Monday 10 September 2007

What's the Metros Agenda?

For those readers who live outside of the uk, The Metro is a free newspaper that is distributed in most of the major UK cities. Since it was first launched over 5 years ago, its proved very popular and many people, including a lot of friends have stopped buying a normal newspaper and just pick up the metro.

At least when you buy a paper, you normally know its political point of view, as you're going to choose a paper that matches your own. The Metro has very little actual analysis and normally concentrates on celebrity stories.

This mornings front page story was about a so called 'report' by the tax payers alliance into how UK families are paying £400 extra over the amount needed to cover their carbon footprint. Clearly the Taxpayers Alliance has an axe to grind over this and are certainly entitles to their point of view as is any individual or organisation.

What is surprising is that a survey run by a group with a clear right wing agenda manages to make it onto the front page of a national paper. If the conservative party was making a song and dance about this, I could understand.

Hence to the title of this post. The metro is owned by associated newspapers who also own the daily mail which is clearly aimed at white conservative middle class Britain, so what exactly is associated press up to?.

With so many stories that they could have run about the effect that global change is having, why concentrate on this non issue.

Instead of getting people to actually start thinking about the earth and each other, this article does nothing more than reinforce the Whats in it for me attitude.

1 comment:

Col said...

A bloke from the 'tax payers alliance' was on Newsnight the other night and was clearly both a git and an idiot (in my personal view - don't sue Charles!). Their name is also not specific enough - I am a tax payer, but am not part of their alliance. They should be called the 'former young conservative right wing nutter tax payer's alliance' or something. As for Metro's agenda, that's harder to call. A couple of months ago they ran a front page splash about how the UK's carbon footprint is vastly underestimated because it doesn't take into account all of the outsourced production by UK companies in places like China - which I thought was quite progressive of them. I suspect that they have limited editorial resources and run stories on whatever interesting press releases happen to come along. I was slagging off Metro to a teacher friend of mine not so long ago, and she said she thought it was great, because pupils who would otherwise take no interest in the news read Metro on the bus and so have a bit more awareness about current affairs than they used to.