Monday 6 February 2012

Decline And Fall

If ever there was an event which shows up the infantile nature of our MSM it's when we have a bit of snow. News reports regarding snow could easily be summarised as; "there's been snow, there will be some travel disruption and here's where they are".

But no, particularly since the age of 24 hour news and digital technology, reporting the snow has turned into 'dire end of the world warnings' mixed with a cuddly multi-media slideshow of things covered in snow. This from the Telegraph:

 Or from the Mail

Just in case we don't know what stuff covered in snow looks like. We could of course just look out of the window if we really wanted to know. But despite this, the fact that it's just winter dominates the news, as epitomised by the BBC - it's headline news, consisting of reports showing people building snowmen and with copious reporters stand out in fields looking cold and telling us how cold it is. One dreads to think how the MSM would react if ever got cold enough to hold Frost Fairs.

Yet even the lack of snow doesn't stop them. A BBC reporter was standing on a bridge above the A1(M) at Gateshead on BBC Breakfast this morning, giving lurid accounts of heavy snow and traffic problems, while behind him not a flake could be seen and the A1(M) was flowing normally. And not just the BBC either, this from the Mail:


According to the caption below the picture:
Big Ben clock in London is seen in the river Thames surrounded by snow yesterday morning
Yeah I suppose there's some snow in there if you look hard enough.  However what makes this worse is the rise of so-called 'citizen journalism, where viewers and readers are encouraged to send pictures in - 1000s of pictures of stuff covered in...er...snow. This is the digital equivalent of having to sit through your Gran's holiday snaps. Nothing could illustrate this better than this example from the BBC:

The caption underneath reads (and I'm not making this up):
Snow has fallen on many parts of the UK. Caroline Hall, from Pocklington, near York, sent this photo of her VW Beetle "Spaghetti". "He is very cold," she says. "Going to have to go and check he is OK soon, poor thing. There is even snow on his little exhaust pipes!"   
That is not news. This is news:


This is not news, it's a fucking snowman:


If the snowman were to go around kidnapping young children and flying them off to Greenland, that would be news but it hasn't so it's not.

4 comments:

  1. The "...infantile nature of our MSM..." may be partly due to the infantile behaviour of so-called adults.

    Saturday evening, while it was snowing, I had to drive through town and saw a young woman (scantily dressed for an evening out, despite the cold) run out across the road though the lights were against her, causing the car in front of me to brake hard and fishtail in the snow - the driver understandably gave a long blast of the horn because she stupidly very nearly caused an accident. Luckily for me I'd kept a decent gap between our cars and could avoid him, but his car could easily have slid into some nearby people on the pavement.

    I saw another similar deliberate incident a couple of hours later on my way back.

    Which came first - the clueless twats or the infantile MSM? (Maybe the soaps?)

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  2. @Anon, some good points, have to agree that sometimes members of public aren't very good with snow either - including drivers - some for example still insist on going ridiculously slow despite the roads being absolutely clear.

    I do often wonder, that as country, how we won WWII

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  3. William Horsburgh6 February 2012 at 23:24

    Your whole argument falls to pieces when you use the 'f' word.
    You expose the 'decline and fall' of the human race, not just the media.
    It's time we erradicated it from our language!

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  4. @Williams Horsburgh Your whole argument falls to pieces when you use the 'f' word.

    Sorry, not sure of the logic there, the 'f' word has long been in existence

    http://www.mudcat.org/detail.cfm?messages__Message_ID=2799252

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