Lowest common denominator

A man has been arrested in Girona (north-east Spain) for managing a site that distributed videos of teenagers basically beating each other up on camera. The individual's feed had more than 160,000 followers and catered to the innocuous-sounding trend of "happy slapping" (as it's called in Spanish and I imagine in English). Of course, this has resulted in many hours/pages/posts in the media and the usual wringing of hands has ensued. The general consensus is that the youth of today has gone to the dogs (sic.) But are the harbingers of the end of the world bringing down their wrath on the right people? Who is morally more corrupt: the addict or the dealer?

The press is the fourth pillar of democracy, or so we are led to believe, and yet the boundary between serious news (broadsheets) and what would be considered sensational "rags" has slowly become eroded. Hence our newspapers are full of true crime, dancing bears and provocative headlines promising salacious pleasure to anyone who clicks on them.

It's so much easier to get a reaction (and a click) by telling readers that the Spanish are anti-tourism vandals who hate "guiris"; whereas writing a boring 1,000-word article about the problems in Spain's housing market and how locals can't afford to live in their own town doesn't get the same engagement. It's much "sexier" to tell people that there are groups of marauding Mad-Max-style squatters ready to occupy their home, than discussing the innumerable blocks of empty apartments still in the hands of the banks since the economic crisis and the inefficiency of politicians to provide affordable housing. Who wants to hear about the contribution, both financially and culturally, that immigrants make to a country or the reasons why they have travelled thousands of kilometres? It's much more effective to galvanise people by convincing them that they're being invaded, having their jobs taken away from them and losing their cultural identity.

In the era of social media, we are led to believe that we need to give punters what they want, but should we? In the satirical 80s TV programme Spitting Image, journalists were portrayed writing sanctimonious articles about how appalled they were about society-in-general's behaviour, while knowing full well that their indignation was invented and intended to stir up their readers. The joke at the end was always that they behaved in exactly the same way as the people they vilified (or worse) and knew that human wretchedness sold papers.

As the French adage goes, "Plus ça change, plus c'est la meme chose."