Lazy journalism - or collective memory loss?

I should start by saying that memory loss is a feature of my daily life, so I'm starting this post from a very weak premise, like going upstairs to get something and then ............ Yep! Forgot what it was. The time I lost the cook's matches that live by the oven is the worst to date. A creature of habit when it comes to putting things back so I can find them the next time, naturally I assumed that the son might have borrowed them. Drawing a blank there, I forced my brain to visualise the box (in case I was seeing it without seeing it) and searched all round my minute kitchen. When it didn't appear, I thought I'd try the 'ignore it and it'll come out when it thinks I'm not looking approach' ..... and I was right. I needed something from the fridge at lunchtime and there, sitting on top of the Lurpak, was the box. The son thought it was funny.

"Hah! Guess that let's me off the hook then" he smirked and I suppose he's right. In all conscience I will never again be able to remind him about the time he was stopped from putting his trainers in the fridge when he was 9 and with his mind on higher thing.... (Obviously, something about fridges in our family, though).

Dragging myself back from all that, the thing that I wanted to write about was triggered by this week's journalistic frenzy on the news about the financial state of the country. Now, I'm obviously no expert but when the hacks, in this case on BBC radio and associated politicians, pundits and economists they've found to drag to a microphone, talk about the last quarter being disappointing and how it might impact on the country (ie us) for at least the rest of 2011 I've found myself shouting at the radio in much the same way as my mother used to shout at our ancient black and white TV when politicians appeared that she couldn't stand.

My point is (and I do try to get there in the end), I'd thought retro was back. It is in gardening for sure: less pesticides and herbicides (until you need to nuke the b*stards) and I can't tell you how much organic horse poo I'm shifting around clients' gardens at the moment... And don't get me started on the nostalgia around sixties clothing, recipes, make do and mend ..... for goodness sake, fondue, snow chains and Clothkits have had a resurgence!

That being so, how come the meeja world has forgotten (a) about the square acreage of print and aeons of airtime they've been devoting to how things are going to be really bad for the next several years, probably at least until the next election? and (b) that ancient and probably rather wise assumption that a new business could/should/would take seven years (yes, years!) to go into profit?

Hearing the Milliband (Imgoingtostuffupmybrother) Child on question time today, it's pretty clear there's been a collective memory loss in that area too. Who worked in the Treasury all those fingers-in-the-sweetie-jar years? Um.... that would be him, wouldn't it?

Don't misunderstand me. I'm not in love with the Coalition. I'm not in love with any political party. I was thoroughly sick of the self-destructive Tory bunch that TBlair outsted all those years ago and for about the first 3 weeks of his reign, I had high hopes..... Obviously not for long though and since then I've been as supine as the rest of us as we've sucked up/tolerated all the vote-buying, play-acting, bad acting, social engineering, over-legislating, control-freaking, education-dumbing, warmongering, prima-donnaring over-spending rubbish that we've been served for the last 13+ years too long.

No, my standpoint is that we have been in deep poo for quite a long time. We did the sensible thing and removed the cretins that were latterly responsible. We've got a new government of mixed attitudes and abilities, but we've got a chance to start fresh and like it or not, the different standpoints (at the moment, at least) are making them compromise ... and we should give them a chance. The alternative doesn't bear thinking about. Sure that means that choices are and will be tough. We won't like a lot of it. Certainly a high proportion of our new leaders are personally rich and won't be affected as much as most of the population. Life's like that. On the up side it means that they should be free to get on with the job in hand. It also means that they won't need to be on the fiddle.

For about the first three days of the Coalition even the rottweilers on the Today programme backed off, as did that very knowing Scotsman on PM. They were rather lost for a while. Out of their comfort zone. They didn't know how to play it, were waiting for us to give them a lead. Then they got bored waiting and went back to their old ways.

I usually listen to Chris Evans on R2 in the mornings (Wogan was so much cleverer and certainly funnier than Today and when he retired it took about 20 minutes to get hooked on his successor) before turning over to R4 for the rest of the day, but Evans was on holiday for a couple of weeks and I can't bear his stand-in, so switched back to Today. JH was interviewing Cameron - well, not interviewing so much as showing off, as usual, asking a question then talking over him, at length, as usual..... and depressingly, the reasons I haven't listned to it for several years all came back to me and I fled to R7. Is the BBC biased? Peter Sissons think so. Not so much in the culture as in it's DNA, he says and if I hadn't spotted the signs myself, I figure he should know. I'm so bored with it and with that whole attitude that anchors (I just can't call them journalists) are the stars and everyone else is inferior. Don't they get it?

There's been a change in the zeitgeist and that includes politics. Yes, I actually believe that. For sure I'm bored with people being patronised and shouted at by lazy journalists who forget their own past stories, take their topics from the newspapers, work from press releases rather than searching out the news for themselves and follow each other in attitude like lemmings.

As TW would say, Is it me?