the divide

The immense gulf in spirituality, decency, principle and basic moral insight between the media on one hand, and the general public on the other, is graphically shown by tonight's almost universal editorial decision within television stations and newspapers, to sideline reports about the Assad government's ongoing industrialised murder of the Syrian people before the eyes of the world, in order to make room for copious, anodyne, morally worthless and wearisomely insincere reportage on the death of Whitney Houston, God rest her. I remember the former missionary Jo Wardhaugh Doyle once telling me of her consternation at media behaviour the day a popstar called John Lennon was shot. Jo was working in Uganda at the time where the government had that very day unleashed a slaughter on the populace just to steal an election. Jo remembers the BBC reserving one sentence for Uganda, wrongly reporting the elections as fair, ignoring the slaughter which was well underway but still stoppable, before proceeding to drown all hope of the truth emerging in a deluge of nonsense about the cosmically irrelevant popstar's demise. La plus se change, la plus se reste vomitous.