We are the angry mob

I am constantly bewildered by what passes for news right now, finding myself harrumphing in my chair in disbelief at what I’m being told. My grandfather used to do it. Sat in his armchair he’d harrumph and grumble at the news of the latest criminal acts, once suggesting that “they should all be sent to an island in the Hebrides, and if any of the buggers try to get off, they should be shot!”.

The BBC is continually getting its arse kicked over the latest public outcry, and what seems clear is that if it ever was on a pedestal that put it beyond reproach, the BBC has fallen off it and landed with a thump, a perplexed look on its face. Mark Thompson could go with the current tide of public opinion and set up a system where the jobs, and earnings, of presenters are determined by a public vote. For me, Chris Moyles out on his backside, I’m not paying for him, give Victoria Coren more work, tell the DJs on music stations to just shut up and play the records, I couldn’t give a monkeys about hearing them showing off for hours on end. True democratisation of public service broadcasting.

Except for one thing. The British Public are apparently idiots, including me.

It seems that we get the news we deserve. This is a big wide world, the environment is on its knees, they’re dying by the thousands in the Congo, stuff is happening that we don’t even know about and yet what dominated all but two of the newspaper front pages a day or so ago was John Sargent leaving Strictly Come Dancing, and what a public outcry it has caused.

There are two problems here. The current financial crisis appears to have given us license not to be concerned with anything that happens beyond our borders as seen in the constant coverage of how we are imminently, or already, in recession. Yes, those poor people in the Congo, but never mind that, I can’t even handle my mortgage payments so I’d rather just get a fluffy version of the news thanks, you know, charity begins at home and all that so fuck the rest of the world. The ‘And Finally’ pieces have become the headlines.

The other problem is that the British public and its continuous knee-jerk outcries and indignant rages have become the news. News now sells if we’re involved. We’re driving it. The loonies have taken over the asylum. Cameras are out on the streets asking people for their opinions, cameras are being handed to us to film video diaries, apparently anyone is entitled and qualified to comment. Except they’re not. The bilge that some bloke down the pub spouts into his pint does not qualify as news. The masses’ ill-informed, addled, childish, poorly expressed sputterings do not deserve widespread distribution. We’re not journalists. What we are increasingly is a braying mob, and the more of us that shout, the less we make sense.

Where to go now? The news is broken, pandering to the moral outrage of the hour, the facts lost somewhere behind the high-street opinions, the BBC is destroying itself and millions of people sleepwalk home with the London Paper under their arm because, you know, we just want something mindless to read on the train. And I’m ranting about it all in yet another sodding stupid blog.