Apparently, the BBC spends £406,000 a year on bottled water. As with all the recent shocking revelations about MPs expenses, and BBC abuses of the License Fee, and duckhousegate, and pornclaimgate, this figure is supposed to raise outrage and flaming pitchforks, when the most it deserves is a shrug.
Before this story, did anyone have any idea how much the BBC spent on water? Or were they, like me, totally unequipped to make any kind of estimate?
It's a headline, so we assume it's bad. But I don't really know how much water costs. It's not something I concern myself with. So that figure could well have been plucked out of the air. If the same story told me that the BBC spent £4 million on water, I'd have exactly the same reaction: "that sounds like quite a lot, I suppose". If they spent £40,000, and it was phrased the same way, lots of people would be appalled at the sheer hedonism of this public funded company. We'd picture a decadent orgiastic feast of water: water flowing like wine; water ON TAP, people bathing in water! Oh, BBC. It's like the last days of Sodom, only cleaner.
These stories always present figures devoid of context. Or give a context so abstract, they might as well invent a fictional currency to compare it to. (£400 grand? That's equivalent to six million Bavarian guilder! Or a trillion vampire pesetas!)
"Experts say that this amount of water could fill three Olympic swimming pools, seventy-twelve times, in a drought, with pigs shovelling the liquid from colossal vats with trowels made of mercury."
Well, thanks a lot. That makes it much clearer.
If it had been a positive headline (unlikely, I know), it might have said "through a series of initiatives, the BBC have cut their water spending by 50% - now only spending £406,000 a year". And we would have congratulated them.
All news coverage is completely devoid of proportion, because they're trying to sell us on ideas that are completely outside of our sphere of knowledge. They have complete control over whether these figures are good or bad. (They always choose bad.)
For example, we know stabbings are bad. I don't want to be stabbed. If a friend is stabbed, I get quite upset. But how many stabbings are there every year in Britain? I have no idea. If someone said twenty, I'd go along with it. If they said twenty thousand, it would seem plausible.
Maybe it's my fault for not being informed. I couldn't tell you what my bank balance is to the nearest hundred pounds. I always use this ignorance to justify frivolous purchases ("Well, for all I know, I might have fifty less pounds than the actual figure. So essentially that fifty pounds is bonus money."
But I don't think the news is helping. I suppose it's in their interests to make statistics as vague as possible, so they can be modified to serve the narrative of the day. Facts can only hinder storytelling.
But it works. People get outraged by these arbitrary numbers. The thought of our tax dollar being thrown down the drain (either directly, or via throat, bladder and toilet) is beyond the pale.
I think the best solution is to put a cap on numbers. We should outlaw any number over, let's say, 1000. It would make everything much more straightforward. It would lead to no problems.
No problems.
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