It’s times like these, as the popular beat combo outfit Foo Fighters front man David ‘Dave’ Grohl (takes deep breath) might have put it, when I am happy to have a subscription to Flight Radar 24. A fire at Heathrow Airport has caused what is technically known as a “power outage”, meaning that nothing can land or take off from the biggest airport in Europe and the fourth biggest in the entire world. I can watch all the diversions in real time. ‘AIRPORT CHAOS!’ screams The Sun. ‘Dream holidays ruined & traffic carnage as blaze cancels ALL Heathrow flights‘. No question it is, as The Sun might stay, A BIG STORY! but yet another example of media priorities.
‘TRAVEL DISRUPTION!’ and ‘AIRPORT CHAOS!’ affect a specific group of people which, in general terms, is the affluent middle classes and business people. It’s bloody awful for those involved, but really, nobody died. Yes, some people will have ‘dream holidays ruined’ and I am not so heartless that I don’t have any sympathy for them. Yet sometimes I wonder just how much empathy and understanding the modern day media has for everybody else.
I am not over-critical of media priorities on a day like today but I wonder where these busy journalists are when far worse things happen to others. For example – and this is always an example I tend to drag up – I’ve been volunteering at a food bank for over two and a half years and the world I see is far more grim than the ‘AIRPORT CHAOS!’ at Heathrow today. Victims of abuse, desperate refugees, young girls with children and so on, he said lazily; people who have nothing to eat and sometimes nowhere to live. They are nowhere on the front pages of the gutter press and the rest of the mass media.
The BBC talks to – and I am not making this up – telly weatherman Simon King whose mum has been on holiday in Jamaica. Her return flight got halfway across the Atlantic whereupon the captain came on the PA system and informed devastated passengers that due to Heathrow being shut, and no other airport being able to take them, they were having to return to Montego Bay. Now that is a pain in arse, bloody inconvenient but it isn’t exactly life-changing. It’s not waking up in the morning in poverty and often in squalor, is it?
We know this story will run and run because the media will explore different angles, perhaps even human stories of delayed reunions and ‘ruined holidays’. I honestly do get that. It’s just a shame when the little things in life, like not being able to eat actual food and having to reply on the kindness of others doesn’t just get relegated to a footnote: the story is rarely there at all. See also sick patients in crowded hospital corridors and all the other trivia that isn’t deemed important enough for the media to bother to tell us about. But ‘AIRPORT CHAOS!’ We all need to know that.
Obviously, I hope those inconvenienced by the Heathrow fire get to their destinations sooner rather than later and, believe it or not despite the overall tone of this blog, I do feel for them a bit and it is ‘BREAKING NEWS!’ Our media is very much the middle classes reporting on the middle classes and no one else exists.
The Great British Public does actually care about people other than those inconvenienced by ‘AIRPORT CHAOS!’ because otherwise the hungry people coming to our food bank would simply starve to death. I’d say this was somewhat more important than the temporary closure of an airport, but what do I know?
