Tis very easy to write about bad things, far easier anyway than to write something good! Recently I have found all the bad things in the world to comment on, the British attraction to copious amounts of alcohol, the ability of the British public to successfully show tourists how to completely blanket a country in garbage and understandably how my house was burgled by a scruffy midget with trainers on!
Newspapers the world over relish in negative side of life! Take for example the recent oil hikes:
"rising prices shock the world", "recession imminent as oil prices rocket", stagnation the next step", etc.
Then, the situation rapidly changed and oil prices unexpectedly dropped within a week!
"plummeting oil prices start price wars at the pumps", oil companies suffer as prices fall through the roof", shock hits as oil prices drops create havoc on the trading floor (as if anybody really cared), etc.
It is rare to see "good news" liberally pasted on a front page of a newspaper! Singapore once issued news in this manner. I remember picking up a newspaper a few years ago, the Straits Times, the largest daily of Singapore and the headlines read "train driver saves the day"! If this headline had been say in the UK Times newspaper it may have read "havoc created as train brakes fail". If it had been in say the daily Mirror it might have read "Train Driver faces sack after train runs amock through crowded station" and some other lesser rag like perhaps the Sun may have created some news by pulling apart the drivers family "killer drivers mother is a slag". The whole article in the Straits Times played up the heroic efforts of the driver to produce a hero; in Britain we want scapegoats, fools and victims and if they are not readily available we will create them!
And I have fallen victim to that style of cheap journalism myself! I must stop, I need to write about things that are interesting and in a very positive light, to find the goodness in the subject matter and not the gory or the depressed side of it all!
And for starters I must write about the wonderful park that the local council have built on the Links in Musselburgh, East Lothian! It is wonderful and classy and far exceeds those playgrounds that I used to play on, those with solid concrete at the bottom so that should one fall off the swing the hospital would be the next step! This playground is styled around a pirate ship, it has many different things to do and children can be kept occupied all day long!
I could have said "It is a crying shame that it continually rains every day, that the council do not see fit to finish it off properly, that adults have generally taken over the park so that the children have to sit and cry and that the park is used as a drunken retreat after the pubs have closed by drug-doped louts and girls with high squeaky voices", but I will resist the urge to find the negative. It is a wonderful park and already my son has had some cast-in-stone fun, although it did take me two days to get the second-hand chewing gum off his trouser legs!
Hi Ieuan, Thank you for this article. It is so true. The media focuses on the negative and then are aghast as to why bad things happen. Think it could be self perpetuating? I have heard it said that if a newspaper printed only good news that it would go out of print. Sad, but it says something about human nature perhaps. By the way, did the council there ever do anything about the rain?
Thanks for the comment Mark! I think this might have been the second comment I have had in the four years I have been on Search Warp! But yes, recently the council did manage to do something about the rain but unfortunately a half-naked Scottish politician from the SNP bearing a caber 'thunked' the switch the wrong way and now its thundering cats and dogs again!
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