Salocin

The Public Interest

A recent post in response to an article on the BBC editoral weblog :

The BBC does not choose what is a prominent story, the public do. Yesterday, the story that people were talking about was the McCartney divorce, and many would have tuned into the 10 O' Clock news just to see that story.
 
It would have been arrogant and conceited for the BBC to ignore a story of such public interest, and they were absolutely right to give it a spot on the 10 O' Clock news. Furthermore, I am reassured to see that the BBC question the importance of the news they could broadcast. Clearly what is broadcast has been carefully considered and fully scrutinised.
 
Job well done I say.

In the 1980s, the editor of the Sun (a grubby newspaper the intellectual equivalent of junk food : smart people make it, stupid people consume it, and it's bad for them) was a man called Kelvin MacKenzie. His defence of much of the invasive and hurtful content he chose to publish was that the public is interested, therefore it is in the public interest.

Jackass.

The Public Interest is nothing of the sort. It refers to the wellbeing of the public as a group of people. A picture of Madonna's adopted African child is not in the public interest. It is, however, in the media's interest, because many members of the public will pay good money to get a copy of that in their evening paper.

Idiots.

The fact that the press capitalise on the shallowness of the general public is a long lamented fact, and the economic forces that so many people with those sort of voyeuristic impulses can unleash is what makes most of the "celebrity gossip" papers so nauseating and profitable in equal measure. Newspapers are not the source of the paparrazi, the people that read them are - ultimately newspapers make money from subscription fees and advertising, and advertising demand is a direct function of readership.

In the end, though, it's just democracy at work. People want to read and consume pap, and for that reason, they eat junk food and read crap. Recently, they've started trying to sue junk food companies for making them fat - I have no sympathy with this argument, you asked for it, they provided it, you paid for it and put it in your mouth, in vast quantities. I wonder if, in 10 years, a whole generation of people who have the culture and sophistication of a stone, try - in their self-imposed ignorance - to sue the tabloids for making them stupid. By then, given how things are going, there's bound to be someone dumb enough to try.