I looked up and down my blog, now just 48 hours old and realised something was missing. It was almost as if there was a black hole in the middle of my blog that needed filling. Then I realised what it was, not one blog thanking the cultural heavyweights that are the daily mail. How can we let a paper so rich with information and philosophy have no mention, no its time to give the daily mail its shot in the limelight. This was recently brought to my attention when I read in the mail: 'Big Brother: a Jordan wannabe, two bisexuals, a minister who believes in UFOs... thank god this is the last ever series'. Yes big brother isn't the most thought provoking of programmes and I had to agree with the Mail on this one, they were clearly very pleased that this was the final series and wished to celebrate that fact by by giving it maximum coverage; filling their paper with profiles of each of the contestants, as well as pages of big brother related news and a special daily mail banner dedicated to the new series. Taking into account it's self confessed hatred of big brother it was giving it a mighty fine send off.
However this recent article gives me a nice little excuse to bring up an old story... swine flu (which left us for a summer break last year and doesn't seem to have returned). Oh it was a scary time, when swine flu was in its prime killing people here there and everywhere.....well only people who were already terminally ill, but it was still terrifying. This was not helped with daily mail headlines such as 'swine flu: now its getting serious' and 'swine flu now the battle to contain it' however the headline 'killer flu is here' takes the biscuit for me. so you can imagine by surprise when I read an article in the mail which said 'after this awful fiasco over swine flu, we should never believe the state scare machine again!' wow, just wow. It is quite remarkable that less than a year before the mail had written that '65,000 could die [from swine flu]'. Yes its awful isn't it this scaremongering culture we live in eh Paul Dacre? At least the mail can rise above it with headlines such as 'how using facebook could raise your risk of cancer' and 'food watchdog warning over peanut butter brand containing cancer-causing fungus' and 'artificial light increases breast cancer risk' and 'big headed babies more prone to cancer'. Oh i could go on and on and on....but I won't, because that would be rather tedious and I feel that I've made my point
Showing posts with label Daily Mail. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Daily Mail. Show all posts
Friday, 27 August 2010
Wednesday, 25 August 2010
Pointing the finger
Everyone likes a good rant. There’s no denying it, be it the weather, our parents, food prices or the unfairness of life. We have a thirst for deploring, complaining and blaming that we quench by offloading our built up emotions at the nearest acquaintance whether they have a morsel of interest or not. That’s just the way we are. However in philosophical and political sense, it’s just got out of hand. What we would usually gripe about in private is splashed over the papers. As a result we have this culture of endless bemoaning, blaming and ridiculing where such phrases as ‘society’s going to the dogs’ and ‘broken Britain’ pop up here and there. As a result we have endless scaremongering with no backbone and a culture where it is mundane to castigate the police and other services at every opportunity.
When you bring up a child they say that praise is as important and condemnation and the effects of the balance between the two are evident in the adult the child grows up to be. Well when the police service is old enough to leave home its going to have some self esteem issues to say the least. In the last year crime has decreased by 9% and in the last 15 years crime has almost halved. So I think a firm pat on the back for the police service is in order. However there’s still this ludicrous perception that crime is sky rocketing. A survey for the BCS in 2008/2009 shows that 3/4 Britons think crime has increased. This warped discernment is truly startling but what more should we expect when you have to dig into the depths of cyberspace to uncover such stats. Just imagine for a moment that crime had doubled in the last 15 years? We wouldn’t hear the end of it, uproar and anarchy would follow. I’m going to give the media a taste of their own medicine by placing the blame firmly on their doorsteps. What causes this allergy to praise? Is it ideologically driven by journalists or is that we just don’t like to hear good news? Whatever the reason, it’s deeply, deeply unfair.
I mentioned the police service as a victim of unjust admonishing in the introduction but that does not mean the service doesn’t have its faults. Efficiency can be improved as can punishments however these are not the areas where the weight of the criticism falls. The strain of it is balanced on the broad shoulders of individual police officers up and down the country. It is not the system that is criticised but individuals and events. There is not a better example than the Raoal Moat incident not so long ago. This man had murdered his ex-girlfriend’s partner and killed a police officer. The police were in pursuit of him as you may well remember when he turned the gun on himself shortly after being tasered. In true Britshness the uproar was imminent; an enquiry into how the police dealt with the incident was demanded. How awful that such a good honest man who was loved by everyone in the community should be tasered. Our friends the Daily Mail were at the forefront of this with a headline screaming ‘Raoul’s death was a public execution on live TV’. Ok, fair enough if it wasn’t coming from a paper which seems to demand criminals are hung drawn and quartered.
Don’t get me wrong, our society is far from perfect, and we can better ourselves significantly. There are pressing issues that need addressing; anti social behaviour, equality, racism and many more but if we are to achieve our goals then we need to work together and not against each other. We need to take our finger out of someone else’s face and raise it in the air, do our bit, help out, offer up ideas, and if not, well, then we need to learn to shut up.
When you bring up a child they say that praise is as important and condemnation and the effects of the balance between the two are evident in the adult the child grows up to be. Well when the police service is old enough to leave home its going to have some self esteem issues to say the least. In the last year crime has decreased by 9% and in the last 15 years crime has almost halved. So I think a firm pat on the back for the police service is in order. However there’s still this ludicrous perception that crime is sky rocketing. A survey for the BCS in 2008/2009 shows that 3/4 Britons think crime has increased. This warped discernment is truly startling but what more should we expect when you have to dig into the depths of cyberspace to uncover such stats. Just imagine for a moment that crime had doubled in the last 15 years? We wouldn’t hear the end of it, uproar and anarchy would follow. I’m going to give the media a taste of their own medicine by placing the blame firmly on their doorsteps. What causes this allergy to praise? Is it ideologically driven by journalists or is that we just don’t like to hear good news? Whatever the reason, it’s deeply, deeply unfair.
I mentioned the police service as a victim of unjust admonishing in the introduction but that does not mean the service doesn’t have its faults. Efficiency can be improved as can punishments however these are not the areas where the weight of the criticism falls. The strain of it is balanced on the broad shoulders of individual police officers up and down the country. It is not the system that is criticised but individuals and events. There is not a better example than the Raoal Moat incident not so long ago. This man had murdered his ex-girlfriend’s partner and killed a police officer. The police were in pursuit of him as you may well remember when he turned the gun on himself shortly after being tasered. In true Britshness the uproar was imminent; an enquiry into how the police dealt with the incident was demanded. How awful that such a good honest man who was loved by everyone in the community should be tasered. Our friends the Daily Mail were at the forefront of this with a headline screaming ‘Raoul’s death was a public execution on live TV’. Ok, fair enough if it wasn’t coming from a paper which seems to demand criminals are hung drawn and quartered.
Don’t get me wrong, our society is far from perfect, and we can better ourselves significantly. There are pressing issues that need addressing; anti social behaviour, equality, racism and many more but if we are to achieve our goals then we need to work together and not against each other. We need to take our finger out of someone else’s face and raise it in the air, do our bit, help out, offer up ideas, and if not, well, then we need to learn to shut up.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
