Chameleon Magazine

Sometimes I genuinely wonder whether people in Britain still watch the news critically, or whether we have simply become accustomed to being fed whatever story the broadcasters have decided should dominate our attention that day.

Turn on breakfast television and the pattern is becoming painfully familiar. A political controversy appears, the presenters become excited about it, the commentators are assembled, and suddenly we are expected to believe that this is the most important issue facing the country.

At the moment, Nigel Farage and Reform seem to provide an endless supply of material.

Farage received money from somebody. Reform did something questionable. Somebody associated with the party said something controversial. Another presenter looks horrified. Another panel spends twenty minutes explaining why we should all be horrified as well.

Meanwhile, outside the television studio, Britain has rather more serious problems.

The tax burden is extraordinarily high, household finances are squeezed, public services remain under enormous pressure and parts of the NHS struggle to recruit and retain specialist staff. Maternity services in particular have faced repeated staffing pressures, yet somehow another argument about Nigel Farage’s party finances can still become the great national emergency of breakfast television.

What irritates me is the extraordinary selectivity of that scrutiny.

We hear endlessly about Gaza, with politicians and broadcasters debating what Britain should do about one of the most complicated conflicts on Earth, while we cannot even have a serious national conversation about something much closer to home: why should a young person in England leave university carrying tens of thousands of pounds of debt while students in Scotland operate under a very different tuition system?

Surely that affects millions of British families rather more directly.

Then there is energy.

We are repeatedly told that Britain must move away from North Sea oil and gas. Scotland watches an industry that has provided jobs, skills, tax revenue and energy security being pushed towards decline in the name of the transition away from fossil fuels.

Yet thousands of miles away, the Falkland Islands are moving towards developing offshore oil resources of their own.

Apparently oil becomes politically easier to tolerate once it is far enough away from Aberdeen.

That contradiction deserves considerably more examination than it receives.

Where is the morning television obsession with that?

Where are the endless panels asking whether it makes economic sense to restrict domestic energy production while remaining dependent on energy produced elsewhere?

Where are the presenters demanding to know what happens to Scottish communities built around the North Sea industry?

Instead we frequently get politics presented almost like celebrity television. Someone has said something. Someone has donated something. Somebody is offended. Somebody demands an apology.

And tomorrow we do it all again.

The problem is not that these stories should never be reported. The problem is proportion.

Journalism has enormous influence over public debate because broadcasters do not simply report what happened; by deciding what receives twenty minutes of airtime and what receives twenty seconds, they help determine what the public spends its time discussing.

That editorial power deserves scrutiny too.

Because while television studios argue about the latest Westminster outrage, ordinary people are worrying about taxes, mortgages, energy bills, hospitals, schools, university costs, jobs and whether their children will have a better standard of living than they did.

Those are not glamorous stories.

They do not always produce furious television debates.

But they are Britain.

Perhaps the most important question viewers should start asking when they turn on the news is not simply, “Is this story true?”

It is another question entirely:

Why have they decided that this is the story I should be thinking about today — and what are they not talking about while I am watching it?