On the pornography of news:
News is increasingly characterised as entertainment, but this only goes half-way. News is essentially a pornographic enterprise – and a dark one at that – repackaging human misery and destruction in easy to assimilate text and pictures – the content of which becomes swiftly meaningless to the audience, to be replaced by image and spectacle of collapse, catastrophe and mayhem. When did you last gasp at the news? Was it when you heard about an international summit limiting arms? Or was it when you saw images of earthquake damage, diseased people or identikit pictures of recently deceased people. And why the fasination with murder? More people die of car accidents and failures in the health service every day than are murdered in a year. The news packages up killings, and sells them to our worst instincts. News is rape trials and police plodding through fields looking for corpses – it is sex scandals and disgrace. It is all stories, and it’s a strange death instinct in all of us that gets off on it.