The Daily Dose of Hate

The Daily Mail (I know, I know, yawn, bore, drone)

About a week before the Elephant Man’s Dad-gate thing started up, DLL and I were in a supermarket queue. The lady in front had a copy of the Mail on Sunday (it being a Sunday), and I said:

“D’you know, the minute I see someone with that newspaper, I lose all respect for them.”

“Why?”

“Because they choose to read a bunch of bigoted, racist, hate when they could be getting a balanced view elsewhere.”

It’s the sheer lowest-common-denominator-appeal, the old-lady-at-the-bus-stop, the white van man cutthroat tell ‘em what they want to hear pitch of the thing I can’t stand. There’s no new information or insight or anything worthwhile in the rag, just a reinforcement of pre-existing prejudice and irrationality.

So, I’ve no problem with their guys gatecrashing a Miliband family service. The guys that did the Watergate thing weren’t exactly operating strictly within the rules. I want my journalists snooping and poking and prodding about where they’re not wanted. I don’t want them poking and prodding around celeb’s dustbins for gossip-column inches. I don’t care what’s going on with the Cowels and the Coles and the Jordans. I do want them with their noses into what’s going on in Westminster, I want them exposing overpaid civil servants pursuing their own agenda, I want them questioning the badger cull, not rooting through protesters’ emails and texts to try and discredit them.

I don’t want a brigade of Clarksons stating what they consider to be the bleedin’ obvious endlessly until myth become accepted as fact.

Real and paper heroes

However distressing the police that found the body of the two-years dead boy found the experience, they’re not heroes.

I spent twenty years in a job where similar experiences came too frequently. Rescue someone or something, and there’s some claim to heroism. Get them out alive, when otherwise they wouldn’t be, and you’ve cause to celebrate.

Lose them, and the only proper and professional reaction is dismay, deep self-analysis, and a determination to do better. I’ve seen, and I’ve been involved in situations where these feelings have boiled over and resulted in on the spot recriminations, accusations and the inevitable helmet smashing and blows being exchanged. There’s nothing heroic in too little, too late.