Further to this (very good) post by ‘Living with rats‘ (name explained here)
“Never trust public servants, the community leader said. ‘They always dump you. They never keep their promises. They’ll always let you down.”
…. here’s rent-a-rant Charlie Brooker on good form:
But if the media’s rotten and the government’s rotten and the police are rotten and the city’s rotten and the church is rotten – if life as we know it really is fundamentally rotten – what the hell is there left to believe in? Alton Towers? Greggs the bakers? The WI?
One of Brooker’s points is the assymetrical way that pressure is brought to bear on objects that have lost the public’s trust. Here his is writing about the Daily Express’ utterly disgusting treatment of Dunblaine survivors:
As I’m sure you recall, there was an immediate outcry, which was covered at length in all the papers. You remember their outraged front pages, right? All their cries of SICK and FOUL and VILE in huge black text? Remember that? No? Of course you don’t. Because the papers largely kept mum about the whole thing. Instead, the outrage blew up online. Bloggers kicked up a stink; 11,000 people signed a petition and delivered it to the PCC. The paper printed a mealy-mouthed apology that apologised for the general tenor of the article, while whining that they hadn’t printed anything that wasn’t publicly accessible online. All it had done was gather it up and disseminate it in the most humiliating and revolting way possible. Last Monday’s PCC ruling got next to zero coverage.
The only slightly bright light here is that 11,000 people signed a petition that was promoted by bloggers. Perhaps even newspaper proprietors are becoming accountable in some way?
