London Riots: Who Picks up the Bill?

I felt like a ghoul when I stayed up until the early hours of Monday morning watching the live news coverage of the riots in London. It was almost addictive watching it as streams of breaking news rolled slowly along the bottom of the screen to reveal where the violence had spread to. The urge I had to avoid sleep to keep up to date was fueled by the hope that the next update from the terrified and bewildered reporters on the streets would be a positive one - they never were. Monday night produced pictures that will be burned into the memories of millions of people, especially the ones that were there and (more specifically) the ones that have been affected so terribly by the criminality of mindless youths. The harrowing stories that have emerged over the last few days have hit home harder than any of those pictures ever could. They provide a background to the smoldering buildings and ransacked shops and tell of the prevalent fear that London is currently awash with. Those pictures and stories, however, are not able to explain to us how things are going to be fixed. Will insurance policies provide the necessary payouts to get home and shop owners back on their feet? Do the police have a duty to compensate those who have lost so much? Can those people's lives ever be the same again?

The Weekend the World Turned Blue

I find it funny when someone is asked if they watch the news and they say no because it's all depressing and there is never anything uplifting about it. I'm sorry but that wasn't in the mission statement when Sir Trevor MacDonald tapped his first pile of news on the desk all those years ago. Surely nobody can think that the world is a perfect place where only good things happen but to be able to accept that that is not true yet still not watch the news is simply a crime. News is what drives our days: it gives us things to talk about and debate, it provides us with a view of what the world is really like and for this reason it keeps us firmly in reality. The news should be watched, listened to, read and digested by everyone in the world because we learn from it as much as we create it. That 'reality' that I mentioned before was firmly bolted onto everyone's conscious at the weekend with the terrible news of the tragic murders in Norway and then with the sad news that Amy Winehouse lost her life. People should watch the news even if these kinds of thing are prevalent - there is no point in ignoring it because things are always going to be like that.

Red-Top Ruckus on the Newspaper Stands

It feels like the privacy of the public has been hacked off at the knees. And the elbows. And the neck. Recent revelations about the dealings of the News of the World newspaper has shocked the nation and the fine people that reside here. Heck, the whole world has been shocked by what vile atrocities have been glooping out of the news as of late - the News of the World has, for all of the wrong reasons, become world news.  Personally I've never been a bit fan of the red-tops anyway and have only even bought a single copy of one of them - and only for a laugh too. I can almost see where the appeal comes from and where the high sales are achieved but I'll never be converted. I'm more of a Guardian/Observer man myself and you can call me a snob but when it comes to journalism and newspaper production, quality always beats page 3 for me. I like to be able to read a paper where I know that I can trust and believe 99% of what is written - something that I don't believe ever has been the case with tabloid newspapers and has been diminished further in my eyes due to recent, shocking reports.