News too mundane to earn a mention

If the media are anything to go by, the public cannot get enough of the Libyan civil war, the Japanese nuclear crisis and the rancorous divorce debate now gripping our islands.

Like a hose trained at a teacup, this deluge of manufactured hoopla leaves very little room in our heads for matters of concurrent but indeterminate interest.

What can’t be reheated or pimped out by the media as “breaking news” is made to do double duty in the “Culture” or “People” sections, and whatever else is left is relegated further back.

Anything too bizarre or pedestrian to merit a showcase gets treated facetiously and repackaged as a fun-sized blurb, preferably out of sight and behind the crayon drawings in the children’s section. Either that or it gets left out altogether.

A solitary example should be enough to stimulate thought and energise debate: the pernicious habit some software companies have of misrepresenting trial products as “free” or “freeware”.

A bloated PDF file I absolutely needed to send overseas forced me out onto the web to forage for a file converter, a harebrained decision which should have carried its own Surgeon General’s warning. After only a few pioneering clicks, I noticed a sadistic pattern emerging. What was labeled “free” – much like “free love” – was nothing of the sort, and was laden with more conditional clauses than a New York divorce settlement.

The bait downloaded and installed, I soon found the traitorous software hobbled by watermarks, severe restrictions on the number of pages converted, or outright truncation of the second half of every page, an assortment of curses magically lifted by a “license fee” of €29.95 or €69.95, depending on the miraculous unction the software promised to perform.

Extortion doesn’t even come close to describing it; what I was up against here was legalised banditry sailing under the banner of free trade.

I will not reveal how I put an end to this torrent of abuse, but here’s a clue for my peers; it had me wearing an eye patch and hoisting the Jolly Roger. Ye landlubbers be missing out now, Yarr!

Rustle a bit of sympathy for the news item that is too mundane to be mentioned, and too confrontational to be revealed.

Not only does it have to compete with the celebrity-inflated and the superficial, but it has to do so in an editorial climate that punishes plain old-fashioned gutsiness. Perhaps it will be a while yet before newspapers can fulfill their classical role as educational institutions and give up the screaming gin and ignorance that has so completely shanghaied their business model.