Contemptable Verbiage is a term my older brother Peter used to use, I have no idea where he got it..
I am pretty sure it’s now just a circus, the news I mean, the mainstream, every-day, vanilla, standard news. The problem with it is its lack of purpose and relevance, who it’s speaking to, who it’s speaking for, and, who is speaking?
It’s 2022, the world cup is on in Qatar and England have just played France, and lost, boo (who cares, English people?). That is a big news item, everyone, even the non-English will be discussing this at length, and I might even discuss it with co-workers myself, though I know so little about current football I don’t really belong in the conversation. Strewn up and down the country there will be pubs with loud conversations about what went wrong, participated in by three-pint football experts that could, by their own estimations, have done a much better job of being the England Manager than that Southgate fella who is the current incumbent of the role. This always amuses me, that it is so easy for the layman to criticise, that the advice, or proclamation, so often follows the same theme – “if it were me, I would have played X and not Y”, as if their many years of watching football qualifies them to be so confident.
Remember the joke about the difference between an astronaut and the England football Manager? Not everyone thinks they could be an astronaut (lol).
The score is not the point, not for me anyways, my gripe (as usual I have one), is that what we loosely describe in this country as our TV news service (some of it most definitely state sponsored), seems not to realise that if a person was in the least bit interested in the footie, then they would have watched it in the first place. They would not require it to be a news item, other than maybe one single sentence and move on. So one wonders what the point of the focus on the football is, and whom this news is for? It is not for me because I watched the match, it’s not for my father who is in no way interested, so who? I watch the news, like most folks, to be informed of things that I do not know, that may be important to me, and may cause me to make better, or at least different, decisions than I would have should I not have watched it. The same condition applies when I read a newspaper in print or online, or listen to a podcast. It is impossible for me to be informed of what I already know. The news might as well be that water is wet, the sky is blue, and things fall when they are dropped – it has become that pointless and irrelevant.
I’ll give you another example; the local news here in North Wales concludes its daily weather report with a rundown of what the weather has been featuring today in North Wales. Now if I live in North Wales, and I work in North Wales, and I have been in North Wales all day, it’s a fair assumption that I will have encountered todays weather, whether outside, or through the window of the office, my car, or my home. It seems like an awful waste of TV time to tell me, as well as the rest of the residents of North Wales who may pick up this broadcast (because North Wales is where this North Wales news is broadcast), what I/we already know of the North Wales weather. Now I will grant you that this information may be of some use to someone, but that’s a stretch. What is of use is to tell me, and those others aforementioned, what the current speculation for the ongoing weather may be, rather than showing me a photograph taken by Maud from Mold that illustrates how sunny it has been there today.
Let’s move to something much worse, a trick, a hoodwink, a piece of bullshit one might call it – the outlier being used as the focal point of the piece, the sensationalising of a single measure, regardless of the data set it is within. It is merely presented in suggestion by our weatherperson, but it is motivated nonetheless by a contrived will to present this cold snap as a much colder snap. The problem is that the comparison has no real strength if it is between the temperature of now and the temperature of another measure within the last few cold seasons, it doesn’t have the same impact as the measure of a single temperature compared to nothing at all, just standing alone and maybe making people think that it means something sinister. On the 12th December the evening news reported the quite low temperature achieved at Braemar in Scotland of -16C as something special, but used it to represent how cold the UK had become, failing to contextualise this fact by failing to show the temperatures across the UK for comparison. A roving reporter standing in front of a railway station reported also that this was the coldest the area she was in had been in 10 years, as if that revelation was in the same league as the Summer news of record temperatures being breached (which was a point of concern).
Anyone who has studied any subject where statistics are used will be aware of the line-of-best-fit, the mean (Average), the mode (Most frequently occurring result), the range (difference between the highest and lowest), and the importance of ignoring the outlier/s (the least frequently occurring point/s), why this is important to know is so that mistakes are not made in forming theories based on patterns or measures, and that it is equally important to not deliberately and knowingly give a false impression of what the statistics indicate; Ben Goldacre wrote an entire book on this subject called Bad Science. If we take the line of best fit and look at the measured single values that lay farthest from it, then Braemar is that point. If we look at what the measure means, we have to form a pattern of stats that will tell us something about Braemar that would indicate why it is an outlier? That would be the fact that it is an often-cold place, seeing the 3rd lowest temperatures in the UK consistently, having recorded a low of 27.7 in 1982, with an average temperature per annum of only 6.8C, and having a whopping 152 days of rainfall. This makes Braemar a rather miserable place, but that hardly matters as it has such a low population that we could assume that they must be choosing to live there, so no biggy as it effects those people who must be ready and willing to endure it. Thus, this temperature is in truth neither surprising, nor useful. Braemar is a geological anomaly, not indicative of the norm in the UK, so to pick it is not accidental, and I think it may be important to remember that and to ask why it was picked.
What might have been useful would have been to tell us something real, like it is damned cold currently in most UK places, and that people need to stay warm to stay healthy. Maybe a good news piece would have been to expose UK building regulations (a government driven set of laws that favours certain building practices and building firms and has little to do with quality) for keep the homes we live in much colder than they should be by forcing us into badly insulated historic and newly produced dwellings, rather than the Scandinavian style abodes that lose heat over time at a factor of 1:3 degrees C in comparison. Maybe it might have been of public service benefit to ask people to go see their elderly, managing on-benefits, disabled, or maybe just lonely, neighbours to see if they had everything they might need, or might not be able to get under these conditions. I just don’t see the utility of always focussing on the worst it is, speculating on the worst it could be, or trying to scare people into making particular decisions based on those aspects of something that we Brits cope with on a yearly basis. I wonder if this even works, never mind it’s motivation, and if it does then why does it? Does the fear of an uncertain future continue to provide a usefulness to the establishment? I personally would argue that our news service is often the servant of the zeitgeist and not the servant of the populous.
Every few years we have harsh weather in the UK, and every few years we panic because the TV tells us how bad it might possibly become, and even though it rarely lives up to the hype they give it, it becomes all we seem to talk about. Someday global warming and the harm we have done to the planet will truly rear up and punish us, and by then it will be far too late to do anything about it, in the meantime it would be pretty decent of the controllers of the means of information to let us learn how to know when to be truly scared into social change, rather than being within fear on a daily basis to the point where we become desensitised to it and sit idly as those things worth worrying about get lost in the rubble of popular news stories.
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