Is the exit of Steve Bannon from the White House staff a sign, as some have suggested, that we are reaching end game for the Trump presidency? Or is that just wishful thinking?

I was hardly alone in believing Trump couldn’t last seven weeks in the job, let alone seven months. Yet here he still is, while his aides keep falling like discarded, broken playthings.

When Bannon himself said it was the end of the presidency, it turned out he only meant that the more aggressive decision-making might now be toned down.

While Trump waved Bannon bye-bye (via Twitter, of course), with this thumbs-up for his right-wing propaganda website Breitbart News: “Fake News needs the competition!” As if Trump was capable of distinguishing fake from real.

With so much misunderstanding and misinformation trotting out on the information super-highway, it can be hard even for a grown-up to tell the thoroughbred from the pantomime donkey.

Is this life itself the real thing, or are we just a simulation created in some greater being’s experiment or game? Who can say for sure?

We’ve grown used to remarkably convincing CGI mammoths and dinosaurs wandering into our wildlife documentaries. And now with Sky Sports, “home of the Premier League”, also broadcasting an “Interactive World Cup” – football simulations played on PlayStation and Xbox – the line between real and pretend is getting very sketchy indeed.

Not that news, or reality, have ever been precisely what they seemed.

On the southern fringe of the French Alps lies the beautiful lake of Serre-Ponçon. It’s a favourite with windsurfers, kayakers, wild swimmers, sailors of small boats. But is it really a lake? It wasn’t there until the late 1950s, when a mighty 123-metre high dam was thrown across the Durance river.

As well as water sports, it powers 16 hydroelectric plants and provides irrigation to a huge area of land. Several villages were drowned in its creation, including one whose cemetery still stands at the water’s edge while the buildings lie beneath the ripples.

There’s a great photo of the village priest of Savines, seen from behind, watching his old church being dynamited in about 1959. It’s a brilliant composition and a brilliant piece of timing by a local newspaper photographer.

But is that really the priest, as his dress and his pose suggest? Who knows? It’s a great piece of story-telling about a real event anyway.

As is another shot from the same paper – surely staged – of an old woman washing clothes at the traditional outdoor village laundry while a massive concrete bridge towers high above her, still under construction.

As it happens, I know that bridge. I’ve crossed it several times. The roadway is just a few metres above the surface of the lake. You’d never guess how deep its legs reach under the water.

The flooding of those villages sounds like a classic modern tragedy. But then there’s this.

The dam and the lake were first proposed in 1856 – not for sport or power, but to save the villagers, and others further downstream, from any repeat of the devastating floods of that year and 13 years earlier. Nothing in this story is not exactly as it first seems.

Now there’s the worldwide web – a wonderful, unprecedented storehouse of information, but one in which it can be all but impossible to sort the good from the dodgy. The matter-of-fact from the well-meant wrong-end-of-the-stick. Or worse.

A photo made it onto the front page of a respected US newspaper last week showing a protester savagely beating a fallen police officer. Or that’s what the caption claimed it showed. It went viral online.

In fact the picture was several years old. It had been cropped to remove the evidence that it was actually taken in Greece, not Virginia. The anti-fascist logo on the attacker’s jacket had been added digitally. Faked news.

I wish I could unsee the picture of a dog, apparently skinned alive, which cropped up in my social media feed last week. Very grisly, very upsetting. But was it quite what it seemed? There were small clues that it might not have been been – surely there should have been more blood if the poor animal had really been alive. Or is that just wishful thinking again?

The purpose of those who posted it was to gather shocked “signatures” for an online petition. A worthy cause, no doubt, but does it do any good in the real world to heap up names in this way?

Great claims are sometimes made for such petitions as democracy in action. But I suspect they have become merely a modern form of prayer. An appeal to a distant higher authority. An expression of wishes. Something to make you feel better by giving you the illusion of doing something when there’s nothing you can do.

Now let us pray – and sign petitions – for the US to change its gun laws, to scrap its nuclear arsenal, and to stop waging war.

We all know by now that many times more Americans are shot dead by small children than are killed or wounded in terrorist attacks. That simple fact, at least, is not fake news.

Putting guns in the hands of infants is a very poor idea. And right now we have two tired toddlers – Donald Trump and Kim Jong-un – stropping around the world playground with very big guns indeed. It’s high time their toys were taken away.                                                                                                             

Last Friday I did what the front page of a certain daily “newspaper” told me to do and Googled “The Terrorists’ friend”.

What turned up was the website of that same alleged newspaper – page after page of links to it. Which seemed apt.

The previous day that same so-called newspaper said we must not give terrorism the publicity it wants – somewhere in its 19 pages of coverage.

At least I think it did. Someone who knows someone I know said it did. And, to be honest, I couldn’t be bothered to read through all 19 pages to check. Which seems like a level of journalistic thoroughness and integrity appropriate to the publication in question.

On the day of that shock-horror “exclusive” about the things you can find on the internet, the same scandalsheet’s continued coverage of the London attack ran to another 19 pages. On day three of its not giving terrorism publicity the count was down to a mere eight pages, again including the front.

Terrorists’ friend indeed. If a solitary, deranged individual with a police record and a string of pseudonyms, armed with a hire car and a knife, can truly be called a terrorist. That would seem to be affording him more dignity and importance than he warrants.

The police have called him “a lone wolf”, which doesn’t fit any definition of “terrorist” that makes much sense.

Collins English Dictionary, for example, defines terrorism as “systematic use of violence and intimidation to achieve some goal”. What happened last week was certainly violent – shockingly so – but hardly systematic. And it’s hard to see what goal Ajao / Elms / Masood can possibly have had in mind beyond the expression of his own disturbed mental state.

On the day he committed his murders, more than 300 people died in London. Assuming, that is, it was an average day. That’s just counting those likely to have been claimed by that greatest of killers, old age.

This in no way lessens the tragedy of those who lives were ended, or badly damaged, by Masood’s acts of criminal madness. It is no disrespect to those whose loved ones were so cruelly and pointlessly snatched away so long before their time should have been up. But it is to put a horrifying event in perspective.

On that same day, at least 33 innocent civilians were killed in an airstrike by US forces on a school near the Syrian city of Raqqa. Four days earlier, at least 52 had been killed in an American strike on a Syrian mosque.
It’s not just the Russians, and the Syrians themselves, who are slaughtering civilians in that sorry land. 

The obscenity committed in London last week happened in a place I know well. I and millions of others. Even to those who never set foot in the capital it will be highly familiar from television. So I understand, to a degree, the obsession with what takes place there.

And it is true, as has been widely remarked on, that that one act of random violence sparked hundreds of acts of kindness. It’s been called the British way. Actually, it’s the human way.

But it wouldn’t hurt us, as humans, to look occasionally beyond our own little bubble. To contemplate, for example, what the Westminster government gets up to beyond these shores.

The UK has sold over £3billion of arms to Saudi Arabia during that anachronistic kingdom’s killing spree in Yemen, which has just entered its third year.

Another, fuller definition of terrorism comes from The American Heritage New Dictionary of Cultural Literacy. It says terrorist groups “usually have the financial and moral backing of sympathetic governments”. In this particularly gruesome case – happening now and every day – it’s the British government that’s providing the backing. Aiding the unelected, fabulously wealthy rulers of an oil-rich state in raining death and destruction on their desperately poor neighbours.

Yemen’s children aren’t just starving to death – they are being deliberately starved. And our government is one of the biggest suppliers of arms to the perpetrators.

The Saudis are blocking aid into Yemen, which is now on the verge of a major famine, with four in five people in need of emergency assistance. Largely because of British-made bombs dropped by British-made planes.

This is terrorism on a far greater scale, with vastly greater resources of cash and technology, than anything that can be perpetrated with a car and a knife.

Yet the only reference made last week to Yemen in the aforementioned supposed newspaper was that “unsurprisingly” it was in the bottom ten in the world’s latest “happiness rankings”.

And its only reference to Raqqa was this: “A book written about the methods employed by Islamic State suggested that around ten Britons were working in the Syrian city of Raqqa to disseminate online propaganda around the world.”

Note again the obsession with the alleged evils of the internet.

It is, of course, true that the web has more than enough sites vilely promoting hatred. Prominent among them being the online presence of the paper that shall not be named.

After nearly 40 years in newspapers, I didn’t think anything in the business could surprise me. And then the Evening Standard named its new editor.

The paper’s sub-editors have just had their hours cut to save money. Then in comes an editor who already has five jobs. One of which, only recently announced, comes with a £650,000 salary. 

Four of those jobs, admittedly, are part-time – though between them they should net George Osborne a little over £1.5million a year. One wonders why he feels the need to edit the Standard as well.

Two possible motivations suggest themselves.

One is the realisation of a long-held ambition. In 1993, when he left Oxford University, he wanted to be a journalist. 

After failing to land a place on the apprenticeship scheme at The Times, he got an interview at The Economist, and was turned down there as well. He did do a bit of freelancing on the Daily Telegraph’s diary column, but that hardly makes him a qualified journalist.

Even Piers Morgan, Andy Coulson and Rebekah Wade (now Brooks), who all looked startlingly under-qualified when Rupert Murdoch handed them the reins of the late, lamented News of the World, weren’t that under-qualified.

Now, suddenly, Osborne’s in the big chair of London’s most widely read paper. A paper which, though it’s given away free and has only ‘local’ circulation, has more readers than every daily paper except The Sun and the Daily Mail. It would have looked a fabulous toy to the boy he once was.

But maybe the greater motivation is the opportunity he now has for revenge on Theresa May.

The PM didn’t just sack him as Chancellor when she moved in next door but piled on maximum humiliation in the way she did so. The arch Remainer now has the perfect platform from which to trumpet “I Told You So” as May’s hell-bent pursuit of Brexit sinks a disunited kingdom further into the mire.

Not that Osborne himself ran the economy well. To put it mildly. It was the austerity he plunged the less well-off into that got us into this mess. And all for the sake of further enriching the rich (like himself) while further impoverishing the poor – and a lot of the less-poor too. But the future scarcely looks any brighter under his successors.

It’s hard to know whether his latest appointment says more about the dire state of politics or the dire state of the press. The Twitter storm erupted almost immediately from both quarters.

The Lib Dems’ press office tweeted: “This doesn’t bode well for our coverage in the Standard.” To which one wag rapidly responded: “I don’t know why you say that, you lot propped him up for five years.” Fair comments, both.

But the political repercussions go further than which parties can expect a rough ride from Osborne’s paper (all of them, I suspect).

Many people have questioned whether it’s right for an MP to have another job while also collecting a £74,000 salary for sitting in the House. The electors of Tatton, whom Osborne is supposed to represent, have a right to feel let down. The question is so pertinent it may even lead to a change in the rules.

And it’s not just about whether it’s possible to do two full-time jobs properly. You might also think there’s a conflict of interest between the roles of MP and editor. After all, it’s the job of the press to hold politicians to account, in theory at least.

So what of Osborne’s other jobs? The combined income certainly gives extra meaning to the slash-and-burn Chancellor’s cynical comment that “we’re all in this together”.

Of course there’s nothing new in former ministers cashing in massively. Tony Blair is only the most recently, most egregiously visible of those who have grown very rich indeed trading on their experience of the corridors of power.

This is perfectly legal – as is Osborne’s lucrative few-days-a-month post with investment company BlackRock. Even though Parliament’s Advisory Committee on Business Appointments advised against it.

Whether it should be legal is another matter entirely.

In my view, it should be illegal to profit from politics, beyond the salary and expenses that come directly from it. And, as with crime, that should continue to apply for life.

But that’s the ethics of the ideal world, not the law of the real one. And we know who gets to make the laws. 

Contrary to appearances, it’s not actually newspaper editors. Though they sometimes seem to have a bigger say than they ought.

It’s partly, no doubt, a by-product of our shallow celebrity culture. It’s partly the fault, I’m sure, of the most shameful parts of our national press. Social media probably has a lot to answer for in the way it both trivialises and intensifies the public conversation. And no doubt some of our politicians must take a share of the blame themselves. But whatever the mix of reasons, it’s a sad fact that the level of political debate has fallen to that of name-calling.

Politics has always been more about personalities and less about policies than it should be. But I don’t remember it being quite this juvenile, quite this spitefully unpleasant before.

Labour leaders – with the curious exception, for a few years, of Tony Blair – have always been a target for the vitriol spat by some of our national press. Jeremy Corbyn no doubt knew it would be his turn the moment he was elected party leader. The moment, in fact, his candidacy for the job was announced.

But I don’t suppose even he imagined just how unfairly, how unremittingly, how childishly he would be dragged through the mud. How much he would face of the kind of undignified inanities normally reserved for unsuccessful England football managers. And along with that, almost worse, the sneering and trivialising attitude of the BBC.

One effect of all this nastiness has been to weld a pretty solid support for him out of those of us who always saw a decent, honest man trying genuinely to do his best. So it’s with deep sadness and regret that I now have to say I’ve had it with Corbyn.

I’m still sure he’s a remarkably nice bloke for a politician. But as a leader he is a disaster. The momentum is gone, wasted. And that’s not entirely the fault of the press.

Corbyn’s incomprehensible decisions over this past fortnight to bow down before the government have torn another great rip through the fabric of his already tattered and threadbare party.

And by agreeing before the Brexit debates began to back the triggering of Article 50 regardless, he gave up any possibility of salvaging anything from the wreckage. The debates became almost pointless. EU citizens here, and UK citizens abroad, abandoned to their fate and to a government that breaks its promises left, right and centre.

Corbyn now says he’ll fight for two years to get an exit on the best terms. But he’s too late. The fight’s happened, and he threw in the towel before the first bell.

Seeing the performance of Owen Smith on Question Time last week, I wondered for the first time if the wrong man won the Labour leadership contest. It’s a bit late for that too.

Smith and the Norwich South MP Clive Lewis are among very few people to come out of this whole affair with credit. Others are Nick Clegg – too late to redeem him from his colossal error of judgement in 2010 – and the best Tory PM we never had, Ken Clarke. Too late all round.

I could fill this page most weeks with my thoughts on Brexit. I don’t suppose I could change your mind, though, whichever way it’s made up. And I couldn’t change the sorry fact of where we are as a country.

But I’m sick and tired of being called a “remoaner”.

Apart from the fact that it’s a pathetic, school-playground sort of insult, it doesn’t come near expressing how angry I am. Or the urgency of the argument.

It’s as if I was in the back seat of a car heading faster and faster towards a cliff-edge, yelling at the driver to watch where she’s going. While she takes her hands off the wheel to turn round in her seat and tell me to stop moaning.

It’s enough to make me start calling certain people bad names.


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Ronald Coyne must be a right charmer. Only truly delightful young people video themselves burning £20 notes in front the homeless.

Give him a few years and this official (ex-official now) of the Cambridge University Conservative Association will probably be in the Cabinet. Chancellor perhaps, given his respect for both money and the disadvantaged. He seems the type.

The attempt by some of the press to smear Nicola Sturgeon by describing him as “a member of her family” is pretty rich, though.

His dad is the brother of the ex-husband of Sturgeon’s husband’s sister. That’s a pretty extended family. I must be related at least that closely to thousands of people I’ve never even heard of. By my calculation, it puts Coyne and Sturgeon only one degree of separation short of the six that are supposed to link you to everybody in the world.

Paul Dacre, the editor of the paper Wikipedia no longer trusts enough to be a source of accurate information, is probably related at least that closely to all sort of undesirables – socialists, people on benefit, refugees, people who fancy Diane Abbott…

The newspaper column that spawned this blog is no stranger to controversy and criticism. I’ve had abuse over my views on everything from global warming to social housing, nuclear weapons to grammar schools, Brexit to Donald Trump (inevitably). In years past, I’ve even had death threats for expressing my opinions about 4x4s and the invasion of Iraq. But if there’s one thing guaranteed to raise hackles in suburban streets and bring angry letters pouring into newsrooms, it's misuse of the English language. Or what a certain type of reader believes – always firmly – to be misuse.

So I’m reasonably confident that some of what follows will fulfil my regular function of provoking an irate reader response. As well as, I hope, a little of the rib-ticklery we all need at the start of what looks like being another grim year.

A former editor of mine once presented me with a framed copy of a letter he had received, scrawled heavily in an angry hand. Among other choice expressions, it said: “When there’s good men out of work, why employ such as that Semmens? Send him back to the gutter where he belongs.”

My crime on that occasion was to write about “naughty” words. Not even to use them, just to write about them.
But it’s not generally “bad language” that rubs up the man or woman on the Costessey omnibus the wrong way. It’s little things like apostrophes, hyphens and commas. (Or should that be “apostrophe’s, hyphens, and commas”?)

Reporters who like to boldly split infinitives. Others who don’t know the difference between desert and dessert (I’m not going for dinner with them). Headline-writers who put “striked” instead of “struck”.

I’m still shaking my head over that last one, which appeared just before Christmas on the Guardian website. Yes, I do know the Grauniad is famous as the paper that mis-spelled its own name, and yes I know the internet regularly sets new standards for illiteracy, but all the same.

Anyone literate enough to have read this far must share at least some of my pleasure and interest in words. And this is something I know about. (Sentences beginning with ‘And’ or ‘But’ are another thing that winds up a certain type of person, but they probably find me too annoying to read anyway. As they would Shakespeare, Yeats, Dickens. Oh, and the Bible.)

All newspapers and publishers have – or should have – something known in the trade as a style guide. It’s got nothing to do with what we wear to work, but everything to do with the words we use and how we use them.
I have written the style guide for one daily paper, co-written another, and contributed to the Daily Mirror’s version. I can spot a mis-spelled word or a grammatical howler in the middle of a printed page before I take in what the stories on it are about.

So I could hardly pass the poster outside the Palace Theatre in Manchester without grimacing. Advertising the current run of Billy Elliot, the Musical, it shows a man holding a laughing boy. Above the photo, the caption runs: “Funny touching and shamelessly enjoyable”.

And if that doesn’t show what a difference a comma – or its absence – can make, I don’t know what does. It makes the classic “Let’s eat Grandma” seem positively innocent. (OK, I haven't actually been to Manchester lately - but I don't think the photo was doctored. If it was, it still made the point nicely.)

Commas – like the spelling of such words as “defense” and “color” and the meaning of “pants” – are a little different in America. They tend to scatter them about more than we do. But I’d like to stick up for the American practice (though over there they'd call it a practise) of using what’s known as an Oxford comma before the “and” at the end of a list (as in the phrase “apostrophe’s, hyphens, and commas” above).

Consider the list “the president, a racist, and a misogynist”. Three things. Now imagine the same words without the second comma. On such slender differences legal cases are built.

Style guides tend to include things like whether acronyms should be written in capitals (FIFA or Fifa, ISIS or Isis). Which words should be hyphenated or run together (short list, short-list or shortlist). And how some words should be spelled (or spelt).

Personally, I like an “e” in “judgement”, but not in “aging”. You’d never put one in “raging”, “staging” or “engaging”, so why write “ageing”? But I recognise – as a lot of self-described pedants don’t – that this is a matter of preference, not of right and wrong.

I know people who get quite hot under the collar at what they consider the wrong use of “less” and “few”, or “imply” and “infer”. My own bugbear is the way “may” and “might” seem to have swapped meanings in the last few years. It might take me longer than I have here to explain that one fully.

Do these things matter? Probably not a lot. That’s one of the things I’ve learned (learnt?) in all my research and writing of style.

On the other hand, one can still be permitted a facepalm (one word, no hyphen) when an incontinent Twitter-user accuses China of “an unpresidented act”.

We’ve been hearing a lot lately about fake news. It’s even been suggested that false stories circulating through social media helped swing the Brexit vote and the US presidential election. I can believe it.

Even for seasoned journalists, it can be difficult to sift out the facts from the heap of misinformation that happens to support whatever you already believe. Others can be taken in by the most preposterous tales.

I’ve seen “news” items from sources such as the Southend News Network and the rather classier Suffolk Gazette passed on as if they were genuine. This is on a par with treating Monty Python as a documentary series, yet some people, it seems, are fooled.

But if the output of these spoof websites is (mostly) fun, there is a much more serious side to the deliberate spreading of  lies and distortions.

Not that it’s a new phenomenon. Certain national newspapers have always been at it – though they do seem to have got more blatant lately.

As a trainee journalist I was taught that the boundary between reporting and opinion had to be very clear at all times. Now that boundary has been smudged to the point where a reader cannot tell news from opinion, fact from fiction.

The selection of what’s considered worth printing – and where – is a crucial factor in swaying public attitudes, too.

The Daily Mail ran its report about Thomas Mair’s conviction for the murder of MP Jo Cox on page 30. A white neo-Nazi jailed for the politically motivated (i.e. terrorist) assassination of a British MP. Page 30. Tucked away between a dull picture story about I’m A Celebrity and one about a Christmas advert.

Might it, perhaps, have made the front page – news-stand visible – if the killer had been a black, Muslim or immigrant terrorist? You know the answer to that.

Where’s the balance here?

But an addiction to supposed balance has its drawbacks too. To put it mildly. Again, the line between fact and opinion – sometimes lunatic opinion – becomes dangerously blurred.

I can’t put it better than one of the world’s finest reporters, Christiane Amanpour of the US news channel CNN.
“I believe in being truthful, not neutral,” she told fellow journalists at the Press Freedom Awards in New York last week.

And she made this vital point: “We cannot continue the old paradigm – let’s say over global warming, where 99.9 per cent of the empirical scientific evidence is given equal play with the tiny minority of deniers.”

I can’t think of a more important subject. Or one where supposed media “balance” has done more drastic harm.

Has Britain – or rather, England – really become a nasty nation of intolerant, racist bigots? Or does it just look that way every time you pass a news-stand?

If you take some of our national papers’ front pages at face value, you might think we were living in a neo-Nazi land where foreigners are thought of as scum. And where those who stand up for a more reasonable view risk being forcibly silenced.

Did the Brexit vote in the summer – unexpected and shocking as it was at the time, inevitable as it looks in retrospect – suddenly alter our national character for the worse? Or did it just give licence to an unpleasant minority to start exhibiting their views in public?

The truth is, surely, somewhere between the two.

In my experience, most people are reasonably well disposed to one another most of the time. We mostly go through our daily lives rubbing along OK together. Even people who express appalling views about “Them” in general terms are likely to behave kindly towards an individual person.

But it’s also a horrible truth about humans that most want to fit in with those around them. So much so that whatever happens to be the public mood of the moment seems to most people as if it’s right and inevitable. And that going against it is criminal.

I have a gut-wrenching feeling that the public mood here and now is turning very unpleasant indeed. Encouraged in that direction by some unscrupulous individuals, both in politics and in what used to called Fleet Street.

The ability to sway the public mood has always been the tool of power. Shakespeare was very good at demonstrating that. And there have been plenty of stark examples since.

Here are some quotes, cynical but accurate, which seem uncomfortably relevant to the way we are right now.

“A lie, repeated 1,000 times, becomes a truth. The bigger the lie, the more it will be believed.”

“Propaganda works best when those being manipulated are confident that they are acting on their own free will.”

The author of those phrases knew what he was talking about. He was Hitler’s minister of propaganda, Joseph Goebbels.

And there’s this: “It is always a simple matter to drag people along, whether it is in a democracy, or a dictatorship. The people can always be brought to the bidding of the leaders. All you have to do is to tell them they are being attacked, and denounce the pacifists for lack of patriotism and exposing the country to danger. It works the same in every country.”

That was Hitler’s vice-chancellor, Hermann Goering. What worked for him in Germany in the 1930s, and for Stalin in Russia at the same time, is at work in the UK today.

I’d like to think we’re better than that, but people aren’t. Not really. Not anywhere.

It was in King’s Lynn in 1987 that CCTV first officially hit the streets of Britain. It was, inevitably, an import from America, New York’s Times Square having had its first cameras installed in 1973. Not that they made a fat bit of difference to the Big Apple crime rate.

From the first, I’ve been unsure about the video surveillance of public spaces. Partly through doubts about how effective it really is in preventing crime. Partly because I’m not sure I want Big Brother watching my every move. And we have long overtaken the States to become the most-watched citizenry in the world.

Not that most people, most of the time, seem to mind. Joe Public seems to have accepted meekly the death of privacy. If he hadn’t, he would never have bought a smartphone and clicked to allow Google to track his every movement, his every message, his every photo.

Turns out, though, that as well as being a spy in the pocket the camera-phone can empower its owner. It can turn the tables by turning surveillance on the authorities themselves. And it’s in the States that this is starting to have a major effect.

Look up – if you can bear to watch, if it wouldn’t make you feel complicit – the names Philando Castile, Samuel DuBose, Laquan McDonald, Tamir Rice, Levar Jones, Walter Scott, Eric Garner. Just a few of the 20-odd victims of filmed police violence that has turned up online in the past three years.

Black men – in Tamir’s case, a 12-year-old boy – attacked for little or no reason by white police officers. Caught in the act of such crimes as having a missing number-plate, a broken tail-light, waving a toy gun in an empty playground, selling untaxed cigarettes on the street.

All of them, apart from Jones and Garner, shot dead. Garner was killed by choking.

The case of Jones – the one survivor in the group – is in a way the most revealing.

Having been pulled over for not wearing a seat-belt, he was shot four times when he reached back into his car for his driving licence. But he didn’t die. He was wounded in the hip – and the officer who shot him regained composure enough to summon an ambulance and discuss with him quite calmly what had just happened.

Where but in America would a man reaching into a car be assumed to be going for a gun?

Where but in America would a cop feel so threatened in such a situation as to shoot first and ask questions later?

In none of these videos do the police show any sense of either shock or remorse at what they’ve done. Is it that they don’t feel any – because it’s all too commonplace, perhaps? Or is it that in their macho culture they have appearances, a self-image, to keep up?

And how much does that image come from watching too many movies and TV shows in which casual violence is routine, glamourised – and the cops on the front line always right? Especially those mavericks like Dirty Harry who stray violently beyond the rules.

The unjustified violence in the real-life-and-death videos is anything but glamorous. It’s messy, tacky, built on mistakes and fear. Real violence has always been like that. But the presence of cameras – CCTV, dashboard cams, mobile phones, the officers’ own body-cams – makes it harder for the perpetrators to justify.
 
 
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We live in an era of round-the-clock news, an age when it can seem almost impossible to escape from whatever the media decide to feed us. Which is a common agenda determined, in practice, by a fairly small number of editors and news editors.

Once, you had to make a decision to buy a paper if you wanted the news. These days it’s thrown at you constantly by radio, internet and television.  

In its early days, TV was not considered suitable for news. The BBC feared the temptation to seek interesting pictures would skew editorial judgement. That what was interesting or exciting to look at would prevail over what was important.

And you know what? They were right. These days the BBC’s own news channel is a 24/7 demonstration of the truth of that fear. But it’s not the only one. It’s an industry standard.

Shallow or trivial reporting spoken over a background of telegenic mayhem is always preferred to rational, objective analysis.

As for human interest – well, the words of Elvis Costello’s brilliant 1983 song Pills And Soap come back to me constantly. “The camera noses in to the tears on her face, the tears on her face, the tears on her face…”

Then there’s the wild, the wacky and the downright outrageous.

The brazen craziness of a Donald Trump may induce hysterics, cringeing mixed with disbelieving laughter. But for TV editors it triumphs every time over any clear-eyed relationship with the truth. And we all have cause to fear where that might lead.