Entry for April 9, 2007

I’m having trouble getting too worked up about the clamour over the Navy kidnapees selling their stories. The media seems to be getting into an enormous state of high dudgeon about the preposterous idea that the troops should be allowed to be paid for telling their stories to the papers.
I detect the whiff of hypocrisy. We now have a media circus about how appalling the whole idea was. The papers are banging the drum. How appalling! Money grabbing sailors! Des Brown must go! The Navy are in meltdown!
And who is all this fuelled by? Why, the media of course. The media who were knocking on the doors of the parents of these 19 year old kids while they were still locked in cells in Iran.
Someone here is to be despised, but it’s not the young sailors serving their country, nor the poor old blundering navy nor even bumbling Des Brown who at least took the whole thing on the chin. Nope. I despise the newspapermen hammering on suburban letterboxes, whilst salivating over the whiff of pain and death and terror, and how it might shift a few more papers on Sunday.