All the news that's unfit to print

Yet another tea-time ruined by the crime-and-violence brigade who now run the early evening telly news programmes, terrifying little old ladies and their cats.  I don't think we really wanted to know about the Russian skinheads who go round decapitating people because they have darker skins, or about yet another baby murdered by incompetent parents (social services's fault, of course), but these people have got the visuals so they simply have to share them with us.

I cannot begin to tell you how deep is my contempt for these very very silly telly people and the little dream-world of sensational images that they inhabit.  The problem with pictures is that they are so easily manipulated.  There is no argument with a picture.  There is no way to tell whether a picture is true or a shocking lie.  The impact of a shocking picture in a news programme has less to do with the importance of the image than with the selection process which chose it, and it alone, to be a news item.  And it is the selection process we should consider when we watch the news on the telly, not the images that some overpaid clown has chosen to show us in return for our paying his or her fat salary.

I'll cut the reasoning process short to save time and electrons, but just listen to what passes for the English employed by the perpetrators of early evening news programmes (their words, not mine.)

They think that because someone has taken part in a PROtest, that therefore that someone must be a PRO-testor.  Or because someone has delivered EXports to another country, he (or she) must therefore be an EX-porter. These mis-stressings are not part of a universal development of a language: they are the tell-tale sign of a coterie that has lost all contact with the real world outside.

The debased English that these Cocos use is a private language, an argot, that might be perfectly suited to an environment in which fine distinctions of meaning are not pertinent, such as burglary, rapine, or the under-fives playground.  It is a simplistic language consisting of about 97 words, including some that begin with the letter "haitch", which adhere one to another by a process of fusion, so that the phrase "my wife and I" can serve either as subject or object.  What you might discern, if you were to observe these Cocos and Harlequins going about their private lives, is that their knuckles have a tendency to brush the ground.

And they are running our national broadcasting services.

It makes me bloody weep.