Newspaper Review

by Rick Johansen

The red top newspapers have really got to grips with the important news in today’s editions. The Sun leads with ‘The Reem Ticket’ a headline I am afraid I don’t really understand, but it appears to be connected with two people called Towie Joey and Towie Amy.

I had to look up what Towie meant and I am sorry I had to waste 30 seconds of my life finding out, but it turns out that Amy wants a “blitz on benefit scroungers”. As anyone who reads the British tabloid press knows, a “benefit scrounger” is anyone who claims benefits, or rather “handouts” as they like to refer to them. There is no distinction between the school leaver who can’t find work or someone who is terminally ill: just make sure benefit claimants are stigmatised.

I did not read beyond the front page so I don’t know if Amy knows that David Cameron – or Dave, as Britain’s worst newspaper likes to call him – leads a government that, in reality, has all but given up on benefit fraud, preferring informal interviews with potential fraudsters to criminal investigations, but let’s not get the facts get in the way of a bizarre ‘political’ story. Like the Tories, the Sun talks tough on benefit fraud, but doesn’t ask the question as to why Cameron no longer regards it as important. Funny that.

The Mirror does not waste its time with articles about Towie ‘stars’, instead focusing more on whether Bill and Kate Windsor will have a girl or a boy. In fact, in the on line edition, readers get a golden opportunity to predict what sex the next royal benefit claimant – whoops! I mean another heir to the throne! – will be. This is causing me great difficulty. I have managed to narrow it down to two options: it will either be a boy or a girl. I cannot begin to tell you how underwhelmed I am with this “news”. Don’t get me wrong: I have nothing against Bill and Kate, apart from the amount of money we pay to keep them in a life of luxury whilst hundreds of thousands of their subjects are relying on food banks. Oh, and campaigning for wild animals to be protected after returning from a holiday (a holiday from what, exactly?) where the royals go out shooting them.

Meanwhile, the Mail bemoans the fact that the government has only employed 300 staff to advise the two million retirees on what to do with their pension pots. By an incredible coincidence, the very same newspaper has been doing the government’s bidding for the enormous cuts that have been made in the very departments which are responsible for tax and pensions. The very “pen-pushing bureaucrats” and “bean counters” are in fact those who deliver the creaking systems best they can, with ever diminishing resources. The Mail has been kicking at an open door, imploring Cameron to “cut waste” on the public sector frontline for five years now, but as soon as its ageing readership starts getting affected, with enormous chutzpah, it campaigns, effectively, for increases in staffing.

So just another day of misinformation, disinformation and trivia in today’s papers. Is it any wonder less of us are buying them?

Yours Sincerely, a soggy liberal Guardian reader.

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