A rats to riches story: Larry the Downing Street cat finds place in TV spotlight

31 pointsposted 12 hours ago
by zeristor
(theguardian.com)

13 Comments

roenxi

11 hours ago

I find it actually quite an interesting exercise to compare all their politics headlines [0] with the fact that apparently Kier Starmer is polling numbers like 73% feeling he is doing "badly" [1] and there is some obscure group called "RFM" who have popped onto the scene and are polling well compared to everyone else (with a strong showing by the Greens) [2].

I mean I'd probably say this for any cat story in politics; but this really does seem like a moment where the British media should be making serious attempts at facilitating a national discourse. The stats suggest something is going wrong in the political system that needs to be talked out. Just eyeballing the politics headlines I'm not convinced the Guardian has their finger on that pulse.

[0] https://www.theguardian.com/politics

[1] https://yougov.co.uk/topics/politics/trackers/keir-starmer-p...

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Opinion_polling_for_the_next_U...

cjs_ac

9 hours ago

Originally, newspapers were very profitable, because they were the only mass media other than books. As representative democracy emerged in the UK, they became very politically significant, and so politicians were eager to hand out viscountcies to anyone who owned a paper in order to curry editorial favour. The legacy of this is that there are now too many national newspapers in the UK, and so they all - even the supposedly sober broadsheets - feel a need to sensationalise their reporting to attract and hold paying readers.

gruez

8 hours ago

>The legacy of this is that there are now too many national newspapers in the UK, and so they all - even the supposedly sober broadsheets - feel a need to sensationalise their reporting to attract and hold paying readers.

This doesn't feel like a good explanation. Don't all newspapers want to increase their readership numbers?

cjs_ac

8 hours ago

Yes, but all the British newspapers are loss-making. You don't take ownership of one to make money, you buy one to buy political influence.

gruez

7 hours ago

How does that change the reporting compared to newspapers that exist solely to make money? In other words, what's the difference between

"sensationalise their reporting to attract and hold paying readers [so you can buy political influence]" (UK)

and

"sensationalise their reporting to attract and hold paying readers [so you can make money off subscriptions/ads]" (US)

?

cjs_ac

6 hours ago

Desperation, and consequently, the extent of sensationalisation.

lo_zamoyski

8 hours ago

> Originally, newspapers were very profitable

That’s news to me. And without advertising, sales and subscriptions have never covered the cost, and advertising has a strong effect on what is published, or more often, what is not. Belloc describes this in his book “The Free Press” [0].

[0] https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/18018

grebc

10 hours ago

I’d wager most people would rather avoid the hard questions.

Much easier to stay calm and carry on;)

mr_toad

8 hours ago

Carry-on complaining you mean. There is lots of political discourse, but no-one has any solutions (unless you count blaming immigrants).

lo_zamoyski

7 hours ago

If you want to call it discourse. The quality is quite poor. Reason always has an uphill battle in the smog of sophistry, ignorance, unhinged thumos, etc.

michaelt

10 hours ago

Eh, traditional newspapers will always contain fluff, because the factual current affairs reporting is always so relentlessly negative.

Ain’t nobody reporting on a road that doesn’t have a pothole.

Nothing unusual about putting in some comics, a crossword, a travel section, a cooking section, a sports section, and the occasional article about a cat.