I read the news today, oh boy.

If, as is often said, no news is good news, then it would logically seem to follow that most news is invariably bad. This depressingly bleak assessment certainly seems to be ringing truer and louder than ever at the moment. 

The death tolls caused by natural disasters Down Under and popular uprisings in the Middle East jostle for the attention of a fickle media and quite rightly so. Events such as these, far away though they may be, are of real international concern and significance and people in this country are genuinely interested in them. But whilst sad news is never something to be greeted lightly, there is something slightly inappropriate in the way the media have reported on these events.

On Wednesday, following news overnight of the earthquake in Christchurch, New Zealand, The Sun newspaper, ran with the headline: "10 Brits Dead in Kiwi Quake". Then, the following day, with the focus of the press having switched 10,000 miles back to Libya, The Daily Mail's front page declared: "British rescue turns to farce: Hundreds of terrified Britons trapped in Libya". Although somewhat unusually, The Mail decided to shun the colon in the headline, opting instead to punctuate with the slightly less conventional, but in no way grammatically inferior, St George's Cross. Presumably in case we mistook them for some of those no good Johnny foreigners.

Though both articles are broadly concerned with the major issues of the day, their overemphasis on the plight of British people in these situations is in danger of detracting from the real story. That British people are trapped in Libya is news, but it is surely news of secondary importance when compared with the sea change currently underway in that country. Likewise, and this is obviously a more sensitive subject, reporting how many British people are estimated to have died in the Christchurch earthquake is absolutely crucial, but it does seem in bad taste to do so without making reference to the total loss of life.  

Clearly there are issues of representation at play here, with the British media needing to appeal to the expectations of British people, who are after all are their primary audience. Cultural proximity also plays a role, that is to say that we are most interested in events affecting people that we can most identify with, in this case people of the same nationality. A clear example of this latter point can be seen in the reporting of last month’s devastating floods in Queensland, Australia, which happened to coincide with similar events in Sri Lanka, Brazil and Malaysia. Despite the fact that the number of casualties was actually greater in the South East Asian and South American disasters; the coverage of the flooding in Australia was unquestionably given greater press prominence in this country. The common language, colonial history, sporting rivalry and First World economy shared between Britain and Australia, not to mention the considerable numbers of British expats living Down Under, makes Australian affairs automatically more newsworthy than those in less familiar countries.  

Such press bias however reached ridiculous proportions on Thursday evening, when the BBC News at Ten led with the story of the difficulties incurred at Tripoli airport as British nationals sought to flee the increasingly volatile situation in Libya. The BBC showed footage of David Cameron apologising for the airport’s poor conditions as trapped British Citizens testified to a lack of organization, big queues and long waits. Without wanting to make light of the trials and tribulations of people trying to flee a country in the grips of what could well turn into a civil war, the inconvenienced travel arrangements of British citizens should not take precedence over events of greater importance in the news of this, or indeed any other, country. 

News is a subjective construct: decisions made by editors and producers determine what tomorrow’s big stories will be and when these decisions are made it is only right that those elements which are most likely to appeal to a British audience are pulled out. But this process, if not handled sensitively, can lead to a distortion of the facts, in which a marginal national involvement becomes the central focus of coverage, as in the evacuation of British citizens from Libya. Ultimately there isn’t going to be a newsworthy “British” angle to every international news story and if journalists seek to artificially insert one, they risk reporting on events which are, when compared to momentous changes in history, inconsequential.  

When the chips are down

Given what’s been going on in the Middle East of late, you can just about be excused if an event taking place somewhat closer to home and of equal seismic significance has, so far, escaped your attention. I am of course talking about National Chip Week, 2011.

Yep, sandwiched between World Day of Social Justice (Feb 20) and International Women’s Day (March 8), like a chip butty served between two pieces of United Nation’s endorsed bread, is our very own National Chip Week. Starting today, National Chip Week will run until Friday and is this year celebrating its 20^th anniversary of raising awareness, consumption and sales of the humble chip.

Presumably, righting the wrongs of social and gender inequalities the world over only takes 24 hours; whereas making people aware of the merits of fried potato requires a whole working week. And whilst International Women’s Day and World Day of Social Justice rely on the backing of the lowly United Nations, National Chip Week receives its benefaction from the mysterious and powerful Potato Council! Because whilst all this may appear innocent enough, scratch beneath the golden-brown crispy surface and you’ll find something a bit more sinister going on.

In the boom years, if you can remember that far back, we were all told to eat healthily. In fact you couldn’t walk around Westminster without bumping into some celebrity chef, badgering ministers to serve less deep fried doner kebabs and more sous vide celery in schools. Chips were out in the cold and in their place the Government ruthlessly administered a strict policy of five portions of fruit and vegetables per person. For a time, instead of filling awkward silences with mundane chats about the weather, we’d enquire whether complete strangers were getting their five a day and how. 

But that was then and this is now; and now things are very different. For a start nobody’s got any money anymore, least of all the Government. Well that’s not entirely true; fish and chip shops have actually got more money nowadays. Lauded as a recession-buster, (or batterer, sorry); chip shops are actually doing better than ever and are currently worth £1.2bn a year to the UK economy. That means £1 of every £100 spent on food in this country is spent in a fish and chip shop. That kind of money carries a fair amount of clout. Rumours abound that it was the dark forces of the chip lobby that shipped Jamie Oliver off to America to unleash his unique style of mockney irritation on an entirely unsuspecting public.  

                                  

This should not come as much of a surprise. It is a characteristic of Big Business that it exerts its often undesirable influence on governments. Big Coal, Big Tobacco, Big Oil, they’ve all done it in the past and now it seems it’s the turn of Big Potatoes.

Look closely at the policies of the coalition and the influence is clear to see, hidden in plain sight. Take the Big Society, often dismissed as a meaningless phrase used to put a positive spin on the removal of state assistance and subsequent second-coming of Dickensian-esque inequality. But seen in the light of the government’s secret tie up with the bigwigs at the Potato Council, all that talk of salt of the earth types, chipping in to get us out of the frying pan of recession seems to suddenly make a bit of sense. Indeed the only interpretation of the Big Society that actually makes sense is a wholly literal one. Our society will indeed be bigger under the coalition: it’ll be positively obese if they get their way. 

It’s nothing short of brainwashing; neuro-linguistic programming to make us all eat as many chips as possible, but to what ends? To clog up the arteries of the trouble making youth with saturated fats, thus making them easier to kettle in future protests? I wouldn’t like to say…though I wouldn’t mind another kettle chip.

We’re all hypocrites now….

Whilst tourist boards in Latin America and Eastern Europe were still busy thanking Jeremy Clarkson for his latest endearing remarks, two other social pariahs, Richard “smash it” Keys and Andy Gray, were welcomed back into the media fold this week taking the morning slot on TalkSport radio.  

The prodigal sons return was greeted with considerably less fanfare than their ignominious departure from Sky two weeks ago and I couldn’t help but be a little disheartened by the announcement from TalkSport programme director Moz Dee, (since when has that passed for a name by the way?), that Keys and Gray’s remit will not extend to current affairs or politics. I was sincerely looking forward to Gray’s take on the Middle East peace process, though I do worry if he would be fully able to articulate his views without the use of his trusty supercomputer. I guess now we’ll never know.   

Like Clarkson, Keys and Gray are well placed to testify to the enduring truth that everybody loves a good witch hunt. Disregarding the severity of their indiscretions for a moment, most people’s overriding feeling, myself included, was not anger at their comments, but pleasure in seeing the once mighty and impossibly smug fall from grace.

However, a confession: since that time I have missed listening to their infuriating commentary and forced ‘banter’ when watching football on Sky, not because I enjoyed it, far from it; I have missed it because it never failed to rile and at times incense me. In short: I have missed not being annoyed by Keys and Gray. I’ve missed the feeling of personal offence caused when they said something I knew was complete nonsense, (zonal marking anyone?).  

We all have our own guilty pleasures, I’m sure. The Daily Mail, The Jeremy Kyle Show, Simon Cowell, Fox News; these may all divide opinion, but you can be sure that those people who are annoyed most by any of the above, take the greatest pleasure in seeking out the source of their annoyance. I know I do.

If I was a practitioner of beer-mat psychology, which of course I am, I’d argue that the feeling of indignation we get from these sources allows us, in our own heads, to feel morally and intellectually superior to the spouters of these views. And to shatter the illusion somewhat, I’m sure that all of these people are aware of this. I’m sure they revel in it, they long to be the person we all love to hate and adopt the pantomime persona we all clamour for accordingly. There are those that go too far of course, those that we just hate: the Richard Littlejohns and the Robert Killroy Silks of this world. The type of people that if you were to get into a fight with and somebody said “leave it they’re not worth it”, they’d actually be correct, but you wouldn’t ‘cos they’re just that annoying.  But by and large these nasty pieces of work are in the minority.  

There are also those on the other side, the self-righteous, those whose moral compasses seemed to be tuned to a higher frequency than the rest of ours and aren’t they just determined to let the rest of us know about it.

It is this group, which argue that TalkSport shouldn’t be employing denounced sexists like Keys and Gray, who have obviously never had the pleasure of tuning into medium wave 1053.  I fear Mike Graham and Eamon Dunphy may be shunning Keys and Gray in the TalkSport canteen as we speak for believing the earth is round and being part of the political correctness gone mad brigade. 

This type of argument insults the intelligence of football fans who mostly know drivel when they hear it and can identify prejudice and discrimination for themselves. That isn’t to say TalkSport is prejudice free, it most certainly isn’t, but most listeners are aware of this fact, they listen to it for precisely the guilty pleasure reasons discussed above. Some even have a nickname for the programme in which the word “Talk” remains and “Sport” is replaced by another word beginning with “S”, though I can’t for the life of me think what…