Cardboard guns and a babble of bias
As we UK citizens surfaced through the ice into 2010, British politicians began wheeling out and firing their heavy artillery. Actually, that’s how they want to make it seem, but isn’t really the case. What’s happening is, the politicians wheel out big, gun-shaped tubes of cardboard and the media take turns to shout “bang!” Then you get a long shrapnel crackle of voters jabbering on the radio phone-in shows. Can we stand four months (or more) of this? Of Punch Brown and Judy Cameron stertorously and inanely claiming and counter-claiming, maligning and counter-maligning, with intermittent yaps from Toby Clegg? Four months (or more) in which the media collude and pretend that all this meaningless vapour is real smoke and ordnance in a textbook case of what Jay Rosen memorably described as the “lame formula” of “ he said, she said journalism ” – as opposed to reporters and commentators saying “look, the economy is prone and blue, so it doesn’t matter who says what or who wins, because wha...