Have the Media Lost All Sense of News Values?

Given all that there is going on in the world at the moment, it is astonishing and depressing that the British media — including the BBC — have gone totally over the top on the story of Gordon Brown’s handwritten note to Jacqui Janes, the mother of one of Britain’s latest Afghanistan casualties. Let us remind ourselves that the reason this is ‘a story’ is because the Sun newspaper, that most reptilian of organs, has tried to smear Mr Brown by concentrating on his bad handwriting, spelling mistakes etc, while trying to spin that the Prime Minister has insulted the bereaved parent, though I have no doubt that he (having lost one child himself) was being sincere. The Sun, of course, recently announced that it was switching from supporting Labour to the Conservative in its editorial policy, but this whole episode is a shoddy way to underline that point. What is even more disgraceful, though, is that the BBC, in particular, should allow its agenda to be set by a highly partisan piece in the Sun, therefore itself putting Gordon Brown in the pillory. There have been repeated, extended TV news items on the story over the past day or so. Rightly, this evening, the BBC report did acknowledged that the Corporation had received an unprecendented number of emails protesting that the Prime Minister was being treated unfairly on this issue. It would have been interesting for viewers also to have been told how many emails arrived saying that the BBC seemed to have lost its sense of news values, along with most of the rest of the British media.