Stop the Press

I am not going to write about Dominic Cummings except to say that the press must be truly desperate to unseat the government to dig up a two month old story and plug it relentlessly when most reasonable people are shrugging and saying, so what? As we begin to relax lockdown rules, who cares that somebody the left fears and hates did a reasonable thing without any apparent risk to others? Meanwhile, we have been inundated on a daily basis with videos of police, press and certain communities blatantly disregarding the rules and no action being apparent.

The press is supposed to inform us but more often than not it acts like a self-serving behemoth, gobbling up snippets of information and regurgitating it as fancy. The world as portrayed by the newspapers is simply not real, it is a fiction designed to sell newspapers. How’s that going for you, The Independent? If you have ever been involved in something that has been written about in the papers you will know the extent to which they write the story first and disregard the facts.

The language is invariably hyperbolic, more resembling the Four Yorkshiremen Sketch than Woodward and Bernstein. So much so that the Man Booker Prize would be more appropriate than the Pulitzer for these fanciful distortions. A mild annoyance is described as ‘fury’ or ‘rage’ in an effort to whip up interest about a story which may not even be true. The adjectival use of ‘incandescent’ is trotted out daily and everybody involved in a press sting is red-faced. There is rarely any attempt to use the fabulously rich English language when all you have to do to is stick to the assumption that your readers are too stupid to demand better.

A source close to government could just be somebody who lives in the constituency of a cabinet minister. A Senior government source is an unnamed and thus unaccountable sacked minister or, these days, a Remain voting backbencher. In anti-government stories (all stories right now) ‘Parliamentary’ sources are, obviously, opposition MPs and even when the source is named the partisan nature of their contribution is so blatant as to be an argument for the other side.

The papers, however, are dwindling in their influence, handing over the baton to the broadcast journalists. But such is the clamour for fame and the gotcha interview that the whole charade gets even more ridiculous on air. Relentless phone-in shows hosted by antagonists with clear agendas for discord. Fatuous magazine shows like Good Morning Britain whose main aim seems to be fame for their presenters. And of course we have the social media based news outlets where the political stench is overwhelming.

He's played you all

The news is rarely about the news, but about what interpretation of events the outlet wants to sell. The affiliations of the main organs is widely known so if you are a taxpayer who has never been on a protest it’s probably a good idea not to read The Guardian and if you are a rabid, red-flag flying Trott the Spectator isn’t going to be your cup of tea. Which means that the only reason you read your favoured papers is for its authors. The story here isn’t about Dominic Cummings, it’s about the storytellers.

Pressed

Donald Trump is an idiot. There, I said it. Actually, I have rarely thought of him in any other way, except for seeing in him what so many of ‘the usual suspects’ utterly refuse to comprehend. He is not whatever else is on offer. He is not a practitioner of slick politics. Far from it, politically he is like Tommy Cooper, busking away when his tricks failed, only to finally pull that rabbit out of that hat. (Or in his case “Glass, bottle, bottle, glass… just like that!”)

Did he become a billionaire through brilliance or luck, or dodgy dealing? Did he even become a billionaire at all? But none of that matters because what Donald Trump really is, is ‘none of the above’. Politics has been mired in subversive deals with lobbyists, elected representatives not representing those who elected them and has been exercised in a manner detached from the lives of those who have to live by what politicians decide. The stench of corruption, real or imagined, is palpable, thick and offensive.

But, right now, as thoroughly loathed as politicians are, this position is being strongly challenged by a press which seems to have lost its mind. Just as in the UK the media as a whole think that their preferred politics – leftish, ‘liberal’, ‘progressive (in their estimation) – is the only obvious and logical stance to take. Anybody thinking otherwise is regarded as Untermenschen needing protection from self-destructive instincts and who really ought not to have a say, for their own good.

And so frenzied is their ambition to topple populist leaders, like Trump, that they cannot help but rewrite reality, even where no such rewrite is needed. Now forever dubbed Dettol Don, the president, unable to marshal his thoughts and consider them before opening his big, bellicose mouth, rambled along with a stream of consciousness which demonstrated a barely rudimentary grasp of recent research findings. But at no point did he suggest that people should inject themselves with disinfectant.

This ignorant monologue just wasn’t enough for the press, though; they just had to embellish it. It is possible that the alarming revelation that some people have actually done this and been admitted to hospital as a result may owe more to the way the press reported his words than what the orange-haired buffoon actually said. What he said was stupid, but what the press say he said was even more stupid. It might look like a clever move in retrospect, now that he has responded like a clumsy, guilty child, claimed it was just a joke and refused to answer more questions, but he never needed any encouragement to look like a clumsy, guilty child.

The press think their job is ‘to hold the government to account’ or ‘to speak truth to power’, but it isn’t. The job of the press is to diligently and even-handedly report the news. Not to distort it, not to inject it with spin which reveals their own bias. And certainly not to change it, communist style, especially when the actual source of their stories is available for all to see on the internet. So, journos, stop making it all about you. Report what actually happens and let the idiots hang themselves out to dry.