I've always been suspicious of the process of daily news and avoided consuming it. News doesn't happen on a daily basis, or on the schedule of 7,8,1 and 6 o'clock news programmes. Morning and evening papers are there to sell different things aren't they? Daily or continual news reporting is so wonderfully easy to twist and fool. There was a great part in the documentary The control room where they speculated about why the US might have murdered the Al Jazeera reporter on the roof of a hotel in Baghdad. The US media attache Josh Rushing (one of the most sympathetic people in the film) pointed out that if they wanted to stop broadcast they could simply jam the signal. No fuss about it. The Samir Khader of Al Jazeera pointed out that the two other arab media sources broadcasting to the general world in Baghdad were also attacked (with casualties) - the fact that al arabiya was attacked wasn't even mentioned in Ireland at the time - the US murder of a Palestinian journalist did get mentioned. He then replayed the arrival of US tanks in the centre of the city. There was supposedly a joyous crowd there. When you look at it again there is a suspiciously homogenous crowd of boys and young men that arrive with the tanks. Nobody joins them. He then pointed out that the young men did not speak like Iraqis, were foreign. And nobody broadcasting in town on that day could tell that. By shutting down the arab media, even for a single day, the army's orchestrated media propaganda did its magic. For all we know everybody in all the buildings around may have wanted to join the 'celebrations' at the statue of Saddam but a rational fear of tanks and soldiers kept them away. But I do believe we were successfully lied to. The fact that anyone knows that now is irrelevant - the result has already happened. Another side of this is that I never really believe the baby killing stories that almost inevitably arise from a war - whether this be Cromwell in Ireland, the Boers, or Iraq's invasion of Kuwait. They take days to disseminate and years to be disproved. Not that it matters the feelings they create never go away. I still felt sick when I arrived in London and saw Oliver Cromwell's statute outside the houses of parliament. Mind you he's not that great a role model for republicans - he never could get himself elected no matter how often he purged parliament and the voting register.
Continuous news, rolling news sources like Sky News just love a big juicy pageant like the pope's death. I mean, don't get me wrong, he was interesting and did wonderful things for the end of the repressive system in Eastern Europe and soviet Asia (unlike the US Republican party which did nothing for those people but likes to, as Doonesbury said at the time, 'claim it' as their victory), relations with islam and the arab world, and went some way to making amends for the appalling treatment of jews by catholics. Not that that helped relations with extremist zionism of course as on the ground in Israel/Palestine the catholic church refused to be part of the programme of taking land from arabs, even when it was offered for christian churches. Anyway, they're still broadcasting it, and he's still dead. That's it. No news yet - just continuous news.
And the reason I'm less of a John is that I managed to not buy, and not miss, Sunday newspapers this week. I tend to buy The Sunday Times as it has Irish news in it but isn't as vacuous as most Irish newspapers (the Business Post being the honourable exception - the Sunday Independent being the hilarious nadir of pretend serious journalism). Last week I finally got sick of how much of it, that I read at least, was written by A.A. Gill, that guy Clarkson (he's supposed to only write about cars isn't he?), and Brian Appleyard. All people who have gone down the Julie Burchill route - write, but never read. So, out it goes from my weekly spending and nothing will replace it.
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