Jackie Danicki

I do love it when other people so eloquently express annoyance at something that I have been worked up about for quite awhile, but have never found the words to explain. Our friend Brian Micklethwait does a very good job in taking on the trad media’s ludicrous scaremongering headlines, illustrated with a cracking photo he took yesterday. Big Media crap and football cock-ups:

The trouble with the bloody Big Media is that they make such a fuss about nothing with things like this that if anyone half sensible really did, seriously, any day now, fear a Doomsday Scenario, this headline wouldn’t tell you. When I saw it, I laughed out loud, and snapped the thing purely for comedy purposes. I just assumed - and still assume - that it was nothing but some ludicrously over-exaggerated bending out of shape of routine medical caution. It simply never occurred to me that this could be real Bad News.

…And these wankers complain about blogs getting facts wrong. They rape the facts so routinely with these kinds of headlines that they no longer register that they are doing it. They put crap like this in a different part of their brains, so to speak, to the bit where they moan about lies on the internet.

Brian then touches on the very poor goalkeeping on display of late in the World Cup - and the poor referee who forgot how many yellow cards are needed before a player gets sent off.

But a cock-up is one thing. The habit of falsification, so ingrained that the perpetrators of it would be amazed to be accused of it even as they know that falsification is what they are quite deliberately doing, is something else again. I feel sorry for those goalies, and even for that referee, perhaps even especially for him, because he is never going to be allowed to forget this. But I feel no sympathy whatsoever for the people who invent these scare headlines, and then wonder why nobody trusts them and why more and more of us now prefer to get our overwrought nonsense for free on the Internet. That referee is going to apologise, very soon, very publicly. Those goalies are probably being publicly distraught even as I polish this. But there will be no apology for that idiot headline, and nobody will even think of asking for one.

Will this ever change? Probably not. But as Perry de Havilland, who edits Samizdata, often says, blogs may not change how newspapers are written but they may just change how people read them.

(We’re having dinner tonight with Brian and Perry, amongst others, and I must remember to shake Brian’s hand for speaking my mind so capably.)

Filed under: Life