Credit Crunch Fatigue And A Culture Of Hysteria: Is it me, or are we all just a little too easily distracted at the moment?

The thing is, the credit crunch is not just depressing, it's dull too. My capacity for mortally depressing news has its limits, but my tolerance for news which combines the depressing with with the brain-crushingly dull is much lower. The economy is fucked: I get it. Or rather, I don't get it, however much the Today show on Radio 4 wants to bark at me about it every single morning as I struggle to drag myself from my bed into the bleak landscape of job insecurity and spiralling utility bills they're describing, and because my level of Actually Understanding It Or Whatever extends to "People Like Me Are Going To Be Poorer For The Next Few Years Because Some People In 'The City' Are Greed Crazed Douche-Bags", I really find it difficult to engage meaningfully with the story.

The way the news cycle in this country has been working recently suggests many other people are on the same page. If it isn't news about the credit crunch, we're absolutely mad for it. In hindsight, The Ross & Brand Controversy was perhaps the first of this At Least It's Not Another Story About The Credit Crunch wave. Would this ludicrous debacle have been the monster of a story it was if we weren't so eager to talk about anything other than a financial crisis we don't understand? The story became something other, something more than it really was; there was a feverishness, a wild, desperation to the whole affair which was, by any rational standard, way out of proportion with the event itself. I mean, was it really the era-defining referendum on decency it apparently became? Did people have to be forced from their jobs? Was it necessary for the Prime Minister to comment on the affair?

Then we have the case of Baby P, a story blood-chillingly awful and shocking in a variety of ways, and absolutely worthy of our attention...but again, the perceived scale of national outrage, the outpouring of grief...I heard somebody on the news today suggest that the story has brought about a period of "national soul-searching", again, as though this were some 'defining moment' in the nation's psyche, a 'Diana moment'. As terrible as the story is, history will not record Baby P and the failures of Haringey Council in such epochal terms, and rhetoric of this nature has more to do with Credit Crunch fatigue than a rational reaction to the story itself. I guess what I'm saying is that the Baby P story has taken on a significance it would not have had in a different climate.

Finally, we have the insane amount of mainstrean media coverage afforded to two stories based around reality tv shows; Laura's ejection from The X-Factor a couple of weeks back, and the failure of the public to eject John Sargeant from Strictly Come Dancing. It's not as though these are even major stories by regular reality TV 'news' standards; there was never any real question that Laura's eviction was illegitimate, there was no accusation of vote-rigging or even panto-style foul-play by the judges, and Sargent's continued success is simply the latest in a tradition of the show's token 'comedy' contestant being understandably well supported by the public. It's not like we're talking Race Row In The Big Brother House here.

What is ultimately most revealing about these stories is that they disappear from the news cycle as quickly as they appear; we forget them quickly, because such a huge part of their 'appeal' is their novelty value, the quick fix, the new-kicks-now, anything but the dreaded Crunch, they sustain themselves a matter of days beyond their natural limits and as they're stretched to breaking point, the media has hammered up some new scandal, and the nation throws itself into the next whirlwind of despair. Seems like when it comes to the Crunch, the British people, and the media, would rather talk about anything else.