It seems now more than ever that the media are adamant to portray themselves as dishonest, bloodsucking parasites with a thirst for human misery. Whether it’s the perpetually printed stories of nursery related gang stabbings, constant news reports reminding us that the Eurozone crisis has fucked our collective bank accounts, or just that Old Rupert Murdoch is masturbating to your sexy phone calls, they want to shock you into buying newspapers and scare the public into mental submission.
The evil mass media!
The closer you get to London the more horrifying the stories become, as if the capital were some sort of rapey black-hole that sucks all innocent life into a parallel universe of corruption and vice. And the thing is London isn’t that bad, England isn’t that bad, the world really isn’t that bad. It’s when you look to smaller, local newspapers that you actually realise that England isn’t on the brink of anarchy, it’s as dull as looking at David Cameron’s face. So I asked to write a regular section in 5 Hit Rap Magazine that looks at that most prestigious of Cornish publications, The Falmouth Packet, to show the world that England isn’t a cess pit full to the brim of racist, knife-wielding peadophiles, it can actually be quite a regular place with mundane day-to-day goings on and a hoard of amusing cultural oddities.
I’m just going to jump straight in with an article I found a couple of days ago to highlight this exact point - bearing in mind this is news, in an actual newspaper.
The headline read as follows: A girl was forced to call 999 after getting her foot stuck in a railing in Falmouth this afternoon. I mean isn’t that just beautiful. You’d think that was some sort of ironic joke if you saw it in the Metro or the Evening Standard. The poor girl; had to be rescued by the fire brigade, cut out with specialist equipment, obviously humiliated by the ordeal, so what do The Packet do? They tell the whole fucking town! It’s unbelievable.
Who remembers when the gas tank blew up on the docks last year? That was massive Packet news, the whole of Cornwall went mad, people were evacuated, there were explosions and smoke and fire and people crying. Sounds pretty dramatic right? Well, with all that in mind one of my friends lived next door to the docks, Railway Cottages, didn’t even wake up, she literally slept through the biggest Cornish news of the year.
Whichever way you look at it the big papers have to fabricate and exaggerate to sell, whereas local papers just inform you about what’s been going on around you. I think what I’m trying to point out is that you can buy into all the media hype, you can fear for your pension and you can constantly look over your shoulder for that bespectacled psychopath with a dildo and a machete, or you can just find humor in the subtle things and try to enjoy what you see rather than worrying about what you read.
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