When I was a teenager my teachers and parents told me that British journalism was probably the most objective and impartial in the world; well apart from the 'red tops'. They were obviously looking through rose-coloured spectacles, but there was probably a grain of truth in it. However, middle-aged fart that I am, I am sure that the quality of reporting has dropped in recent decades. Instead of trying to establish facts we are bombarded with opinions and almost lurid entertainment. With newspapers, stories often have thinly veiled spins to force the political views of the proprietors down our throats.

I find that the BBC falls into the same category. I really wonder if they are trying to act like a commercial station focusing on viewing figures and ratings rather than its mission 'to inform, educate and entertain'.

Two things strike me about the news media today:
a) there is an unhealthy obsession with child disappearances and murders
b) there is a very narrow selection of international news.

I have been shocked at the amount of attention given to the terrible cases of child murder like Sarah Payne a few years ago and recently the disappearance and alleged abduction of Madeleine McCann. This obsession with a very few terrible cases is in my view unhealthy and leads to parents making poor choices. Many parents think it unsafe for their children to play in a park with their friends even if they do not live in an area with much crime - our beautiful local park is often empty apart from dog walkers while in my childhood it would have been full of kids playing games. Parents think it is safer for their kids to be sedentary in front of a games console or the TV. Similarly many parents feel it is safer to drive their offspring to school rather than to let them walk or cycle. However, the dangers of having obese unfit kids are far greater than being abducted by a stranger.

It would be very interesting if the Home Office published abduction and child murder figures. In my childhood - when such news was treated with less sensationalism - there were certainly some cases like the Moors Murders. I bet the figures are not much different today and yet the media coverage is totally different. When I lived in Germany, there were also cases of crimes against children; in fact to our horror we found out that a child murderer had lived at the other end of our street. However the stories were covered as they broke and were revisited if there was real news like an arrest or court case.

 

The blanket coverage given to the Madeleine McCann case is breathtaking. To parody Churchill "never in the field of British journalism was so much written about so little by so many". The whole point is that so little is known. She disappeared, there was a failure to gather forensic evidence, there are Portuguese secrecy laws which are unfamiliar to us and a few possible sightings. So what is the justification for the column-metres of coverage? This happened again this week with the sighting of a child that looked like Madeleine in Morocco; though I admit that was one of the few newsworthy items. Inevitably one wonders if Madeleine came from a poor working class family, was black- or brown-skinned or had ugly parents whether the coverage would have been so comprehensive.

Thankfully there have been a few voices of sanity in the media. On 10 September Martin Bell writing in the Comment is free blog pointed out that the BBC had sent an army of journalists to Portugal while not maintaining a full camera team in Afghanistan. 25 British soldiers have died there this summer. In yesterday's Times Mike Hume makes the point that "The line between investigation and emotive entertainment has disappeared".

Perhaps even worse is our coverage of momentous events abroad. I recall that a quarter of a century ago we did get a fair number of stories from abroad. However today our news is dominated by the UK, the US and occasionally the Middle East. When I was living in Germany I was surprised that my parents did not read stories of terrible floods or a terrible airport fire in Düsseldorf in the Telegraph or the Mail or see anything on the TV news. But if a Germany story is not reported what about an African one?

 

When I was in Portugal I made a visit to an internet cafe because I wondered what the weather in the UK would be like when we returned. It was 26 August and I was checking the weather in the UK - just curious about what it would be like when we got back. I was shocked when the Met Office reported that 50,000 people had been displaced by floods in Uganda. I have friends in Uganda and looked on mainstream UK news websites for more information. I found precisely nothing.

The African floods hit not just Uganda but were as far west as Ghana and as far north as Sudan. Yet the news only seemed to appear in our media in mid September. As of last week 1.5 million people need emergency help. However this is apparently not very interesting.

I think our news media has a twisted coverage. While my heart goes out to families affected by crimes against their children the amount of coverage is absurd. It is obscene that far greater human tragedies in poorer places are squeezed out from our newspapers and broadcasts.

My youngest son has been keeping chickens for over a year. He had had a job at a children's farm (one where kids pay to see cute farm animals rather than one focused on food production) as part of his school work experience programme.

He took back a number of 'hens' most of which failed to lay eggs. One large Orpington failed to lay then started crowing and was duly returned, but his replacement stopped laying after a week. He was given a small "runaway" hen for free and she has consistently produced small eggs.

My wife bought four hens at a nearby freerange farm for 50p each in the early summer. They were uneconomic for the farmer but have proved regular layers for us... well except for one. One seemed a bit weak and sickly. Judging by the egg count one hen was not laying and we assumed it was the sickly-looking one. Before we left for Portugal instead of foraging for insects in the run she spent hours just lying down on the ground.

On our return our neighbour, who had fed and watered the hens in our absence, told us that she had died. Not only that but before her death she had produced a giant egg. She had obviously not died during laying as the egg was in the henhouse in the laying box and she died in the run. But it must have been traumatic!

 

On the left you see the 45 g egg from the little 'runaway' hen. In the middle is a typical egg from the hens retired from the farm - usually they are around 70 g. On the right is the giant 100 g egg from the hen that died. I have never seen such a large hen's egg. The perspective of the photo is not great but it measures 75 mm end to end.

On holiday recently we went to a shopping mall at Loures just north of Lisbon. It was a well-designed, brightly coloured shopping centre which we liked. We were very impressed by the brighly coloured and originally designed wash handbasins in the 'bogs'.

 

Instead of having individual basins with depth there was an inclined glass plate underneath the tap that drained into the wall. Under the plate were brightly coloured patterns.

 

The patterns under the glass varied from toilet to toilet. However they seemed to drain effectively and were more cheerful than the usual white ones.