The people who hand out London Lites are getting nimbler by the day. No matter how hard you try to avoid eye contact, how quickly you accelerate as you move into their orbit, how many other hurried commuters stand between you, they’ll shove a copy of their vapid rag in your face. Or they’ll die trying. Ducking, weaving, somersaulting their way through the rush-hour throngs to bring you ‘the news’, whether you like it or not. Let me make it clear, straightaway, that this isn’t an implicit dig at the people who hand out thelondonpaper. They are, in my experience, just as spry, and their product is, without a doubt, just as annoying.

I’m also not going to bother sounding-off about how awful the content of these essentially identical papers is. We all know that the dating columns are fabricated; we all know that two recent graduates are responsible for pretty much every article; and we all know that if they don’t manage to kill Amy Winehouse, it won’t be because they didn’t give it their best shot. Let us take that as - unfortunately, far too frequently - read.

Instead, reflect for a moment on how depressing it is that at six o’clock of a weekday evening, everybody is reading the same thing. We like to pretend that it’s just a reflex. We pick them up because they’re there. Something to do, isn’t it? Not fooling anyone. Time was when a stranger’s arm snaking its way behind you on the tube was a sure sign of unsolicited sexual attention. Now it’s a sure sign that someone is groping for the scrunched up copy of London Lite resting on top of your seat.

Underlying this frenzied pursuit of carbon-copy inanity is the idea that there exists a perfect form of ‘the news’ that can be delivered into our minds unmediated. Pick up a free paper, glance over it, and you will be - this is a guarantee - informed. But ‘the news’ doesn’t exist as some absolute quality, abstracted from the rough and tumble of normal life. Papers give us ‘the news’ of what is happening in our world, as understood by some of us.

Outright lying on the part of reporters is, granted, a bit off, but it’s impossible to relay the news without striking up an attitude to it. No matter how objective a reporter tries to be, they’re still a person with opinions and prejudices. We know that, through the relative space and prominence given to articles, newspapers even strike an attitude at the level of their layout. And that’s as it should be; once we finish reading a newspaper, we keep on living, so we need to decide how we’ll integrate our understanding of what’s happened into what we do once it’s happened.

Making the effort to buy a paper, then, deciding what you’ll part with your hard-earned (or loaned) money for, is, at the very least, a gently positive exercise of will. It’s a statement that, for today, I accept, or, to put it in its weakest terms, am willing to countenance, the attitude of whichever papers I buy. I am much more comfortable with someone actively deciding to buy The Daily Mail, however obnoxious I find its attitudes, than I am with someone actively avoiding thinking by making a dash for the last Metro. At least the Mail reader is making the effort to engage with reality. Sort of.

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London, Media