You know that a government is in trouble when the newspapers who form their cheer squad, start publishing obvious non-news.
This week alone there are at least five major scandals which if politics wasn't being directed by the proprietors of media outlets, would have made the front pages of both the tabloids and the broadsheets. These are scandals which include the sexual illegalities of members within Parliament House itself, the mismanagement of billions of dollars, bullying allegations, court proceedings to do with the disenfranchisement of rank-and-file members, and historical allegations relating to the performed racism of the Prime Minster's own preselection.
Given all of this, what did the Daily Telegraph decide to run with as a major story arc?
"Inflation Australia: Rising cost of a supermarket shop between 2019 and 2022"
Seriously? We've got several things which should warrant either a Royal Commission or investigations by the Federal Police and the hard-hitting journalism of the Daily Telegraph chooses to run pieces which once upon a time would have belonged in the newspaper's own "Happy Shopper" columns.
Inflation Australia: Rising cost of a supermarket shop between 2019 and 2022
It’s no surprise that the cost of filling up your trolley has soared in three years, with certain products nearly doubling in cost.
It’s no surprise the cost of filling up your trolley costs more in 2022 than it did three years ago.
However, the exact difference three years makes to a trip to Woolworths is startling.
Comparing the 2019 receipts from a pre-pandemic supermarket shop of an inner-city Sydney couple with a five-year-old child, an 18-month-old infant and a cat, the same shop costs $45.90 more in 2022.
- Daily Telegraph, 4th Apr 2022
Of course it's no surprise the cost of filling up your trolley costs more in 2022 than it did three years ago. That's like saying that water wets things, or that trees are a good source of shade, or publishing a handy hint that if you put a brick in the cistern of your toilet that it will take up space and you will end up using less water when flushing the toilet. Pointing out an obvious thing while obvious, isn't news.
Take a deep dive into the article in question and the list of items that they have compared came to a total of $236.07 in 2019.
"However, the exact difference three years makes to a trip to Woolworths is startling."
Is it? If you apply the basic interest formula and assume a rate of inflation of 3% then you get the following calculation:
A = P(1+r)ⁿ
A = $236.07 (1.03)³
A = $257.96
Actual A = $259.97
Allowing for inflation, that's what? One Mars Bar in two years?
Ergo, inflation is running at about 3% which is less than the historical average since about 476AD. The reason why I have chosen that date is that that was the date that the Roman Empire snapped in half and it's pretty safe to say that the passing of a hundred generations of people sort of constitutes the long run in economics.
The general rate of inflation since the end of the Roman Empire runs at about 4% over the very long run; that includes the entirety of the industrial revolution, mass production, computerisation, as well as the discovery of the entire New World. Here though, inflation is running at about 3% which seems completely normal; especially given that we've just passed through a major pandemic and still have come out the other side fully.
Of course it's no surprise the cost of filling up your trolley costs more in 2022 than it did three years ago. That's like make the equally obvious statement that prices in general rise. In fact if we want to be exact about it, the headline should read: "Prices Of Consumer Goods In Line With Consumer Price Index". This is so much of a non-news item that it should be laughable.
There's also something else that's subtly interesting here:
"Comparing the 2019 receipts from a pre-pandemic supermarket shop of an inner-city Sydney couple with a five-year-old child, an 18-month-old infant and a cat, the same shop costs $45.90 more in 2022."
An "18-month-old infant"? I have bad news for the Daily Telegraph. That is that an 18-month-old infant, didn't even exist in 2019. An 18-month-old infant was born in October 2020. I know that this may shock the staff at the Daily Telegraph and I don't really want to have the conversation about where babies come from but it should be pretty obvious that if you are carrying the costs associated with a person who didn't even exist during the previous period of comparison, then those new costs should add to the overall costs and make the total bigger. I have no idea how old the cat is and there is no comment on whether or not the couple in question got it before or after 2019. I assumed that when questioned, the cat provided no useful comment.
Why even run an article like this? Why run an article in a newspaper which is in no way newsworthy at all? Maybe it is possible that articles like this are kept in a kind of buffer in case the newspaper needs to pad out the content. Local newspapers used to do this a lot with almost a trope of articles where you'd have a local person looking either sad or angry and pointing at something. The "local person points at a thing" is a classic of the genre. It is possible but unlikely. This was given prominence at the front of the newspaper and made to look very important indeed.
The thing about newspapers and even more so in the age of the internet, is that the sacred and the silly, the grave and the garish, the banal, the boring, and the brutal, can all be paraded along side each other. Media like radio and television which is linear has the problem that there can only be one thing shown at a time but in print or an infinite scroll, a seemingly equal weight of importance can be placed on anything.
That's especially important if you are engaged in the art of political manipulation of the public. We live in a kind of Huxwellian future, which is not overtly oppressively as the idea of Big Brother in Orwell's '1984' and neither is it as controlled as Huxley's 'Brave New World'. The public who are naturally individually selfish, are mostly Delta-Middles who want to be left alone, who want government to be there when they need need it but don't want to pay for it. The object of the rich and powerful is to maintain being rich and powerful and mass media is an excellent was to sell whatever narrative is sufficiently good enough to that end.
The one fly in the ointment here is that people tend to have a sense of conscience or at very least a sense when they are being taken for rubes. An article like this exists as a lollipop of distraction so that people won't notice what's going on; even when there are at least five scandals which has there been an objective media would have been reported on.
It’s no surprise that the Daily Telegraph which is owned by the son of the former proprietor of the political party now embroiled in things as serious as sexual illegalities of members within Parliament House itself, the mismanagement of billions of dollars, bullying allegations, disenfranchisement of its own members, and historical allegations relating to the performed racism, should want to run a screen for all of this. If they can be made to be aware of their own wallet, for just long enough, they won't bother looking up and around at what's going on in the world.
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