Man Spanks Monkey

The monkey abuser I was talking about on Monday is back on the front page of the Crapchester Chronicle, in fact, he's even made onto the local BBC teletext news service.  I despair.  I really do.  Is that what local news has become?  Instead of investigations into dodgy local political decisions, or murky business deals, or even local crime, we have stories about men mistreating pet monkeys.  It wouldn't be so bad if they'd even used a faintly amusing headline like 'Man Spanks Monkey'. But no, they couldn't even manage that.  But to get to the point, it's somewhat ironic that this story ended up on the BBC's local teletext, as only this week I heard more braying about how the BBC's local news coverage was putting the local press out of business.  I assume the argument is that why should people bother buying a local pater when they can get all their local(ish) news for free from the BBC? 

Which, of course, is absolute nonsense.  The reality is that BBC regional news programmes, (and 'regional' is the key word here), are far from being 'local'.  My regional programme, for instance, covers six entire counties and parts of at least two others, encompassing at least half a dozen cities and dozens of large towns.  Consequently, the news stories it offers are nothing like as localised as local newspapers can cover.  Moreover, there  is an inevitable bias in the BBC coverage toward the larger population centres, also, they can never cover individual stories in anything like the depth that a local newspaper should be able to.  Which is the real problem, obviously: whilst local papers should be able to cover local news in depth, they don't. In my, admittedly limited, experience, nowadays they seem to expect the stories to come to them.  The closest they get to actually going out and getting a story is to attend the local magistrates court and find out that a guy has been prosecuted for spanking his monkey.