Foot and mouth disease and the silly season
Tuesday, 14 August 2007
Is it fair to say that coverage of the outbreak of foot and mouth disease in the South East has been overblown as a result of the so-called “silly season”? According to Peter Wilby in the Guardian yesterday, the excitable tone of coverage, especially in the Daily Mail - which, a fortnight ago described a “30-mile shadow of fear” resulting from the disease - is a result of journalists having nothing proper to write about during July and August.
(I can’t find the infamous “shadow of fear” story on the Mail’s website. If you Google “30-mile shadow of fear Daily Mail” and follow the link, it turns up a Mail story with no mention of this phrase, strangely enough.)
He notes that farming accounts for just 1% of the UK economy - so why all the fuss? He also draws attention to some breathtaking hypocrisy from Simon Heffer in the Mail, who abandons his Thatcherite posturing in order to demand state support for beleaguered farmers, having last month offered no sympathy whatsoever for uninsured working-class/northern types who lost everything in the recent floods.
Wilby makes some good points but I can’t help noticing that during this particular “silly season”, there seems to be a large volume of stories and comment pieces about the “silly season” as a concept. It’s a rather tedious media circle-jerk for which the broadsheets are largely responsible.
Take, for example, the Sun’s story about great white sharks off Cornwall. Utter bollocks, of course, but what else do you expect from the Sun? Nonetheless, the Guardian, the Times and others have filled pages reporting on this and other daft stuff under the guise of a report about the “silly season” as a concept.
They also like to run debunking stories - such as this one from the Guardian about the “Demon of Dartmoor”, which turned out to be someone’s pet dog. The Times, meanwhile, has spent vast amounts of time debunking the Sun’s merry-making - not, you understand, to fill space during the dry spell but to put right a grave falsehood being perpetrated by its News International stablemate.
Thus, for next summer, I suggest all broadsheets should be banned from running stories about the silliness of the silly season, and instead should be required to come up with their own silly news themselves. It’s only fair.
