The scourge of the morning

Every morning, I am woken up by my alarm at 7am. I turn over, hit the snooze button and grab an extra 15 minutes of sleep. Once my 7.15 alarm goes off, I’m out of bed and into my dressing gown. I walk downstairs and prepare my morning juice. With my juice in my hand, I head back upstairs and on the way, I turn on the pump for the shower. I spend the next twenty minutes beautifying myself with a shower and a shave and a scuab of the old fiacla. Following this, I quickly get dressed and head to the dart station. This is when I start to get annoyed.

As I approach Glenageary dart station, I am confronted by two young foreigners – one male one female - but both with the same agenda. They both want to burden me with a copy of the daily rag that they are paid to hand out. Yes I’m talking about the Herald AM and the Metro “newspapers” – the scourge of the morning. Actually, the girl who hands out the Metro is fairly cute and I enjoy smiling at her every morning but my mood quickly changes to irritation when she forms a barrier to the entrance of the station with her Herald AM counterpart. The idea is that they make it difficult to enter the station without acquiring one of these rags however I pointedly refuse to accept one – even if the cute girl smiles at me.

But that’s not all! My journey to work from here takes 30 minutes and over the course of that half hour I am presented with the same problem three more times. Once at the exit of Grand Canal Dock station, once at Baggot St Bridge and yet again outside my place of work on Baggot St. When I board the dart, I am frequently required to move copies of the “newspapers” off a seat in order to sit down. As the dart fills up, the rags are moved to the floor and by the time the train arrives in town, a massive amount of litter has accumulated throughout the carriages. Some people elect to take the rag with them off the dart however this only defers the problem to a different time and place. The rubbish bin at the exit to Grand Canal Dock station is constantly overflowing with the rags. As people walk by and see that the bin is full, they simply toss the paper on the ground. I’ve even seen one guy discard his papers on the ground surrounding the bin only to acquire new ones five seconds later from the distributors standing outside the station!

Aside from the massively unnecessary number of these rags floating around the city each morning, I have a problem with the content. I mean it would be one thing handing out all these papers if something substantial and good was contained inside but nothing could be further from the truth. The level of reporting in the Metro and Herald AM is absolute bottom of the ladder journalism. In fact, I don’t think it even qualifies as journalism. www.iclasses.org defines journalism as ‘a style of writing for presenting bare facts to describe news events’. Bare facts?! That’s a laugh! I think if anyone were to read any of the “articles” in the morning rags with any kind of scrutiny, they will find that bare facts have been replaced with sensationalised nonsense and silly captions that would be more at home in a childrens’ book. These papers are nothing but a collection of short words in large font with some bright pictures for people to look at. Very often, sentences don’t even make sense. Don’t get me wrong, I wouldn’t hold the Sun or the Star in any higher regard. But at least at least the people who read these are paying for their own rubbish. In the case of the Metro and Herald AM, the papers are forced on us for free each morning and we read them because we have nothing else to do on the way to work.

Well a long time ago I decided I wasn’t going to be subjected to this crap. I always bring a book with me to read on the dart and if I ever want to find out what’s happening in the news, I buy an Irish Times which is on sale just inside the door of Glenageary dart station. I am shocked at how many people read the tripe contained in the pages of these rags. People who otherwise command respect in society lower themselves each morning to a level beyond comprehension. And what about the kids? Every morning dart contains large numbers of school kids, most of who are also reading one of these papers. What are these kids going to grow up to be like if they keep reading this stuff? My old Leaving Cert English teacher, Ms. Duff had a way of dealing with it. Whenever she caught someone in the year reading a rag like the Sun or the Star or the Mirror, she would grab it off them, tear it to shreds and tell the student they would be in big trouble if she caught them reading that rubbish again. That was before the days of the Metro and the Herald AM but I have no doubt that she is equally as appalled by this scourge as I am.

In addition to the litter caused by these papers and the complete crap inside that they call news, I can only imagine the energy wasted on producing them. In an age where we are supposed to be as green as possible and reduce our carbon footprint, here we have two companies printing out tens of thousands of sheets of paper a day. And for what? So we can have our news dumbed down for us and be spoon fed it like children. So that tomorrow’s generation think that short words in big font together with a bright picture and a “clever” caption is news? For the four week period between 31/3/08 and 27/4/08, the Metro produced twenty issues averaging 75,805 individual papers a day. If each paper contains 30 pages that’s over 2.25 million pages produced every working day. If ever there was a contributor to global warming…

I urge people to do everything they can to stop this madness. There is no good at all that can come from the production of the Herald AM and the Metro. If enough people boycott them, maybe finally they will be shut down. Let’s all work towards a city where trying to catch a train or bus doesn’t mean being accosted from either side by rag pushing fiends. Or where people’s knowledge of current affairs does not stem from sensational claptrap. Let’s purge the scourge!