanity...1 Rationality...0

The national press has had a bit of a rough time of late; with the development of TV news in the late twentieth century and the internet even more recently than that, they’ve had to shift their focus away from the boring neutral and supposedly factual (or whatever) perspective of news to opinion pieces and campaigns. The newspaper medium has found itself adapting to an ever-changing environment, clutching to power in the form of Sachsgate (the Russell Brand and Jonathon Ross scandal for the less pretentious) and unleashing the expenses scandal. A lot has happened since I last posted however. The world decided to have a tiff and produce a number of monumental, dramatic, and devastatingly tragic events. Now it seems as though newspaper inches are struggling to fit it all in. On TV, the 24-hour rolling news channels actually seem worth it just so everything gets covered.

Tunisia and Egypt were the most reported revolutions in North Africa, acting as a springboard for what is being labelled ‘Arab Spring’. Then we saw a very rich man full of BS claim how if you were him; “Your face will melt off and your children will weep over your exploded body”. A man who believes “Every great movement begins with one man” – and that he is that man. A man so self-deluded by his own power, so ignorant of the feelings of those around him, and who has divided public opinion. That man was Charlie Sheen. It seems like he and Gaddafi shared a dose of ‘Charlie Sheen’ (the ‘drug’ not the man in this case) and decided to compete in a bizarre version of ‘whose line is it anyway?’ where they tried to outdo each other in a ‘who could have the bigger mental breakdown for the entire world to see’ contest.

Of course this was all overshadowed by the cataclysmic earthquake and tsunami in Japan; and this is where my attention turns back to the national press. Rather than focus on the tragic loss of human life and the trauma this would cause the Japanese people, some of the national press instead ran stories on the 11th of March with headings such as ‘Japan Earthquake: Tokyo flights cancelled’ (The Guardian) and ‘Japan earthquake hits global markets’ (The Telegraph). Yes that’s right, never mind the Japanese people, will this affect me flying to Tokyo and how are my stocks and shares doing? Ok, I guess the flights being cancelled does affect any potential loved ones coming home to Britain but still, why make that the leading heading? I know that locality is a relatively high news value but so are unexpectedness and personalisation – both of which were far more important in this story. It’s been a recurring theme in all these news stories though. With the Japan and Charlie Sheen episodes as exceptions (‘cause it’s not really relevant with Sheen) no one is even really asking: ‘what’s Britain got to do with all of this?’ In regards to the revolutions the focus has been more on the British reaction and the inconvenience for British tourists.

Although that said I don’t have too much of a grievance with that, I guess a lot of British people are interested in how this affects us and ultimately if there’s no market for it, the newspapers wouldn’t publish it and the newsreaders on TV wouldn’t be reading it out. Not that the newsreader has the power to neglect reading things out of course.

Possibly one of the worst things about the newspaper coverage of recent events was the beginning of the conflict in Libya at the weekend. If you were for some reason living in a cave and newspapers were the only source of information available to you, you’d think the apocalypse was dawning upon us all. I’m not even exaggerating, headlines included: ‘ROAD TO HELL’ (The Daily Mirror), ‘TOP GUNS…1 MAD DOG…0’ (The Sun), and ‘JORDAN PICS WILL MAKE PETE RAGE’ (The Daily Star obviously didn’t get the memo). All very apocalyptic – although the Jordan story is more damning for the sheer bemusement and disbelief at what some newspapers (and presumably people) consider to be newsworthy. Fair play to the Daily Star though, the next day they ran the moderate headline which in no way was playing to shock-appeal nor was it trying to make Colonel Gaddafi look as evil as possible: ‘GADDAFI’S HUMAN SHIELD OF KIDS’. Terrible yes but you can’t help but feel the press are very much in support of the government in regards to this war. Not that I’m anti-war myself (that’s a touchy subject for some people and one in which I’m not about to delve into).

What is particularly amusing from this is the use of sports-like score lines to depict serious news. Imagine the uproar if the Sun had ran the story of Japan being tragically hit with an earthquake and tsunami under the headline: ‘NATURE 1… FUKUSHIMA…0’. And rightfully they shouldn’t, it’s in appalling taste. Then again, when has that ever mattered to most of the national press?

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