THE snow. Who’d have thought it?
Well everyone who’d looked at any sort of official forecast.
After the Petrol Crisis of 2012, where there was no shortage of petrol, we’ve now had the Surprise Snows at Easter where everyone was told there would be snow, but didn’t believe it.
There appears to be a widening gap between what people are told and what people choose to believe.
A healthy distrust of authority has always been part of the British mindset.
But it appears now that we seem determined to ignore official advice in its entirety.
Whether this is a good thing remains to be seen – but it’s the why which intrigues me.
Has the spin of the main political parties rendered people unable to trust anything?
I think the media may be at fault but not your good old Examiner.
May I be the first to point the finger at the rolling news TV channels such as Sky News and BBC News.
These channels have to fill 24 hours a day.
BBC1 has to do this, presumably on a budget which dwarfs the BBC News channel, and still uses repeats and shovels in a load of old filler.
So we’ve got a channel which to fill space includes extended (and often breathy at-the-scene) reports on the most minor of stories.
You have hours of rolling coverage of something that may be the sixth item on the news – and get three minutes at six o’clock.
The interesting (or often not so) has become important and people are receiving mixed messages about what they should care about.
The TV news media, in its quest to fill space, has created a situation where nothing is important anymore because everything is as important as everything else.
Now let’s cut to a man who's been stood in front of a building for eight hours ...
