News, views and numbers

Here are two pet hates in news reporting that I definitely share:

1. “Will say later today” : If someone is going to say something, wait until they’ve said it. If they haven’t said it yet, cover something that someone has said....

2.”according to a new report” : You know what reports are? They’re somebody writing down what they think about stuff. What someone thinks about stuff isn’t news. It’s just what someone thinks.

Read the rest here. I can add one other pet hate - the incessant use of the word "swingeing"* meaning very harsh or severe. There seems to be an unwritten journalistic rule that all cuts are "swingeing". In over four and a half decades of listening to the gloriously multitudinous assemblage of people who use the English tongue, I've never, ever, heard the word "swingeing" used anywhere except in news reports. Come on, guys, if you really must force the same, unimaginative prefix into every other bit of copy, at least use a word the rest of the world uses.

"Swingeing", though, is just a very minor peeve of mine - the constant use of this stale word is just an annoyance, but the amount of "news" time clogged up with rubbish about what people are about to say and uncritically reported PR filler is a real menace. Especially when the real news is quite incredible enough to make anybody stop and think:

I wonder if the cost of the new "Independent" Parliamentary Standards Authority - a staggering £6.5 million per year - will cause the same level as anger as the duck houses and plasma-screen TVs that led the government to set it up in the first place. Somehow I doubt it. But it should.

£6.5 million represents around £10,000 per MP. As the BBC report points out, it's almost six times the total amount being paid back by assorted troughers. Cutting back on abuses, it seems, will cost far more money than the abuses themselves.

Writes the heresiarch.

To recap (in round figures):

Cost of inflated/inappropriate expenses claims to be paid back by MPs - £1,200,000

Cost of the enquiry into those expenses - £1,100,000

Cost of a standards authority to scrutinise future expenses claims - £6,500,000 per annum

Cost of rescuing failed British banks - £850,000,000,000

Yes, between them, a collection of MPs managed to fiddle just over a million quid out of the taxpayers in dodgy expenses. The enquiry that looked into the affair cost the taxpayer almost as much again. To make sure that the same thing doesn't happen again in future, the taxpayer will have to pony up six and a half million every year. Yet the whole expenses scandal is the merest of small change in comparison with the really big story it pushed off the front pages - the billions pocketed by sections of an ill-regulated financial services industry to save it from itself (and, more importantly, to save the rest of us during what, even with the bail out, has beenthe longest lasting contraction since records began).

These sort of facts, speak loud and clear for themselves, and represent real news and context, as opposed to whatever happens to be today's piece of PR-puff "research" or a press release about what some tedious politician is about to say in a "keynote"** speech that's being eagerly awaited by precisely nobody at all.

*tr.v. swinged, swinge·ing also swing·ing, swing·es ArchaicTo punish with blows; thrash; beat.

[Middle English swengen, to shake, dash, from Old English swengan.]

The Free Dictionary

** "Keynote" - a piece of journalese almost as annoying as "swingeing"