Sailing choppy waters in the ‘media’ debate

No one wanted to ban you singing Rule Britannia. “Yes they did, it was only last week, you can’t rewrite recent history!” You might shout at your newspaper through mouthfuls of breakfast. To some extent you’d be right, that was indeed what you were told. I’m usually the last person to use the broad and frankly unhelpful term ‘media’ which is applied liberally in an almost universally negative sense. But in increasingly choppy waters I find myself straying perilously close to that particularly whirlpool. And just like many historic seafarers, I imagine, I am constantly fighting the misconception that everyone who sails a ship is a pirate. Other than both being newspapers The Daily Mail and The

Guardian share not one thing in common, for example. But there’s definitely a growing trend of oversimplifying issues, which helps no one.

Social media - the one catch all term I do hypocritically love using - has got a lot to answer for in this regard, rewarding highly shared debates often with a binary

Brexit-esque feel.

Online it is increasingly difficult to

‘agree a little bit’ with what someone is saying or ‘respect the point’ they are making.

Now it’s “you’re an idiot, you’re wrong and

I’ll sing Jerusalem on top of a May Pole if I want!”

Well, no one wants to stop you, fill your boots but don’t fall off. On one hand I suppose ‘No one is offended by Morris Dancers’ doesn’t make a good headline but when there are rumblings of a row it’s the job of journalists to properly present it and not scream ‘NOW THEY WANT TO BAN FLAGS’ like some sort of Brass Eye sketch.

For the avoidance of confusion the BBC will play Rule Britannia and Land of Hope and Glory at The Proms but without lyrics, because there is not much point of rousing singalongs in a Covid-era audience-free auditorium - not “because Black Lives Matter forced them to ditch the words”.

‘Online it is increasingly difficult to ‘agree a little bit’ with what someone is saying or ‘respect the point’ they are making’

Ed Mcconnell The KM Group columnist with his own look at the world