No News is Good News
Jul 23rd, 2008 by Donagh
This is weird. My brother lives in London, no that’s not weird, but being the loyal ex-pat he follows Irish news almost excessively. The conviction today of the three English drug smugglers is certainly newsworthy, and with an estimated €440 Million haul and the lengthy sentences they received, you would imagine that it would be of interest to international news agencies, newspapers and media outlets and UK ones in particular.
But he has noticed nothing about it in the British media. So, prompted by this and I’ll admit that it is not particularly scientific, I checked out Google News by inserting this search that encapsulates the key words of the story.
€440 million cocaine smuggling operation west Cork coast conviction three English men
The search returned 43 stories, with the latest being from the BBC which published a report about three quarters of an hour ago. However, scanning through the media outlets who have published the story there are very very few that are not Irish, or in the case of the Belfast Telegraph, on the Island of Ireland.
Google News search.
Considering the nationality of the smugglers is this not of interest to a UK audience?
Had noticed this myself, its difficult not to conclude that the characters involved are a bit too white and geezerish to get the tabloids into a lather. The broadsheets don’t generate much original crime stuff, tending rather to come in with more “balanced” reporting of stories the Mail et al have already run.
Try searching under Martin Wanden, the name of one of the men convicted. I located stories in the Guardian, the Times, The Mail and the Currant Bun.
(A qualified information professional adds: using too many search terms will severaly reduce the number of hits you achieve.)
Oh yea. And good point too about the search terms. But you gotta love the Mail headline:
Police killer is freed early from prison - but then jailed for 30 years for bungling bid to smuggle £350m of cocaine
Which says it all from a Mail point of view really. I wonder if he hadn’t bungled it and lived in Argentina for 10 years before being finally brought to justice. I’m sure the sentence would have been shorter.
Funnily enough, was in the Occupied Territories of the Dordogne for the last couple of days where a shiver went down my spine to see a wrinkly Middle England ex-pat in front of me at the supermarket queue buying the Daily Mail.
The headline, I noted, concerned some sort of Romanian ATM machine fraud scam. A bigger scale criminal operation, clearly, than the lads floating rather ineplty off the Cork/Kerry coast.
When I was in Zarrutz (near San Sebastian) last December I saw a copy of the Daily Mail that said “printed in Spain” at the top. Something scary about that. Something pretty odd, too, since how many smallminded expats head for the wet Northern coast - and the Basque one, at that - rather than the south?
I think it’s the Ryanair phenomenon - once they start flying to some regional airport (in France anyway) the fly-by-night estate agents with a Union Jack on the door to indicate they can also rip you off in English start appearing everywhere… It doesn’t even have to be particularly sunny.
They fly to San Sebastian, I believe. Latest place in France to see the phenomenon is the rural but not exactly sexy Limousin. Having said that, all of we expats aren’t smallminded are we ? Just the ones that need the xenophobic line of the Daily Mail to reassure them they’re well out of a country ‘gone to pot thanks to all those bloody for’ners’
On a side point, I note that a not at all smallminded expat in the Limousin somewhere is Stuart Staples, frontman of the Tindersticks. Here’s proof of it from DailyMotion (a pretty good Townes Van Zandt cover) :
http://www.dailymotion.com/relevance/search/Stuart%2BStaples/video/x1h894_stuart-a-staples-16-autumns-15-fall_music
If you look at the same poster’s other films, you get to see Staples’ place in the Limousin. At home with the stars or what ??
The musical blog from which the clip is taken has a fairly good ‘Concerts à emporter (takeaway concerts)’ section with a fairly eclectic mix of acts :
http://www.blogotheque.net/spip.php?page=cae_all