Outrage

My daughter and I often have a discussion about newspapers' responsibilities to be careful about what they print. When I get  twitchy about an article I have accidentally read in the Daily Mail she tells me that it is my fault as they only print things that people read. It's all about what sells. She tells me that people enjoy being upset and outraged and although they pretend they only want to read good news it's always the stories with conflict that they click on. I have, in the past, disagreed with her, insisting that people read those stories because that's all they are presented with and if the press gave us more happy stories then we would all be much more content.

For the New Year I decided not to read or watch anything that I knew would offend or upset me. No more Katie Hopkins, Nigel Farage or Jeremy Clarkson. No more accidentally clicking on a Daily Mail article because someone I respect on Twitter links it with the statement, "you must read this!" If something appeared on the TV I didn't like I was going to turn it off. But since then, life has lost a little of its sparkle. 

This week, I have finally decided that my daughter was right - outrage is fun. Some people like to provoke it and others like to take offence: it's a game we play. It was Question Time and the discussion of Charlie Hebdo that made me realise my error.  In truth, I should have given up Question Time in January, as it has become more provocative recently but I do like to be informed and it helps me fall asleep after a very long Thursday. 

This week David Starkey was being borderline racist about Muslims in his very odd, 'I'm so clever and use lots of long words so that you have to think I'm right' way and Mehdi Hasan was becoming offended but trying very hard to keep calm. It was gripping television. Shouting at a box on the wall had never been more fun. Twitter (or the twittersphere as it is now called by the Guardian) went mad (or imploded, if you read the Guardian). People called for the BBC not to book people like David Starkey (who had  refered to Mehdi as Ahmed) but how can they not when all the Question Time tweets referred to what he had said? We live in a country where free speach is allowed but our National Press is a business and it is going to cater for what the majority of the people want and if we're honest, we want a bit of controversy and something to discuss around the water cooler.

The alternative, however, is too awful to comprehend. If we lived in a society where people weren't allowed to offend then maybe the bombings on the Charlie Hebdo office wouldn't have happened because it would have been illegal to draw the cartoons (just as it's illegal to bomb offices) but people would be punished for saying things. It would be the decision of a government what you could and couldn't say. You could get ten years in jail and 1000 lashes for blogging, "Secularism respects everyone and does not offend anyone ... Secularism ... is the practical solution to lift countries (including ours) out of the third world and into the first world.", as Raif Badawi has in Iran.

So, I'm going to hang on to my right to be offended and to say offensive things, like, "Did you see the picture of Gordon Ramsay suggesting that we all eat more vag?"