Scandal – Object writing MArch 16
Mar 15th, 2009 | By admin | Category: Daily WritingNewspapers feeding on them for breakfast, lunch and dinner. The main course whenever they find one, gluttonously consuming all, putting it on the front page in big skyscraper blocky capitals ‘ SCANDAL’. Unmissable, unmistakable. Klaxons, fire alarms and air raid sirens scream from the paragraphs. Quickly researched backgrounds also stand in skyscraper columns of print. The story smells of rotten seaweed laid out on a beach for weeks and beaten down by a tough sun.
Over the next few days the scandal wears people down with and angle grinding relentlessness, until we’re numb with submission and we believe all that’s been laid on the plate and the story goes cold or is put on hold while the angling journos fish for another scoop. They dangle their rods off the top of skyscrapers looking for another victim, another body to assassinate.
There’s those ‘current affairs’ shows on at 6.30 pm, now they’ve long since ceased to be about ‘current’ affairs rather about consumer affairs. The presenters sit in front of the safe facades of the set while the pack of hunting hounds go bout haranguing those who’v done wrong, a lynching by television. The reactions – predictable – make great television, punching of cameras, fusillades of abuse, hopeless knocks at doors that won’t open. Questions about the whereabouts of monies long since gone….
