Disgusted of Tunbridge Wells

TMM are beginning to question their sanity. Or rather their age, attire, smoking paraphernalia and location, because what they are beginning to feel definitely belongs in the realm of the retired, blazer wearing, pipe-smoking Tunbridge Wells resident. For our international readership, this stereotype is synonymous with conservatism and signs letters complaining about falling social standards to The Times or Telegraph as "Disgusted of Tunbridge Wells".

For today, if we didn’t know better, we would suggest that the Media is running the world. Journalists are currently thriving on the exceedingly fertile ground of natural disaster, nuclear disaster, social unrest, war and international discord. In Tokyo the western media appears to have done their best to whip up panic with a barrage of bent and twisted statistics and now Libya has been a classic pump and dump exercise. Demand action, criticise its tardiness and then tear it apart once done, all the while offering opinion based on emotion rather than fact.

The BBC has been particularly guilty of this emotional manipulation recently and as TMM come to work in the morning the BBC Radio's landmark current affairs program, "Today", will offer at least twice every hour, an interview that goes along the following lines.

Interviewer - "So tell me what has happened to you"
Person - "{ insert person/ organisation/govt} has stopped giving me {insert something cheap/free} that I always got before"
Interviewer - "So how do you feel about that?"
Person - "Well, it's terrible and I'm worse off now without the free things"
Interviewer - "Should this have been allowed to happen?"
Person - "It should never have been allowed to happen"
Interviewer - "What do you think should happen now?"
Person - "I should be given {insert cheap/free thing} again"
Interviewer - "And whose fault is it?"
Person - "It’s all {insert govn, large corp or rich person}'s fault"

Repeat the above process replacing Person with Person's close relative.

What has happened to reporting FACTS? Not emotions or cherry-picked factoids designed to influence emotions in a precalculated manner or opinions of non-experts, but just the hard facts. TMM of Tunbridge Wells feel that they are big enough to come to their own conclusions and don't look to news services to tug on their heartstrings. It's meant to be News, not "how do you feel about losing" X-factor.

Can someone please point TMM towards their most highly recommended factual Radio and TV news sources that are manipulation and emotion free? Oh, and finally whilst on the subject of media, who at Bloomberg sent out a writ decreeing that all Earthquakes from here on in will be referred to as "Temblors"? The only temblors TMM want to experience are Knee Temblors.

Rant over, let's move on to the BoE monetary policy......

{TMM suffers Heart Attack, is carried off, stage left, by stretcher bearers. Curtain}