Clown-World And Other Media Content

I used to write about political and social issues.

Do that now, taking the media as one's lead, and one winds up dealing, mostly, with four kinds of content: clown-world, freak-show, temper-tantrums, and press releases.

Clown-world is a denial of economic or practical rationality, possibly accompanied by a recital of dubious research and a liberal dollop of bullshit. Masks are clown-world. CNN shouting Russia, Russia, Russia for three years. Putin starting a conventional ground war against the Ukraine. The IMF asking the British Chancellor to do what Gordon Brown would have done. Anyone who thinks that the world's economy can live with sub-5% interest rates forever. Anything backed up by unanimity, rather than overwhelming data, is clown-world.

Crucially, Indulging the freak-show is also clown-world behaviour.

The freak-show is any attention-seeking behaviour: a) for causes that have no basis in fact, or that has no economic benefit to the participants or anyone else; or b) reaches the levels expected from a borderline or bi-polar personality disorder.

Tik-Tok is an all-day freak-show. A Trade Union march for higher pay and better conditions is ordinary business. Pulling down statues to protest behaviour that happened two hundred years ago is freak-show, as is ostentatious Veganism. Modest religious practice is normal life. Almost all virtue-signalling is freak-show, if it isn't already clown-world. Extinction Rebellion is pure freak-show, because its cause is... unfounded. Pride Week is pure freak-show. On the other hand, drag acts are not freak-show since the drag artists get paid, and Morris dancing is just weird. Quintin Crisp was an eccentric, because he didn't care if people noticed or not.

Having a protest march to keep open a traditional right-of-way that some landowner wants to close is just fine - as long as they also raise the associated legal applications. Otherwise it's either naive, or a temper-tantrum.

The first huge temper-tantrum was after the Brexit poll, then Trump 2016, followed by the 2019 Brexit debates in the House of Commons, and more recently the EU threw one when Italy electing the "wrong" person, and the markets throw one every time a Chancellor does something they need him not to do. A group of people throws an enormous hissy fit, bad-mouths whatever it was, and tries to sabotage it, while also claiming that the people who made the "wrong decision" are everything from merely ignorant to Putin's stooges to the kind of criminal who has to be put in solitary for their own protection. One group of people exhibit the most open, snarling, vicious, seething contempt for whoever it was made the "wrong decision", and would rather burn down the world than shrug, move on, behave like a pro, and make it work for them.

Then there's the PR masquerading as news (any article based on something a charity says, or that tells you what a Minister is going to say, or in which a company name or senior manager is prominent, or reports an "expert" or a "scientist" pushing a political policy), and on the extreme end of that is outright propaganda, as with Covid. In newspapers and news shows, this covers the arts reviews, the sports reporting, anything on fashion and lifestyle.

As the good Lord Rothermere (or the other one) said: news is anything someone doesn't want you to know. Look at any newspaper in that light and find me one item of news.