I’m supposed to be able to trust my local (well, regional) paper to tell me the truth and to be accurate about stuff. But I can’t.
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| Newspapers being useful – used to build a house! |
Newspapers are written by journalists who are dominated by the middle-class, well-bred quite wealthy intellectuals and chattering classes who’ve been bred to have centre-left to left-wing political beliefs. Rarely are they ‘Conservative’, instead usually aligning with the left of the Liberal-Democrats. These days, with the coalition government to confuse their pretty little minds (Journos love to hilariously call them the “Con-dem”s), they have been pushed even further to the left than ever. Sometimes they are very open about being anti-“the right”, and yet I’m supposed to trust them when it comes to providing me with untainted facts.
True, not all journalists are bad. But they do have among them a very high number of drug and drink abusers. This must additionally distort anything they have to say or their actual understanding of the world around them. I mean, would you really trust a drunk to tell you the clear facts about anything? These journalists see the world around them and write about it through their haze. Unlike with broadcast media, there is no requirement that articles be written from a factual and neutral position. Their bias or their misunderstanding, however subtle, is ever present and they are not bound by law to seek the truth or balance. Their inability to be in touch with the people they ‘serve’ is astounding.
A classic example of how my regional Labour-supporting paper is put together by people with no understanding or grasp on the world immediately around them can be demonstrated by the TV listings. The North-West does not have analogue TV (it is nearly completely phased out across the rest of the country too) which consisted of only 5 channels. Instead, the barest minimum that anybody will have is via standard ‘Freeview’ and is around 30 channels. A huge number will also have the many more that Virgin cable or Sky brings, since large parts of the area are infested by the voluntarily unemployed for whom Sky or cable TV is an essential.
However, for reasons that make no sense to anybody, the regional paper’s TV listings are dominated by BBC1, BBC2, ITV1, Channel 4, and Channel 5. Details of programmes to be broadcast on these five stations will be given liberal space in the paper with the title of each programme and a synopsis. Indeed, lots of nice unused white space exists in this area where these listings are. Then, on the next page, all scrunched together and titled “Freeview and Satellite” are the listings for only a few of the 25 remaining channels.
The first ignorance here is to title this tiny section “Freeview” as if it is somehow something different to the 5 channels being given the huge space, which are also “Freeview”. There is only “Freeview” upon which all channels are equal and there are over 30 of them. Secondly, each channel under this section has in a tiny font just the times and the names of the programmes scheduled with no synopsis or explanation unlike those kindly given to the five channels singled out for some weird special attention.
In other words they list all the other channels beyond the random five they’ve decided to give nice details for, as if they are some kind of after-thought or even unavailable to the bulk of the population. Why? They are all the norm for everybody.
It can only be because they have no concept or finger on the pulse of what is truly happening around them. It also demonstrates my points precisely about how we can’t and shouldn’t ever trust journalists to tell us the truth or to see our world and how different it is to theirs.
England's England 