Read all about sh*t

3 September 2008.

Will people finally heed my advice and stop buying newspapers? The fact that the status quo at Newcastle United has been maintained with the board repeating their desire for progress with Kevin Keegan at the helm proves the saga of the last 24 hours is simply not a story to report on.

It has had top billing across all media, however, which will probably now lead to Kevin Keegan’s position becoming untenable. Meanwhile, an eyelid was barely batted at Alan Curbishley’s actual departure for the same reasons blamed on the Messiah’s alleged exodus.

Of course look back almost exactly one year and the treatment given, which is as about as fair as that experienced by Asian police officers, mirrors that exacted upon Martin Jol just a few games into the 2006/7 season. As with Martin Jol, the fans have enjoyed the news of the prospective departure of Kevin Keegan about as much as inserting their faces into a bowl overflowing with Hepatitis C-filled hypodermic needles.

This talking up of rifts in the media almost inevitably becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy, meaning good people are disposed of quicker than a Staffordshire mansion. As history has shown, any replacement will be employed for around five months and then fired for not living up to the standards of the previously-abused predecessor.

It has almost become a competition between the tabloids as to which can curtail a contract quickest, much like the other contemporary fashionable wrong of something being more positive than 100% – first you could give 100%, then someone stated they had just given 101%, next the figure 110% became commonplace, 120% was bounded around occasionally, next 500% was mentioned, then Louis Walsh affirmed 1,000,000% that an X Factor contestant should continue in the competition, before Cheryl Cole usurped this scornfully with 2,000,000% as if a mere 1,000,000% was pitiful.

The worst consequence of proving a tale to be erroneous is that the newspaper is fined some loose change in a court battle two years later, the publicising of which generates more attention of the negative plight of a notable C-lister and grants free advertising to the newspaper being fined.

Quite frankly I can’t understand the obsession with tabloids: If you enjoy the articles, go buy a fiction novel as you’ll be rewarded with greater imagery, writing and probably more realistic scenarios. If you enjoy the page three nudity why not subscribe to adult TV channels or the internet’s most notable side effect that is porn sites? Or just get a girlfriend. If you like the cartoons then go watch re-runs of Tom & Jerry. Or maybe the tabloids are simply a diluted or conveniently combined version for chavs of these evidently prohibitively expensive premium equivalents.

The only solution to being fed the constant barrage of fallacious rubbish that spuriously flows from the tabloids is to boycott them, or at least to introduce a regulator. These newspapers rely on sales to pay the printing costs and wages of the snakes that hiss this garbage. Switching to broadsheets may have an effect, although a blanket ban would be preferable.

But an attempt to boycott newspapers would be comparable to the futile campaign doing the rounds on certain social networking websites which encourages drivers to avoid only the “big” fuel providers such that these would have no choice but to drop their prices with the rest of the producers then following suit. Whoever constructed that campaign clearly failed to recognise that there are only big fuel providers, and that all fuel, supermarket “own-brand” included, is provided by the few entities that exist in the oligopoly.

In any case, with the price of running a car today do you not think people would have gone without petrol by now if they could? The campaign instigator clearly lives in London or works from home if they believe millions can suddenly deprive themselves of their means to get to work. Next they’ll be telling us to boycott Tesco in order to stave off food price inflation.

The question has to be posited, moreover, as to why there is a need for newspapers at all, bar keeping the homeless warm at night. Think of the benefit to the environment of not printing all that paper. The occasional email from the environmental officer at your company reminding you not to print unless there is a real need is undone more quickly than Calum Best’s flies upon introduction to the latest Zoo cover girl by the millions of newspapers printed each day.

Besides, the internet, radio and television all co-exist to provide us with free news (for those pointing to the television licence, most television can now be viewed on the internet instead), eliminating any need for newspapers. The real reason for pushing the purveyors of more crap than Phat B*stard is the political bias they can instigate in return for favours from political parties.

This proliferation of media has now led to us being fed a binge diet of American “news” too. How does finding out John McCain’s unknown running mate’s seventeen year old daughter’s got a bun in the oven constitute the top story over here? The relentless coverage of the American elections will have been going for over a year come results day (or results month if last time is anything to go by).

Unlike the UK system’s five, elections in the US must be every four years. If we spend a year reporting on something that occurs every four, a quarter of all the UK’s top news items will be to do with the US. Yet despite the recent revelations over cancer and bankruptcy, I bet they know as much about Jade Goody or Kerry Katona are as the BNP do about tolerance and multiculturalism.