Be careful what you wish for

Ooohh, the excitement! We're all a-twitter.

The News of The World is gone, and - apart from a couple of self-regarding journalists - we all think thats abso-fucking-lutely marvelous.

Everyone on twitter thinks that they did it. The morons who repeatedly tweeted companies who have never advertised in the NOTW, ordering them not to .. err .. advertise in the NOTW.

Even the insipid bints on Mumsnet have stopped comparing choccy biccies for long enough to claim responsibility.

We're pleased to see the giants toppled, we tell ourselves. The little people overwhelming the all-powerful, tweeting them to death.  But they're not naturally powerful; we made the media powerful. We lapped up their stories of indiscretions, paid good money for them to go through our bins.

And we have the power to bring them down again; and we're exercising it.

The rumours swirl and grow: the Sun's next, the Sunday Times is on its way out; and that Daily Mail, they won't escape for long. Drunk with power, the Twitter mob staggers around, smashing everything it sees.

But just hang on a minute. Whoah! If we get rid of all these terrible papers, and - for good measure - get rid of Rupert's awful Sky to punish him a bit more, then what we be left with?

A Britain where there's one newspaper - The Guardian - and one live news channel - The BBC.

Is that what you want?

Didn't think so.


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6 comments:

Anonymous said...

who wants (that which we never really had) news?! we want (your) blogs, don't we?

Tattyfalarr said...

Urrrmmm....If all the newspapers crash and burn what will the bloggers talk about ?

Aetius said...

I have to agree. Bad as Murdoch is, it could be a lot worse. The best we can hope for is Murdoch and News International still in business, but somewhat weakened, so that prime ministers don't run their policies on Europe past NI and prospective prime ministers don't go running to them to beg for support.

Captain Ranty said...

Am I alone in knowing that my life will continue even if all newspapers die and all television stations close down?

I mean fuck me, it's not as if each and every one of them isn't driven by one agenda or another, is it?

Just how badly do you need to be told what to think?

CR.

Angry Exile said...

Actually there probably are quite a few who'd wish for a Britain in which the media consisted of just the Beeb and The Graun. Many of the people at the Beeb and The Graun for starters.

Cap'n, get your point but credit where it's due, they are pretty good at getting information. Not always information we should give a shit about and not as good as they once were, true. There's too much copy and paste recycling of government and company PRs, and as you said too much agenda pushing. But on the other hand how easy is it for an individual to find out half of what's in their morning paper or RSS reader for themselves each and every day? Really the big problem is their bias and the easiest way round that is to read two opposing papers. Smaller market here of course, so it means The Age and The Australian. Both are biased in opposite directions and on something contentious I wholly trust neither and assume the truth lies somewhere in between.

JuliaM said...

"Urrrmmm....If all the newspapers crash and burn what will the bloggers talk about ?"

Other bloggers, of course!