All businesses function according to the law of supply-demand, postulated by Adam Smith and other obstetricians to modernity.
Hence, if the demand for potassium cyanide is greater than for potassium chloride, that’s what our chemical firms will sell. And if HMG tries to interfere, it’ll be hit with the uppercut of Edmund Burke’s warning that “the moment that government appears at market, the principles of the market will be subverted.”
If today’s music lovers like to have their music played by giftless semi-nude girls, they’ll be treated to a steady diet of Yuja Wang and Khati Buniatishvili, performing what a reader of mine calls Concerto in 34D Major.
If the market wants assisted-suicide clinics, that’s what the market will get. There’s no God but supply-demand, and money is its profit.
Newspaper publishing is like any other business. If the press barons of the past were at times driven by considerations other than supply-demand, today such things are seen as quaint oddities.
The reading public gets what it wants to read, and what it wants most is something that tickles its naughty bits. That means sex involving celebrities. coercive sex, drunken sex, group sex or just sex.
If you wish to take issue with this observation, here are eight of the first 24 stories appearing on the website of our most conservative newspaper, and I wonder what the other lot are printing. By the time you read this, both the stories and their ratio will probably change, but the general tendency won’t:
Wheelchair-bound woman is gang-raped by six migrants at Swedish asylum centre after asking if she could use the toilet
The migrants’ religious identity is left to the readers’ imagination, but you only get one guess. I must say an asylum centre of any description wouldn’t be my first choice of a pit stop, especially if my mobility were limited, but tastes differ. Anyway, I suspect next time the woman will opt for a lay-by or a bar.
Man, 59, rushed to a Vietnamese hospital in agony after ‘breaking’ his penis trying an exotic sexual position
A bit of a cock-up, that, but the nature of the exotic position is cruelly withheld. The people have a right to know, if only as ‘don’t try this at home’ precaution.
So DOES size matter? Women debate the importance of penis size in a very frank chat that will make every man blush
It DOES matter, but not as much as what you do with it or the attendant “emotional stuff”. You can see me wiping my brow even as we speak.
‘What’s the box for?’ ‘It’s for you’: British father, 66 is jailed for raping his son from the age of six and locking him in a wooden crate for hours at a time in Ireland
One wonders why the British father had to go to Ireland for that purpose. “The boy, now 13, was placed in foster care in 2011 where he was further sexually abused by a child,” informs the paper. The poor lad simply can’t win.
‘It wasn’t time for a conversation’: Ched Evans tells his rape retrial he didn’t speak to his victim before thy had sex
The strong silent type then. Women used to shun me for such men, and that still rankles.
Muslim father rapes his daughter as punishment because she had become ‘too Westernised’ living in Norway
The European Commission against Racism and Intolerance (ECARI) is going to hear about this. Hasn’t the EU expressly banned British papers from using the word ‘Muslim’ in such contexts? The first word in the headline should have been ‘Norwegian’.
Male nurse who plied a drug addict patient with beer and had sex with her after contacting her on LinkedIn is suspended for a year
“The woman, who was addicted to heroin, had worked as a prostitute to feed her habit,” says the paper, but apparently that’s no mitigating circumstance.
Judge who quit the government’s child sex abuse inquiry after just 18 months was handed a £90,000 payoff – including flights home to New Zealand
The inquiry, says the paper, is beleaguered, leaving it for the reader to work out any possible causal relationship with the judge’s remuneration.
Far be it from me to deny the variable newsworthiness of all these stories. By all means, if that’s what our comprehensively educated public wants to read about, it should be given the chance.
But eight out of the first 24 stories? A third? Verily I say unto you: they publish and we perish.
Not physically, you understand. We are perishing as a civilisation worthy of the name, but at least it’s all in a good cause. The law of supply-demand won’t be repealed for any reason, and that’s one noble cause worth dying for.|
I felt similarly exasperated by a BBC news story about a school-boy who had been stabbed to death over a biscuit. What was the point of mentioning the banal cause of the incident? It’s as if the viewer is being dared to laugh.