Hiding a small action with a big action is a fundamental of magic. A magician makes a big sweeping motion with one hand and releases a dove. Our eyes instinctively follow the hand, then the dove. Meanwhile, the magician does their magic with the other hand. All magicians know this. The fine art of misdirection.
The British media has spent the last few years mastering the opposite version of the trick. A perverse reverse magic in which the small motion hides the big. On one hand you kind of have to admire them. On the other it has now reached a level where society is literally being pulled apart at the seams.
This week’s amazing piece of media perpetrated reverse magic involved BBC newsreader, Huw Edwards. Famous person uses dating app. Links up with an adult. Nothing comes of it, they never meet. The adult threatens to write about it online. Famous person is very angry. Literally not a story at all. And yet somehow, thanks to the inverse sorcery of The Sun, this non-news ends up being the lead item on BBC News. The BBC fell into the trap, and then we all did.
Meanwhile, the real news went unreported. Boris Johnson’s contempt of court. A crime that would put any other citizen in jail. Or, how about, if you were prepared to dig hard enough, it was possible to discover 5% of UK adults reported that in the past two weeks they had ran out of food and had been unable to afford more, Richi Sunak quietly exploded a bomb in the further education sector by capping the numbers of students on ‘low-value’ degrees, and – ‘don’t mention the word ‘Brexit’’ – it was announced that, now we don’t have enough workers for all the jobs that need doing, the Government is exploring a reciprocal visa scheme so that under-35s can work across the EU and Britain. That’s ‘announced’ as in you probably needed to read a French or German newspaper to find out. Your guess is as good as mine regarding the things that happened that never received a mention anywhere in the media.
The small story hides the big. The non-story hides the biggest.
Huw Edwards, Phillip Schofield, Prince Harry, Stop The Boats. Smokescreens all. Innocent chaff. Sacrificing innocent individuals to protect guilty press barons. We see you. We see what you are doing. When the smokescreens dissipates, you will not be forgiven.