Unbelievable News

One of the problems with newspapers these days is that you don't actually get news in a lot of them. What you get instead is opinion. While I'm not opposed to well-argued analysis in the place of drab facts it would be nice if the analysis were actually based on some facts. Very often the paper has a well-established editorial position and then conveniently slants the story to fit it, by playing down or omitting inconvenient elements and bolstering their viewpoint with selective "facts". Obviously a lot of this is political but here's a nice example of how newspapers in the UK pander to lowest-common-denominator thinking and pre-convceived notions of the public good.

The story shown here from the Daily Mail in the UK has the headline "Family's anger after hit-and-run driver is jailed for just 30 months after killing SECOND pedestrian." Sounds pretty straightforward, right? A 61 year-old bloke kills a mother of two by running her over and fails to stop - let's throw away the key! However if you read on you'll discover that the woman was lying in the road at the time, having spent the day drinking with her family.

Now I don't know about you but I tend to regard lying in the road as inviting death. Her (obviously) similarly moronic mother commented "People say Val was in a drunken stupor but she might have been in the road looking for an earring." I'm sorry, did I understand correctly? She was lying in the road looking for an earring? Fucking hell! Where do they find these idiots?

Also turns out the previous "killing" for which this old bloke was responsible was some 70 year-old deaf man who walked out in front of his car when he was driving too fast. Maybe a speeding ticket would have been more appropriate, especially when the boxer, Nasim Hameed, only did 15 days in jail for overtaking at 90mph, showing off in his new Mercedes, hitting a car head-on and crippling the driver for life.

So he runs over a drunken bitch, dressed in black, lying in a dark street. He's guilty of failing to stop, but at what point is the dozy cow herself expected to shoulder the blame for being drunk and lying in the road? (Don't give me the "looking for earrings" bollocks - getting run over while lying in the street searching for an earring would only render her death Darwin-Award-Worthy, as opposed to just dumb.) Then her charming family proceeds to break into and smash up his house. I think we can readily characterize them as traditional English shell-suit scum. This poor cunt gets 30 months in prison and the police think justice is served.

My point is that instead of the original headline you could just as easily have read "Pensioner forced from his home by thugs after accidentally running over drunk in the street." That puts a somewhat different spin on it, doesn't it? Given the positions taken by the Daily Mail on law and order issues I'm not sure how they decided who was the "bad guy" in this story. It certainly doesn't seem to have been on the basis of the facts. So be careful out there, and watch out for drunks in the street searching for jewelry.


Copyright © 2008 Edward Bison