The news

I can't read the news anymore. I just can't. It's too depressing.

I don't find it depressing in a 'state of the world' kind of way, although there is no denying that things seem to be slipping down our own moral blackhole faster than usual. What I find depressing is my relationship with the news... I am now too informed of the mechanics of the news industry and media at large to place any form of trust in them.

Before I was content to buy the Guardian and the Daily Mail, watch Channel 4 and ITV, log onto Fox and MediaLens and summarise that the truth is somewhere inbetween them all. Now I question whether anything really happened at all. It's not like I see conspiracy everywhere I look, but I feel that we have been lied to too many times, had our emotions played with too many times, and seen too many exposes of the 'truth' that our bluff has now been called. The press have become the boy crying wolf, and we are the villagers.

My first thought on the the Heathrow terrorist plot was disbelief. Not fear, or interest, but disbelief. I rolled my eyes and muttered 'whatever.' I don't doubt that this threat was imminent, and I entirely believe that the police and lawmakers did what was neccessary to prevent it going ahead. In fact, I'm thankful that they moved when they did and that the operation was a success, but when it comes to details I am incapable of believing anything I have been told.

The next day was the kicker. I had come to terms with my mistrust, and then I saw the headlines of the tabloids. The shock value of these papers, and their outright manipulation of truth and emotion is nothing new, but I simply refuse to place my confidence in any organisation that reprints pictures of 9/11 in a gratuitous and tittilating way. Particulary an organistaion that focuses on creating fear of what could have happened, rather than analysis of what did happen.

Tabloid hackery is tabloid hackery and, short of a missile attack on the offices of the Daily Mail, will be around a lot longer than it has any right to be. What I truly resent is how this approach to reporting is having a negative effect on all forms of reporting. The commentary pages of UK newspapers are begining to resemble a Fox News broadcast - not in the extremity of their opinions, but rather in an increased polarisation of left and right. You can either be on one side or the other, you can either be pro-Israel or pro-Lebanon, do you support the USA or not, are you a soft liberal who believes in human rights or a hardnosed righwinger who wants to see all detainees hang? We have lost our scope for rational thought, as if even our press have been caught up in lunacy of the argument and objectivity is a thing of the past.

In the Observer today there is a column entitled 'Why Zionists Must Stop Seeing Conspiracy Everywhere' or something to that effect. The column makes some good arguments against liberal paranoia, and some good arguments for it, but the crux of the article - reading between the lines - is that you must be either one or the other. If you support the feeling that Western foreign policy is a prime motivation behind terrorist recruitment, then you must also believe that all terror plots and threats against the country are made up by our government to control us. And vice versa. The voice of the middle ground - of rationality, or logic, or a bigger picture than tomorrows sales - has been lost.

Speaking as someone who could probably be descibed as leftwing, or liberal, or a communist, I resent having my well-thought out arguments and opinions reduced to a descriptive term. I find myself being labelled in a negative fashion alongside anybody who doesn't follow the official Western line... and all these little comments, and comparisons, and articles - they all contribute to a slow socialisation of thought until anybody who offers a rational, non-biased opinion becomes an enemy of state.

According to Front Page Magazine, Noam Chomsky is the most dangerous professor in America. Not the man who set up the website who claims to represent freedom by silencing his opponents, but the respected lecturer who offers a sociological world view and one of the most fecund ontologies in the modern media.

Life is not about black and white, and right and wrong, but about understanding and co-operation. That may be a soft, liberal, hippy, traitorous comment that illustrates how much I hate freedom and love Osama, but I promise we'll survive alot longer than if we just bomb the fuck out of anyone who disagrees.

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currently listening to: religious children

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