Over the summer we had riots and phone hacking. Everything?s gone quiet now and we're left with the old bogeymen.
The Mail sees global warming as some kind of conspiracy that involves the BBC, the lib dems, Richard Dawkins and someone at a council who wants to rebrand Christmas as Winterval.
In fact on Monday they managed to combine a climate change story with another of their favourite topics when they discovered that wind turbines were immigrants (?Two thirds of the UK?s wind turbines are foreign-owned?).
It's this obsession that has inspired them to make one of the biggest stories of the week actually be about a book with a factual error in it. This isn't normally news, but this time the book was an atlas and the error was an exaggeration of the effect of global warming on the coastline of Greenland. Therefore making it all into a sinister plot to force people to recycle their glass for the twisted sexual pleasure of Guardian-readers.
On Wednesday they managed to compare the liberal democrats to flat-earthers accusing them of ?clinging to long-disproved theories in unshakeable denial of realities staring them in the face?. On the same page there was an essay about the vast exaggeration of global warming.
The Sun gets our thumbs up for hysterical headline of the week. Ken Clarke is the kind of Conservative of whom the right wing press is very wary. For all his faults (and believe us, he has them) he's a libertarian and a pragmatist. Pragmatism requires compromise.
The more passionate people are about a news story, the more newspapers they?ll buy, so dressing up compromise as defeat is always good policy to make the masses see red. Remember IRA terrorism in Britain? In order for that conflict to be resolved, pragmatism was required. Do you think the tabloids saw the big picture or do you think they just tried to stoke the anger of their readers every time anything was given to Sinn Fein? Incidentally we always liked the way they were referred to as ?the troubles?. There was something stiff upper lipped about it. We?d like to see more patronising understating of serious issues. Palestine and Israel can be rebranded ?the tiff?. The Arab Spring would be ?the hissy fits?.
Anyway back to Ken.
Ken has been trying to get prison reforms pushed through the House of Commons. We won't bore you with the details, but the aim is to reduce the prison population which has more than doubled in the last 20 years.
Tuesday?s Sun helpfully condensed the reforms down to the wonderful headline ?Ken: Free All The Monsters? like an order from an insane scientist.
And to think there are those that think that the press stifle debate just as much as they encourage it.
Follow hecklerspray on Twitter or else we’ll kill you in your sleep or join our Facebook group if anyone is still daft enough to use it or BUY ONE OF OUR STUPID T-SHIRTS OR WE’LL KILL EVERYONE YOU’VE EVER LOVED!