Media hype

Sure, sure, it is the classic last resort of the aging armchair critic to bemoan the decline in standards of public discourse and media reporting. And I have entered that septuagenarian closing chapter where I compensate for my lack of a serious immediate priorities (such as actually meeting work deadlines) with these little outbursts of powerless outrage which I attempt to dignify with the tag of a blog. Yet a couple of examples in the past 24 hours have encapsulated the brain-dead trivialisation of the media.

A journalist ambushes Boris Johnson with a photograph of a 4-year-old child lying on an A&E floor with a drip (signifying his serious condition of pneumonia) and a makeshift blanket loosely draped over him. Johnson, to be fair, handles it all most incompetently but he does not say anything terrible. What is there to say in that situation other than to apologise for the poor treatment (which he did) and promising to do everything possible to improve the service for others (which, in a manner of speaking, he did)? I am totally opposed to Johnson and appalled at the crude cynicism and dirty tricks of his campaign. So much so that, if I was registered in a constituency where Labour was the only serious challenger to a sitting Tory MP, I would vote Labour despite massive reservations about its programme. But I cannot see how Johnson’s response to this photograph tells us anything at all about how the Tory policy on the NHS compares with that of its rivals. This was classic door-stepping journalism around the oldest, and most discredited, trick in the book, i.e. using a single case to make a general claim.

Equally bad – arguably worse for its insidious use of media coverage to invent a story out of nothing – were the later headlines that “Labour activist punches minister’s aide”. The incident took place outside a hospital where the Health Secretary, Matt Hancock, was walking from the main entrance to his official car. He is being heavily heckled (but in no way physically threatened) by a small group of protesters including an orange-vested man on a bicycle. After the official car has driven Hancock away, one of his aides walks along the pavement towards the man of the bicycle whose hand is outstretched in protestation. The footage shows clearly that the aide walks (probably by accident but it could just have been deliberate) into the outstretched hand of the orange-vested bicycle man. The aide at least does not do a full Neymar and collapse writhing to the pavement, but his friends in the media do the metaphorical equivalent for him with the subsequent headlines about the “punch”.

I guess that there may have been similar examples of media hype, exaggeration and invention in the past. But these two examples seemed open-and-shut cases of deliberate fabrication of a story, from both sides of the political spectrum. Pathetic.