Priorities, Priorities

Last Sunday, the submersible OceanGate Titan was less than two hours into a dive to view the wreck of RMS Titanic when contact was lost. A major search and rescue effort began: five souls were aboard the craft, and it was assumed by most observers that they would still be alive. Hence the reports telling of how long the sub’s oxygen reserves would hold out.

For our free and fearless press, this provided the ideal cover for stories they would rather not run, for fear of embarrassing themselves. So when the Privileges Committee report on whether disgraced former alleged Prime Minister Alexander Boris de Pfeffel Johnson misled Parliament, which he did, and repeatedly, dropped on Monday morning, his press pals had cover.

And did they need cover: Bozo, for whom so many on the right had been shamelessly shilling, was found to have lied to the House knowingly and repeatedly. Worse, he had been using that same press to smear members of the Committee. Had he not resigned his seat, a suspension of 90 days would have been recommended. Withdrawal of his Parliamentary pass was urged.

All this could be safely shuffled to an inside page, if the details were reported at all. So readers need not be told that a 90 day suspension was instant recall petition and by-election territory; hence Bozo jumping before he was pushed. The Commons debate on the report saw only six Tories vote against the report, with more than 100 of Bozo’s formerly fellow MPs voting for it.

So it was that we were treated to wall to wall deep sea drama. Look at the adventurers and the very rich, not at the UK’s rotten and corrupt politics, which enabled a moral vacuum like Johnson to rise to the top of the pile, to become Prime Minister, a position for which it was well known beforehand that he was not fit to hold. And then another thought entered.

Late last week, the BBC reported that “At least 78 people have died and more than 100 have been rescued after their fishing boat sank off southern Greece. But survivors have suggested as many as 750 people may have been packed on to the boat, with reports of 100 children in the hold”. There have been accusations that the Greek authorities did not help the overloaded vessel.

Those on board were refugees. Yes, they were migrants, they were not white, and most would have been Scary Muslims™. It is the kind of story that many in and around our media establishment would rather not report, especially as so few of them can muster the slightest shred of empathy. The press knows its readers, and many of them are racist bigots of the worst kind.

What deeply unpleasant former Sun editor Kelvin McFilth said so many years ago - “You just don't understand the readers, do you, eh? He's the bloke you see in the pub, a right old fascist, wants to send the w**s back, buy his poxy council house, he's afraid of the unions, afraid of the Russians, hates the queers and the weirdos and drug dealers. He doesn't want to hear about that stuff (serious news)” - still drives so much of what gets published.

So more than 650 of those people McFilth’s ideal Sun reader would like to “send back” got drowned somewhere in the Mediterranean Sea? The press knows it happened, that there are hundreds of families grieving, but they are in one of those very difficult positions. They backed the idea of “stopping the boats”, and the idea of “pushing them back”. The result? They’re not so keen.

Much easier to ignore the catastrophic loss of life in the Med while shouting support for pushing boats back and sending desperate refugees to places like Rwanda. And keep readers and clickers focused on the North Atlantic, although the sad news from yesterday may shorten the story’s shelf life.

A remotely controlled exploration vehicle from the Canadian ship Horizon Arctic has located a debris field on the ocean floor close to the Titanic wreck. Some of that debris has been reported to be from the Titan. As the carcass of the sunken liner lies some 3,800 metres below the surface, the pressures involved would be immense. And any failure would be deadly.

It is looking like Titan’s loss of contact signalled a catastrophic hull implosion. So all aboard would have died more or less instantly, and on Sunday afternoon. It may have been a “cyclical failure” - one pressure cycle too many, shades of the Comet I. The press will now try in their usual inimitable fashion to string out the why-oh-why potential of the saga.

For them, this beats covering the horrors of sea disasters nearer to home. It trumps covering the cost of living crisis. They prefer it to owning up about the slow puncture to the UK economy that is Brexit. And it certainly outranks any attention given to Bozo The Liar. An absolute SOB. But he’s their SOB.

Falsehood and misinformation. Bozo did it. His pals say Look Over There.

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