Today the world will go mad. A man and a woman are having a baby and that will now lead the BBC news, the LBC news and every other news. The plight of Jamal Khashoggi will be relegated to a footnote. The Brexit backstop? Nah, not so important. The government’s new Loneliness Strategy? Forget it.
And yet in every newsroom up and down the country journalists will be tearing their hair out, not wanting to do this. Because they know what real news actually is.
The general public, however, will devour the royal baby “news” as if it was going out of fashion. The fact that the wedding of Princess Eugenie to Jack Whatsisname was the most read article on the BBC website on Friday tells you all you need to know.
I’ll make a token protest and tell my producers I don’t want to cover the royal baby in my 7pm LBC Newshour but I know it’s a battle I will lose. I’ll play Mr Grumpy on CNNTalk at noon, where the entire show will come from outside Buckingham Palace, but in the end I have to recognise that it’s a subject many of the viewers will love to talk about and react to.
And then you have The Telegraph announcing on Twitter that the “Duchess of Sussex is expecting Prince Harry’s first child.” As if this was 1818 rather 2018. They did have the good grace to change it to THEIR after it was pointed out to them.
And then this tweet from Catherine Mayer…
"I'm a producer with ⬛⬛⬛⬛. Would you like to come on the show to debate Meghan's pregnancy?" "No thanks. I'm not doing any interviews about the royals." "But we need a feminist. We'll be discussing whether she should have travelled to Australia in her condition." pic.twitter.com/STlQU4SAgs
— Catherine Mayer (@catherine_mayer) October 15, 2018
Words fail me. And we now have a whole day of this sort of bollocks.
It’s not news. It’s showbusiness.