Enemies of Reason Poundshop potshots at the media moral maze.

There was weather!!!

Here we go, then. Roll up for the first of this year's non-story pieces of bullshit that taint journalism with the whiff of desperation it doesn't really need. Snow is forecast for today and tomorrow. (Not just in Scotland or the North of England, where it doesn't count, but in places like Surrey and London, where real people live).

Already I can sense news editors up and down the country getting excited. "There's going to be snow! In winter! In a temperate marine climate! Bloody hell, whatever next? Quick, get me pictures of snow. And people. And see if motorists had some trouble getting from one place to another because of the weather, we've never covered that angle to the story before. And, er, some kids tobogganing down a hill. And someone making a snowman. Yes, it'll be great! No-one's ever seen this before! What a fresh take on the news! This'll be the one that gets us the Pulitzer!"

You load of fucking washed-up braindead numpties. Jesus wept, is this really what we've got to put up with for the rest of our lives? Yes, it's going to snow. I don't need a cunting newspaper, website or television station to tell me that once it's happened; I'll be able to see it out of my fucking window, using my eyes. Yes, people talk about the weather, because that's what people do - it's called 'smalltalk' for a fucking reason, though; is it really, really, in their heart of hearts, what people expect their news media to slavishly devote all of their resources to all the bloody time? Is it? Really? Is that how low we've sunk as news consumers, that we couldn't care less about real things and important stuff, but we're suckers for a bit of snow?

Of course it isn't just snow, is it. Every summer, newspapers, websites and TV get amazed by the fact that it's a little bit warmer than winter in summer. Whoop de doo! Sun in "is hot" shocker. But you'd think it was unprecedented for things to warm up in June, July and August, given the endless yards of coverage it gets. Picture of some dozy tart in a bikini in Bournemouth. "These beauties cooled off in the sea de blah de blah de blah de fucking blah where did my career go? I wanted to break exclusives and challenge the establishment. Now I'm just writing picture captions about weather. Pass the fucking Prozac overdose..." Giant phallic thermometer showing temperature in Fahrenheit (because that sounds like a bigger number). Picture of cartoon sun, wearing sunglasses or sunhat. All that fucking dreadful schtick you get every bloody time. No invention, no creativity. Just the same shit, in a slightly different order.

It makes me sick for so many reasons. It's not journalism; it's just utter froth with no news merit to it whatsoever. There was weather. Yes there was! There was also day and night, but we didn't decide to do a full-scale five-page report into why it suddenly got dark in the evening and then brightened up at about dawn time, did we? The tide went out and came back in again. So what? So fucking what? So why the fuck do we do it?

What's even more depressing is that the same papers who rush out to capture stories about the weather, when it happens, which it generally does every day, are the same ones whose columnists and leaders are more than happy to rubbish climate change. They go a bit like this: "Yes, we've run 10 billion stories this year about boiling hot summers, floods and snow, but my ice cubes don't melt in my gin and tonic, ergo nothing's wrong whatsoever and who cares if the polar bears drown? I just want to carry on my god-given right to burn a few fossil fuels because tax is theft and besides, I quite like warm summers, I am wilfully ignorant of the fact that climate change could in fact make Britain colder but that's the sort of pig-shit ignorant cunt I am, and that's why I get paid thousands of pounds a year to talk utter bollocks in tabloid opinion columns. Also, it'll only be the blacks in Africa who are going to suffer, so never mind! It's all the fault of lentil-munching socialists and political correctness gone mad, there's nothing wrong with the climate, the fact that there is almost total unanimity of scientific opinion means nothing to me because there was one bloke on Channel 4 once who said something against it, and I believe him instead of everyone else. Besides, even if the world is getting warmer, which I doubt, we're powerless to do anything about it, it's not down to us, it's sun spots or something, I read some shit once in the Daily Mail, didn't get past the first paragraph but it went along with my five-year-old opinions on things and reassured me that everything was right and proper and would indeed be better if we all went back to the 1950s, so essentially there you are. Will this do?"

It just shows the very worst of news: isolating individual events and failing to see a pattern, or failing to try and describe anything that lasts for more than five minutes, for fear that the readers might not understand it. Trends are ignored; insignificant events are covered in microscopic detail. Really, there's the opportunity with electronic archives to link together news weather stories from right across the country and going back a few years, to show what kind of effect (if any, and sometimes weather is just weather) climate change might be having on weather patterns in this country, and look elsewhere at what's going on. That would be fascinating. That would be news used in an intelligent way, and it would be journalism you can actually use and explore.

So that's why our news media couldn't give a shit. Let's stick with the 'it snowed! lol" in winter. And "it was sunny! lol" in summer. Much easier to remember. Much easier to do. So less taxing on the brain.

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