Cogito ergo Sum

A few years ago I would introduce my students to a lesson on the British media by giving them a list of, "who reads what in Britain?" It went something like this; "The Financial Times is read by the people who run the country", "The Daily Telegraph is read by the people who think they run the country", "The Daily Express is read by the wives of the people who think they run the country", anyway, on and on the list went, all inclusive, down through "The Morning Star (the old CPGB daily) is read by the people who would like another country to run the country" to the people's favourite, "The Sun" and, "The Sun is read by people who don't care who runs the country as long as she has got big boobs. However, if we thought the pits had been reached, we were wrong, because even "The Sun" covered political items and real news, albeit very sketchily and with a lot of bias. No the plebs needed something else and so, in 1991, "The Daily Sport" was launched some five years after its sister paper, "The Sunday Sport". It was later to have problems because of its "adult content" and sort of just disappear. However, the good news for the working classes of the United Kingdom is, it was relaunched in April of this year. Still, no need to pass the news on because "The Daily Sport" sold an average of 85,000 copies a day in June 2008.
When I was younger I didn't really believe that people believed the crap they were reading in the Murdoch press. That is when I was younger, now I realise they do and similarly, when I was first introduced to a copy of "The Daily Sport" I thought, "well, it is just a spoof, nobody actually believes this", but do you know, I think they do! Perhaps, we shouldn't be too harsh on the media in China and too ready to accuse the Chinese of being gullible and who can forget the ridiculous figure of Colin Powell, pointing to satellite photographs of empty buildings and telling the world media that these were nuclear installations and there they are doing the same thing with Iran.

The front cover of "The Daily Sport" shows that the paper is doing even better than than the 85,000 daily circulation figures might have suggested. Recent satellite photos of Iran are suggesting that the "mad mullahs" have the nuclear capability to unleash an Islamic armageddon on mankind.