Presidents Club

I’m so astounded that my fellow men have let us down and yet again scandal has landed across the headlines with men behaving badly in the UK.

Put men on their own together, add some alcohol and rich food and the blood rushes down.

I can’t think of anything worse, an ‘Only Men’ dinner!

Who wants to go to that?

When I was employed I had to attend, back in the 90’s, a so-called sports dinner, yep, you guessed right, men only! I’ve never played rugby or football, so basically the discussion ended up being about work and the weather. I’ve never been so bored. Usually they have a comedian whose stand-up routine is very blue too.

This latest scandal reminds me of the hit series on Netflix, The Crown, where Prince Phillip attended a men’s only club, called The Thursday Club and the goings on that resulted. He had to sack his personal secretary for inappropriate behaviour that resulted in his wife divorcing him. This was in the 1950's.

Here is a quote from an article in the Independent newspaper on 16th January, 1996, written by Miles Kington who obviously attended the club.

“I think I am probably one of the last surviving members of the old Thursday Club, the gang of cronies that the Duke of Edinburgh used to gather round him in the 1950s to have a bit of fun away from his serious life at Buckingham Palace. The club was strictly all-male, but that does not mean there were not women at these gatherings. After all, as Arthur Koestler once said to me, “The extraordinary thing about men at all-male gatherings is that they talk about women non-stop, whereas at mixed functions the men talk only about male hobbies such as sport, politics and cars — never about women, even though there are many women present.”

It is ironic that nearly 60 years later a similar club still existed, The Presidents Club.

I am not doubting the huge amount of good they have done as a charity, but now they have caused the charity to close down with the inevitable result of job losses and the good causes losing out too.

Sometimes I am embarrassed being a man.

Michael de Groot

Press

The first ENGLISH newspaper was first published in The Netherlands.

I know that might sound like a fake news story, but it is actually true. In fact they published newspapers for Italy and Germany before they published their own.

Here is the Wikipedia page that confirms the story and of course you may not believe Wikipedia either?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_newspaper_publishing

Well it all depends whether you’re Dutch like me and then you will convince yourself that indeed it is true. Or if you are a different nationality then you will read that your nation was the first one to publish newspapers, doesn’t matter that it wasn’t in English, correct?

Either way the press have been around for 400 years and news stories are being published every single second of the day at lightening speed. Because it is news, we have a built-in program, conditioned over centuries that whatever has been published by the press is actually true. After all it’s there in black and white and surely nobody would allow the journalists to write a fake news story and actually publish it?

Roll on the internet and now we find ourselves in the wild Wild West. Basically anything goes. But our brains are still conditioned to believe what has been written by the so called press must be the truth.

I have one great example to share with you, a story that reports on bad weather. Here in the UK we are obsessed with the weather and the press know this, so it’s always an excellent opportunity to publish an article about forthcoming weather events in the UK, especially snow and wind, they make a lethal combination to get our attention.

However reporters like to bend the truth in their headlines to pull you in to their story. Have a look at the screenshot below of a headline that caught my attention. Now you may suggest to me that it’s just a coincidence, but I’ve been studying news headlines all through 2017 and have noticed patterns, especially about outlandish weather headlines that hardly ever were true.

The first part of the headline suggests that hundreds of people are stranded in heavy snow. The second part is confirming a forecast 70 mph winds set to batter London and Southeast.

The headline starts off by saying that the news is Live, so it can be misunderstood to say that at the time of that story being published, people are stranded in London and the Southeast with 70 mph winds. It’s ever so subtle but it attempts to get you to click through, which of course I did.

We don’t read properly on the web, we scan and journalists know this, you’re even scanning when you reading this article.

Can you see what I mean with misleading and outlandish headlines? The next day there were even more headlines along the same lines. I’m guessing that weather stories are clickbait for the press to get us to their sites. Makes you wonder doesn’t?

Happy reading?

Michael de Groot