the brilliantly leaping gazelle

It’s baffling, it really is, the way in which the press seem to be inordinately preoccupied with an utterly trivial aspect of the general election, at the expense of doing what the press is supposed to do. I mentioned this yesterday, in relation to the betting nonsense that has so gripped the press as compared to absence of any discussion of the national debt. 

I mean, yes sure, there may well have been the odd mention of it here and there over the years, but there hasn’t, to my recollection at least been the same outrage, the same demands for drastic improvements or the setting up of a public inquiry similar to that which emerged after the Post Office Horizon scandal.

That scandal had the massively good fortune to be so complicated as to provide the media with an excuse not to have reported on it for years, but not so complicated however that when the story finally broke, it could easily explained.

That is, after all, what the press is meant to do, ferret away at a story, reveal the truth and present it in a readily comprehensible way? That’s what Private Eye did for years. 

They’d run a story every few issues about either the latest attempt by Post Office executives to cover it up, to insist that the Horizon software was totally reliable and so it must’ve been the sub-postoffice managers hat were responsible for the missing monies. Or else to highlight he fact that Post Office could launch its own investigations and despite knowing full well that the Horizon system was at fault, prosecute sub-postoffice managers.

Now we know otherwise. Now we know that it represents the biggest single series of wrongful convictions in British legal history. Now the press can do can do a full Fred Goodwin on Paula Vennells, the boss of the Post Office during part of this whole sorry affair, and can therefore be the scapegoat upon which the public’s righteous anger can incorrectly directed.

Like ex -Sir Fred, she has been stripped of her gong and no longer has her C.B.E to keep her company, but much  more importantly, her successor and predecessors, some of whom have arguably more culpabity than her, have somehow remained largely out of the spotlight.

Like Adam Crozier, her immediate predecessor from 2003 -2010. During that time, the Post Office secured more than 400 convictions in England and Wales using what they knew to be flawed evidence. Despite this, and despite having trousered over £9.7m in pay and bonuses, there haven’t been the same calls for him to return any of it, like their have been for her.

But don’t blame it on the privatisation of the Post Office that allowed this happen or on the ‘light-touch’ regulation of the financial sector that facilitated the Northern Rock disaster. Blame Paula, blame Fred, blame it the boogie if it makes you happy, because the system works perfectly and the last thing anyone needs are too many people questioning in whose interest does the system actually work. 

And can a system that pays £120 millions a day on the interest of a national debt of nearly £2,660 billions really be said to be working? 

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As any readers of this blog will no doubt be aware, I am a deeply cynical person and getting mores all the time. In fact I don’t think that I’ve ever met a more cynical person than me. Although newspaper editors are currently having a good go.

Witness the ongoing media obsession with finding Jay Slater. I must confess to not being as especially interested in him so much as I am with why the media wants to tell us about him, how it was his first time abroad, when and where he went missing, the search…

Has everybody forgotten what happened mere days ago with Michael Mosley? In essentially the same circumstances? With probably the same outcome. 

To me, the main reason for their detailed coverage, however much they might bang on about bringing it to the publics attention, is so that when the inevitable bad news is finally revealed, they can then feed off the attention they created and sell more papers.

Is no-one else thinking about ‘Ace in the hole’? Another Billy Wilder classic from 1951 starring Kirk Douglas which has that as its central premise?

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