But no, particularly since the age of 24 hour news and digital technology, reporting the snow has turned into 'dire end of the world warnings' mixed with a cuddly multi-media slideshow of things covered in snow. This from the Telegraph:
Or from the Mail
Just in case we don't know what stuff covered in snow looks like. We could of course just look out of the window if we really wanted to know. But despite this, the fact that it's just winter dominates the news, as epitomised by the BBC - it's headline news, consisting of reports showing people building snowmen and with copious reporters stand out in fields looking cold and telling us how cold it is. One dreads to think how the MSM would react if ever got cold enough to hold Frost Fairs.
Yet even the lack of snow doesn't stop them. A BBC reporter was standing on a bridge above the A1(M) at Gateshead on BBC Breakfast this morning, giving lurid accounts of heavy snow and traffic problems, while behind him not a flake could be seen and the A1(M) was flowing normally. And not just the BBC either, this from the Mail:
According to the caption below the picture:
Big Ben clock in London is seen in the river Thames surrounded by snow yesterday morningYeah I suppose there's some snow in there if you look hard enough. However what makes this worse is the rise of so-called 'citizen journalism, where viewers and readers are encouraged to send pictures in - 1000s of pictures of stuff covered in...er...snow. This is the digital equivalent of having to sit through your Gran's holiday snaps. Nothing could illustrate this better than this example from the BBC:
The caption underneath reads (and I'm not making this up):
Snow has fallen on many parts of the UK. Caroline Hall, from Pocklington, near York, sent this photo of her VW Beetle "Spaghetti". "He is very cold," she says. "Going to have to go and check he is OK soon, poor thing. There is even snow on his little exhaust pipes!"That is not news. This is news:
This is not news, it's a fucking snowman:
If the snowman were to go around kidnapping young children and flying them off to Greenland, that would be news but it hasn't so it's not.