It's not exactly News is it?

One of the things you tend to find yourself doing when you’re a journalism student/wannabe professional blogger is trawling news sites, trying to find something to write about. This naturally brings a lot of headlines to your attention.

Now I have a lot of respect for headline writers. Trying to come up with a snappy one liner that sums up a story is quite difficult. But sometimes I come across headlines that are so incredibly clichéd and predictable that my options are tweet it or curl up in a ball on the floor laughing. Yesterday, for example, we had “Tories will fight hard for seat.” According to the story, Conservative party chairman Baroness Warsi had said that the Conservatives would fight hard for Chris Huhne’s seat if he was forced to resign, rather than simply let the Lib Dems have it. While the headline is a perfectly good one, it’s also predictable. Of course the Tories are going to want to increase their majority. You don’t need to say it.

This week however we’ve had a set of headlines so amazingly clichéd, predictable and ridiculous that I just have to bring them to your attention. First off:

Cameron willing to take Hit over NHS Reforms

In this story the Prime Minister outlined how he expected, and was, indeed, quite willing, to “take a hit” over his proposed changes to the NHS. He meant of course to his popularity and polling numbers.

Oh. David!

If you think this demented course of action is just going to result in a dip in the popularity polls you need your head examining. If you’re going to “take a hit” from anything it will be the volley of heart monitors flung by angry doctors and nurses.

The problem is of course that Cameron – and by extension Andrew Lansley – are breaking the Golden Rule of British politics. Each party has their own of course. For the Tories it is, “thou shall not speak ill of the blessed Maggie”. For Labour it’s “thou shall not annoy the Trade Unions” and for the Lib Dems it’s “thou shall always seek to represent the people.” 

Ooops. Oh well. No one’s perfect.

But the central rule, to which every party subscribes, is “Thou shall not mess about with the NHS.” I’m not kidding when I say that how a party treats the NHS can be a clincher when it comes to elections.

Now I know the Tories have never been particularly fond of the concept of the NHS, but even Mrs Thatcher never went as far as Cameron and Lansley are going. It’s almost as if Cameron is tired of being at the top already and so is committing electoral suicide as quickly as he can.

He keeps saying that it’s too late to drop things now, but come on. Nobody wants these reforms to go through. If he wants his place in history to be a favourable one, I would simply scrap it now and have done.

Secondly we have this amusing pair of headlines out of Russia

Putin Declared President

Opponents Claim Fraud

These headlines refer, of course, to the Russian presidential election, where Vladimir Putin was elected for a third term as President of the Russian Federation. Naturally his opponents claimed it was a set up.

No. Really? You don’t say?

Honestly I expected the next set of headlines to read

Nobody That Surprised

Or maybe “Pope is revealed to be Catholic.” I mean come on! It’s a Russian Presidential Election. If it had passed without even a whiff of impropriety then I would have been surprised. The Russians tried democracy for about five minutes and didn’t enjoy it very much.

I mean did anyone really expect Putin – the man who has built a fairly strong cult of personality around himself – to leave something as important as the election results up to chance? Good grief man, he might have lost. And then what would have happened?

Of course his confirmation will go by without a hitch – Putin is still beloved by a large amount of Russians – but still I find the surprise to be well... surprising.

Of course it might be that I’m the only one who finds these headlines at all amusing. But you never know. If you spot any other amusing ones, feel free to forward them to me. Best one gets a blog mention.