I’m sorry, but at what point did private persons gain the right to block the press from reporting the proceedings of our Parliament?!

One of the jobs of the press is to be the conduit between the people, politics, and society; it should be free to report the public activities of our elected representatives, and it should be free to hold them, and powerful persons and organisations to account for their actions. What the lawyers for Trafigura have done here is break that function.

So, let’s help out the good old Guardian by saying, loudly, what they cannot say. Head over to Twitter and retweet the parliamentary question, spread links to the story, and write about it on your own blogs.

I haven’t yet today infected my mind with the endless speculation and incessant ‘man on the street’ views that will no doubt be playing all day on the BBC News Channel, but I imagine a fair number of people will be of the opinion that public figures are fair game, with little right to keep parts of their lives private; it’s certainly a view I’ve heard before, and it seems like it’s the view held by the News of the World journalists and executives involved in this disgrace. I may post on this again later, when I’m able to write more that my own idle speculation.

When I did hear about it, I was initially slightly panicked at the idea of a pandemic of a virus which was, according to the Guardian, most lethal to young and healthy people. Over time though, I came to realise that a more peaceful and pleasant life could be achieved by switching off the BBC News Channel and logging off the BBC News Web-site, and limiting my news intake to the World Service (that last bastion of mostly serious news) and the Guardian Weekly.

It annoys me a lot that the press now feels it necessary to sensationalise ‘boring’ (read ‘worthwhile’) stories, taking their coverage beyond all sense of proportion, and stuff the rest of their coverage with trash stories such as whatever it was with Susan Boyle that was so interesting, and the fact that in winter it snowed. The result is a society which is dreadfully informed about what is really happening in the world, satiated on a fast-food diet of celebrity and reality-television trash, where anything serious has to either be ‘deep-fried’ in reality-television oil, as can be seen with the Jury Team’s hideous and thought-free X-Factor style list for the European elections, or sensationalised, as swine ‘flu, and the economic difficulties have been.

Is there an alternative though? Perhaps if it were possible to force all news outlets to behave like the Guardian Weekly, the World Service and the rather good nightly BBC World News, then the public would be excellently informed on the state of the world, engaged with politics and capable of reaching reasonable conclusions on important matters of the day. Unfortunately, though I’d love to see more of the sort of journalism that is found in these publications and broadcasts, it is a sad fact that that would simply turn a lot of people off the news completely. While it is debatable as to whether no news is better than poorly reported news, I can’t see how alienating millions from the news would be beneficial, whatever benefit they are currently able to draw from it. I can’t see how, so long as inequality in education, social status, and income are as sharp as they are now, we can have a mass media which is free from what is essentially prolefeed.

I’ll try to stop this from becoming even more of a premature ‘grumpy old man rant’, and finish by including a knock-off of the well known Keep Calm and Carry On poster. I think it’s quite fitting advice for whatever the next crisis thrown up might be.

Network Europe

Okay, so most of my choices are from MSM of some form. Network Europe is good at the non political stuff. It covers cultural and lighter stories, though there is a painfully loud tone at the very start of the programme, which makes iPod listening less than perfect.

The Record: Europe

This seems to be the only programme on EU affairs on British television, so it has a guaranteed slot in my viewing habits. Most definitely for proper politics geeks, and unfortunately only available for UK viewers unless you have BBC World News.

Café Babel

A strange quasi-blog/magazine/social network for young Europeans. The RSS feed hasn’t worked for ages, but it’s worth a browse anyway. Has some of the odder European stories.

EurActiv

Without this I’d know nothing of what happens in Brussels. The news section is on my list of must read RSS feeds every day, and the LinksDossiers have become my first port of call for research.

Of course there are lots more that I’d list here if I could be bothered (but I can’t, and I have a kettle to replace), so I’ve updated my blogroll with some of them.

Both sides apparently employed media relations companies in Brussel to fight their cause with the press. I suppose I shouldn’t be surprised. Twenty-four hour news output on all platforms imaginable makes having some form of control on what goes out there important, and professional PR firms certainly aren’t foreign in other areas where you might not expect them to operate.