WE are leaving for Manchester to help our son and his girlfriend move flats. I am dressed in my typical uniform of broken-in Levi’s with the bottoms turned up, Doc Marten shoes (lightweight ones, not the four-wheel drive winter versions) and an old shirt worn untucked.

“Are you sure that’s a shirt that’s best worn untucked?” my wife asks. “Only you’re so slim you don’t need to wear a shirt untucked.”

Oh, what a gentle yet piercing observation. To the point without being rude, and sweetened with a honey squeeze of flattery. So I tuck the shirt in and after that I am deemed presentable enough to leave the house.

As we drive across the M62, a road much travelled, I think about the rules of male fashion. Lots of men decline to tuck in their shirts. It’s quite a thing nowadays. I have even seen a Facebook post with the title: “Do I need to tuck my shirt in?”

I left it unread as it was by way of a disguised advert for shirts I probably can’t afford.

Many middle-aged men wear more or less the same clothes, dressing as I like to, perhaps with brogues instead of Docs on a night out. When I went into an office five days a week, I always wore a tie. Nowadays I avoid the noose if possible, but do string something striped around my neck if I am interviewing someone.

Here in York, the Lord Mayor, the first Green incumbent, is a cheerful and friendly man called Dave Taylor. From what I can see, he is throwing himself into the role with great charm and energy. Everyone should be happy with such a Lord Mayor, especially as the previous one spent a lot of time complaining about things. Yet a letter writer to the Press moaned about Dave’s lack of a tie in a photograph. This makes you wonder if perhaps some people’s minds are not much bigger than the knot in a tie.

It is raining in Manchester, just like the last time we went. We move everything between the flats, including our son’s collection of guitars. In one of many trips in the lift, I notice that my son is wearing jeans with the bottoms rolled up. I point this out to him. “Short legs,” he says.

One of my brothers wears his jeans that way too. Short legs all round.

Removal business over, we have something to eat at Salford Quays, dodging even heavier rain, then drive back over the M62. As we skirt Leeds, I am driving in the middle lane. Time to move over, I think, as I am not one who usually hogs the middle lane.

Before I can do that, I spot a Range Rover coming up on the inside lane. So I wait. The car pulls level and the driver gesticulates that I should have moved lanes.

I leave him to it. Once his big red face, and his big black car, have rolled away to conquer more tarmac, I move over. I would have done this earlier if an intemperate idiot in a house-sized car hadn’t been overtaking me on the inside.

As he was sitting down, I couldn’t see if that driver had his shirt untucked. But I am guessing that it was tucked in and tied in a knot under his testicles, as that would explain his lack of good humour.

Either that or he was just an annoying tit. And no doubt he drove off thinking the bald bloke in the old Volvo estate was an annoying tit. Now isn’t that just how life sometimes rolls: annoying tits in all directions, whether or not they have their shirts tucked in.

So the sartorial question of the day is: should men tuck their shirts in? All suggestions welcome. Today I put on a T-shirt as no one tucks those in; or at least I hope not.

IT takes something for a pub in York to survive being messed around with. So all praise to the Blue Bell in Fossgate, probably the least modified pub in the city.

That ‘probably’ is there for a reason or out of sheer cowardice. You have to be careful about these things in York as passions can run high.

Whatever the case, the Blue Bell features in a new book called Britain’s Best Real Heritage Pubs. The tiny but cherished pub is listed in CAMRA’s National Inventory of Historic Pub Interiors, alongside three other pubs in the city: the Golden Ball in Bishophill, the Swan in Bishopgate Street and the Wellington in Alma Terrace. From that list I have yet to tick off the Swan, a lapse which must be rectified.

The Blue Bell has been a favourite since I discovered the place on moving to York in 1988. We popped in for a pint on Sunday lunchtime as part of one of those lively mini-festivals when Fossgate is closed and filled with stalls and the like.

There have been a few of these happy street shut-downs now, but a flick through the dusty files – or the website of my old newspaper – shows that such events were not encouraged in the past.

In July 1998, the Press reported that plans for York’s smallest pub to celebrate its 200^th birthday had been stymied when the council refused to allow the street to be closed.

This was a problem as the tiny pub couldn’t contain the expected number of guests.

Peter Evely, head of highway regulation at the council at the time, gave a rather mealy-mouthed statement, congratulating the Blue Bell on reaching its 200th birthday, but adding: “The significant inconvenience that this would have caused to pedestrians and other road users could not be justified for this purpose.”

In the event the council relented after pressure from the public, and the party went ahead in the street, going on longer than had been officially intended.

A few days later, the pub had to close due to blocked drains. During the work to rectify that problem an infestation of wordworm was discovered. A report in the Press said: “It now seems likely that the bar and shelving of The Blue Bell, Fossgate, a listed Edwardian interior, may have to be totally ripped out.”

It is unclear what was removed in the event, as the pub’s Edwardian interior survives virtually intact to this day. To those who have not visited the pub, it is basically two small rooms divided by a bar, with a corridor along the side. The front room is cosy and open to the central bar, while the small back room is walled off and drinks are served through a low hatch.

Dark-stained wood panels line the walls of a pub that essentially hasn’t changed since 1904. Its interior is Grade II listed and past-proofed against the prettifying sins of interior designers. If you want to know what it felt like to go for a drink in Edwardian York, pop in for a pint. The beer is always good, featuring the likes of Landlord and Rooster’s Yankee, and beers from the new Brew York brewery down the street.

One happy change since the 1980s is that this minuscule pub is no longer filled with smoke. I guess the tarry haze made it even more genuinely Edwardian, but some authenticity you can do without.

The pub survived a fire in 1974 and short-lived expansion plans 20 years later. There have been surprisingly few landlords at the Blue Bell, and the licence has changed hands only half a dozen times since 1903.

The following account comes from Guzzling Gav on the Press: “George Robinson, founding director of York City FC, took over that year. When he died in 1948, the licence passed to his wife Annie. When she passed away in 1963, their daughter Edith Pinder took over, and she remained in post until retiring in 1991. John and Pauline West then ran the pub for three years, followed by Tim and Eileen Worrall for six, before Jim [Hardie] took over in 2000.”

The latest landlord is the ever-cheery John Pybus, who happens to be a friend of our son’s. He also happens to be just about the friendliest landlord to be found anywhere, having clearly missed miserable bugger training school.

I recall old stories about a landlady of the Blue Bell who refused to accept decimalisation and continued to price a pint in ‘old money’. From the timescale, that must have been Edith Pinder, described in certain accounts as frail but formidable, and a York pubbing legend.

It is interesting that the council was reluctant to close the street in the 1990s, citing “significant inconvenience”. Nowadays such car-free parties are common and York is all the better for being inconvenienced. Sometimes change is good. And sometimes it isn’t, as shown by the immutable interior of the Blue Bell.

SINCE the Brexit vote, the front page of the Daily Express often reminds me of a bored child asking from the backseat of a car: “Are we there yet?” Almost every day there is an impatient headline demanding that we leave the EU now. Followed by a demand for more sweets.

So I wonder what this morning’s EU-themed words might be? Ah, here goes… “EU EXIT WILL BE GREAT SUCCESS.” Glad to see that one-track mind is still at work. And look at that old-style Express logo: “Get us out of the EU.”

The prime minister and her cabinet met at Chequers yesterday for their first post-summer gathering. Brexit was at the top of the agenda, as it will be for every such meeting into the misty blue distance until someone works out what is going on.

Theresa May repeated her favourite slogan, which is: “Brexit means Brexit.” You have to admit that this is brilliant. Tough, no-nonsense and succinct. And entirely meaningless.

For her equation to work, you have to know what equals what. And the thing about Brexit is that no one really has a clue. Not those who wanted it; and certainly not those who did not. We are all clueless together, united only in our lack of a clue.

May sounds in control when she says this, yet if you don’t know what Brexit means in the first place, it all falls down. I guess she means that Britain will leave in some form or other. And we knew that already. What we can’t grasp is the important shape bit. You know, how it will happen. And when. And whether afterwards we will be in or out of the shit.

I have a fancy that after the meeting that pro-Brexit ministerial threesome of Boris Johnson, David Davis and Liam Fox were left alone around the table…

“Ah, she says what she means, does Theresa.”

“Means what she says.”

“But what does she, you know, actually mean?”

“What she says.”

“And what is she saying?”

“What she means…”

And so on possibly for all eternity, but you get the idea. This trio are sometimes referred to as the Three Musketeers, but I prefer a cornier version, the Three Must Get Out of Heres.

For some reason, Theresa May’s stance on Brexit brings to mind one of those eye-straining mathematical prints by MC Escher that were so popular in the Seventies. The ones where people walk around flights of steps at the top of a tower only to end up back where they started, ascending and descending and not getting anywhere.

Theresa May seems to be going forward with brisk determination, saying “Brexit Means Brexit” and ending up back in the same place, no nearer to finding the answer.

But she is at least high in the polls at the moment, much higher than Labour. Now nothing fills me with despondency more quickly that seeing the Tories on the rise. But really, Labour only has itself to blame. The party has spent weeks tearing lumps out of itself in a fairly pointless leadership race. And in all that time, the Tories have ruthlessly deposed one leader – David Who? – and held a leadership contest and chosen a winner.

Funnily enough, Labour seem to be trapped in an Escher drawing, too. They started out with this leadership contest because so many Labour MPs did not have faith in their party leader. Yet Jeremy Corbyn is on course to win easily – and his MPs still don’t have faith in him.

So Labour has walked up and down all those steps to end up in the same fruitless position. For however popular Corbyn is with his party membership, if his MPs don’t have faith in him, then what is supposed to be the main party of opposition will still be squabbling with itself rather that, you know, opposing. And that just won’t do.

OH, I do like a new word. And valetudinarianism is a good one. In case you don’t grate a dictionary into your porridge each morning, it means constantly and morbidly concerned with one’s health. And, yes, I had to look it up.

Paxman used this word in his column in the Financial Times, writing: “At the reception desk of a hotel to which I checked in this week was a pile of free copies of Mature Times, which calls itself ‘the voice of our generation’. Oh God, I thought, the cheeky bastards are including me. Back off.

“For this must be the most unfashionable publication in Britain. Who wants to be called ‘mature’, like an old cheese? We all know that ‘mature’ means on the verge of incontinence, idiocy and peevish valetudinarianism…”

As Paxo is 66, this was presumably intended as a joke at some level. Either that or he just felt like being annoying by upending a bucket of bile on the elderly.

Whatever the case, his outburst brought the publisher of the Mature Times out in a nasty rash (there’ll be a cream for it somewhere, sir; just ask your readers).

Andrew Silk said Paxman was clearly in denial about his age and likened him to Jeremy Clarkson without the charism. Jeremy Clarkson has charisma; who knew? I have never met Clarkson, but suspect his Top Gear persona is a bit of an act. A hugely profitable one, mind, for if half the world thinks you’re a twat and the other half likes you, that is a good enough return. I have met Jeremy Paxman, though, and he was perfectly charming.

In his age-intolerant rant, Paxo also said that the elderly should lose the vote, as it wasn’t fair to “allow people to vote for a future they won’t live to enjoy or endure”. And he added that politicians were too frightened to confront the “whiffy vested interest” of old people.

Popping another pill from the insult bottle, he added: “They have every reason to laugh at the way government after government has skewed things in their favour. Yet the most striking thing about rooms full of old people is how very little you see them laughing.”

Well, the older people I know are nothing like the caricatured pensioners he summons up. And they do laugh, too.

Yet Paxo is good at provocation and if he had set out to be reasonable, no one would have noticed his column. And the publisher of the Mature Times would not have had his 15 seconds of fame (you don’t get so long nowadays; blame low interest rates or something).

Mr Silk wrote a rebuttal in Mature Times, saying of Paxman: “He is 66, so he obviously does not see himself as one of the people he wants to poke fun at, which is irrational. This could be his Gerald Ratner moment…”

Well, not really a Ratner moment, as unlike the businessman who joked that his company’s jewellery was ‘crap’, Paxman has nothing to sell. Apart from himself, and he did a pretty good job there.

Jane Silk, the editor of Mature Times, had a lively riposte in an opinion piece on the Guardian online, accusing Paxman of being puerile (the columnist’s sin, perhaps). She added a mouthful from her dictionary, too: “Well, I have a couple of long words for you, Paxman: gerascophobia and gerontophobia. He seems to be suffering from both a fear of getting old and of older people.”

Is that so or was he just being colourfully offensive for the sake of it?  I am a few years younger than Paxo but do not wish to read Mature Times.

A few years ago, I hated finding that I was suddenly lumped into a greying mass called the “over-fifties”. This seemed to bring with it a supposed desire to take part in weedy keep-fit sessions and other dispiriting things. No thank you. I went off to play squash instead. And I still do.

THE coffee plant is said to have been discovered in Ethiopia in the 11th century. A nice legend has it has a goat herder called Kaldi noticed that after eating berries from a certain tree, his goats became so energetic they did not want to sleep at night.

So in that instant he discovered coffee and insomnia, setting in motion the pleasure and pain of many a life.

There is another story about this possibly legendary herder of goats. In this one he looked at the beans, scratched his head and pushed away an overactive goat. Then he stood from the rock he’d been sitting on, propelled upwards by a thought. “What I need to do is roast the beans, then grind them. After that the ground beans should be placed in virtually indestructible aluminium and plastic capsules that fit in expensive machines. And then I could find a famous person to advertise them. I wonder if that illustrious goat-herder George Clooney is available?”

Like all legends, the one I have just made up cannot be proved. What we do know is that when Clooney became the face of Nespresso coffee pods in 2006, this marked the beginning of a costly worldwide obsession with a product that allowed people to brew espresso at home at the touch of a button.

Now if you ask me, this is an unnecessary invention that litters the planet with used pods that are said to take between 150 and 500 years to break down in landfill sites. Although how anyone can know that is a mystery.

Both of my brothers use these pods. We drank coffee made that way on holiday in France at the start of the month, although the host brother did relent and buy some ground coffee too. Perhaps he picked up the vibe from his bad bean big brother.

As well as being rotten for the environment, these pods take away the pleasurable ritual of making a cup of coffee. I prefer to grind the beans, Taylor’s Italian for preference. The ground coffee goes into a cafetiere. This is filled with water gone just off the boil that is poured over the back of a tablespoon to take away direct heat. Mugs are half-filled with water from the kettle and the timer is set for four minutes. Works every time. The mug tip was picked up from a food magazine: it makes the coffee properly hot.

The global market for coffee pods is reported to have risen from $7 billion in 2010 to £17 billion in 2015. And that’s an unending stack of those sleek little capsules to put in the ground.

Even the man who used to run Nespresso, former chief executive Jean-Paul Gaillard, is reported to believe it is time for consumers to consider the price of convenience. “It will be a disaster and it’s time to move on that. People shouldn’t sacrifice the environment for convenience,” Gaillard has said. He now produces biodegradable coffee pods.

Earlier this year, the German city of Hamburg banned coffee pods from government-run buildings, citing pollution and waste. A smart move, Hamburg.

I will stick to the method mentioned above, backed up by an ancient stove-top espresso machine and a new Aeropress device (a vacuum plunger that instantly produces one excellent mug of fresh coffee).

Two more thoughts on coffee. According to researchers at Edinburgh University, a gene appears to influence the amount of coffee people can drink. Those who carry the PDSS2 gene consume about one less cup of coffee per day compared with non-carriers, according to a story in the Guardian last week, which reported: “The gene variant appears to affect people’s coffee intake by slowing the metabolism of caffeine in the body.” So those with the gene have a longer ‘high’ and drink less coffee.

A final thought arises from my short break in France. We listened to Dylan in that cottage as the ‘French’ brother is a big fan. One More Cup Of Coffee (Valley Below) is surely one of the best coffee songs, with its bean-rattling refrain… “One more cup of coffee ’fore I go/To the valley below.”

A truly great coffee song. But so too is Black Coffee In Bed by Squeeze. And then there is that old blues song Half a Coffee Smile as released by the supposedly environmentally minded George Clooney: “Woke up one morning and earned a fortune for flooding the world with indestructible little pods…”

HERE are some good and less good points about living in York, as compiled after being conveyed around the city on creaky knees for my Sunday morning run.

On the way back I saw that the Micklegate Run Soapbox Challenge was being set up. This fun challenge taking place today will feature 44 teams racing down the steepest hill in a generally flat city.

This is the same hill, incidentally, that the wagons went down at the start of the Mystery Plays in their original form in medieval times. The wagons were stored in Toft Green, near to where York Brewery now is and the scenery was erected early in the morning, then as the wagons began to roll around the city, care had to be taken that none of them ran away with themselves down that hill. The opposite wish will be in operation today in an event that will embrace rather than pull against gravity.

We will be going along to watch the soapbox challenge, on our way for a drink and something to eat in Fossgate, where the street is occasionally shut off and filled with stalls.

York is admirably adept at such events nowadays, and it is no coincidence that the independent councillor Johnny Hayes is one of those behind the soapbox challenge, having long championed the Bishopthorpe Road area.

There is often something on in York and for me that goes into the box marked ‘good’. So what is to be found in the box stamped ‘less good’? Oh, hordes of pissed-up people on a Saturday night and other evenings too; paralytic hen parties and staggering stag parties; day-long racegoers tipped into a night even more drunken than their day; many of them, whatever brought them here, loud and raucous and objectionable. Yes, that sort of thing.

Whenever a shop closes in York, or whenever a landlord turfs out a small local business because they wish to earn more money, you can bet that a bar or restaurant will move in, often part of a national chain. And if not that then a coffee shop

Now I like all of those establishments at times. There are great places to drink in York and no end of restaurants and cafés.

But each year it seems that more local and independent shops disappear to make room for these bars – and to accommodate the tippling masses.

This has not gone unnoticed by those who live in York, many of whom stay out of the city at night. This week members of the Guildhall planning panel, a voluntary group which scrutinises planning applications in the Guildhall ward, warned that too many properties were being converted from shops into cafés, bars or restaurants. In my old newspaper, the chairman of that panel, Chris Edghill, said: “We have been objecting to the quantity of restaurants, bars and cafés. You only have to walk around town to see how many bars and restaurants there are.”

This is true but whether or not anyone has the power or inclination to do anything about it is another matter. Too often the official response is to shrug and then go with the motion – rattling downhill just like those soapbox cars will do today.

York needs to keep hold of its independent shops, and its independent pubs and cafés too. Otherwise the centre of what will always be a beautiful city risks turning, at second glance, into any-town anywhere, filled with all the same chain restaurants. To a large extent this has happened already, but efforts should be made to slow down the race to sameness.

Both of today’s events are designed to promote local businesses and communities in the city. And that can only be for the general good.

Now it is time to creak off to the shower.

TWO stories bob about in the political pond today. Both are silly but only one in a good way.

First up is the Jeremy Corbyn train seat row, tediously also known as ‘traingate’. Last week, the Labour leader caught a train to Newcastle and, being unable to find a seat, squatted on the floor. He sat there in solidarity with other passengers and had a mumble-grumble about how this incident showed why the railways should be nationalised. His polite but brittle sit-down protest was recorded and a film clip released.

Until yesterday this was a small story, a ripple or two in the teacup. Then the whole storm rattled the china when Virgin released CTTV footage appearing to suggest that Mr Corbyn walked past empty seats before sitting on the floor.

Sir Richard Branson, the Virgin Trains founder, backed the release of this footage, in which the company said it took issue with the idea that Mr Corbyn “wasn’t able to be seated on the service, as this clearly wasn’t the case”. The Labour leader stood by his description of the train journey, saying that the empty seats displayed reservation tickets, adding that he was given a seat when another family was upgraded to first class.

Mr Corbyn reportedly declined a first-class upgrade for himself, perhaps in a Citizen Smith-style power to the people moment. And now he has ended up looking silly; or if you are Mr Corbyn and his loyal band of supporters, the newspapers have inflicted further inky calumny on their man.

So who is the winner in this much-amplified small squabble? Mr Corbyn looks shabby because his stunt was derailed by events; and Virgin looks shabby because it released this footage a week later in a bout of petulant foot-stamping. Mr Corbyn looks ridiculous because he indulged in a spot of incompetent spin; and Sir Richard Branson looks ridiculous because, well, he just is.

In Mr Corbyn’s favour, some of his observations about overcrowding and how our railways are run are fair enough, especially on a line which has seen two private companies fail to date. Is Virgin now going to struggle as well? It’s a reasonable question to print on your ticket.

Other factors work less well for Mr Corbyn. For a man who leads a political party, he seems naïve about train travel. Book ahead and it’s cheaper. You can often sit in ticketed seats, at least for a while. And being upgraded to first class is fairly normal when the train is overcrowded, and not a calculated insult to your socialist values or whatever.

Having said all that, it is difficult to stand up for Virgin Trains or for the bizarre way we run our railways: just how much public money do these private companies absorb? But Corbyn has certainly been put in a Branson pickle.

The veteran travel journalist Simon Calder, of the Independent, this morning accuses the Labour leader of boarding the Hogwash Express. How handy is that. For my second silly story concerns an American study which finds that people who have read the Harry Potter books are less likely to support Donald Trump – or Trumpdemort, as he is rather splendidly being dubbed.

The study published in PS: Political Science and Politics bears the playful title Harry Potter And The Deathly Donald.

Professor Diana Mutz of the University of Pennsylvania polled a representative sample of 1,142 Americans in 2014 and again this year. By asking about their Harry Potter consumption, she found that each Potter book read lowered her respondents’ feelings about Trump by two or three points.

JK Rowling was naturally thrilled, tweeting that the news had made her day.

As far as I can tell, no study has yet been undertaken into whether or not having read Thomas the Tank Engine books makes readers more or less sympathetic towards Jeremy Corbyn.

IN today’s terms, I am a mainstream sort of guy when it comes to the news. The BBC, the Guardian and Observer, and quick raids into hostile territory – the nettles in Daily Mail-land don’t half leave a rash – mostly do for me.

Once there was a time when identifying yourself as a Guardian reader was tantamount to coming out as a raging leftie, but nowadays life is more complicated than that. Should you wish you can now visit a website dedicated to ‘proving’ that everything you read in the Guardian is wrong, but there you go.

Earlier this week pictures of Omran Daqneesh, the tiny survivor of a suspected Russian airstrike on the besieged Syrian city of Aleppo, went around the world, giving face to a tragedy which has remained mostly unseen. Stills from video footage showed this five-year-old boy with his face bloody and his eyes blank with shock.

You might have thought this was the media doing a global good deed, prodding the world’s conscience with reports of a boy who stands for all the children harmed or worse by wars everywhere.

But hardly had the blood been wiped away from that young face before the heckling began, with certain websites warning that we shouldn’t swallow this news at face value. The details are complicated but suggest the image was being used as a way of escalating further military action in Syria.

I don’t know the truth of such claims, but I do know that here was a tiny child caught up in a bloody shit-storm not of his making. And this morning reports suggest his brother died in the raid from which he was rescued.

Thanks to the internet, we can have instant news and opinions on everything nowadays, and we can skip from mainstream rivers to lively streams of dissent. The sceptical responses in this case strike me as being disrespectful to the child, to those who rescued him, and to the few remaining doctors who toil against impossible odds in Aleppo.

Whose truth is the real truth here? That’s the impossible puzzle in a way. Sometimes there is a sort of dark alchemy to the news, in that certain events pass unnoticed while others suddenly capture the world’s attention. Why that should happen is sometimes easy to see, as in a child being rescued in a warzone. But why that child and why just then? It is not easy to answer that, but certain news stories just do that, often thanks to a striking image.

Only later can we gain some sort of perspective, and sometimes not even then. For what is history but a lively argument about how to interpret yesterday’s headlines?

There is a lot of talk about bias among those who dislike the mainstream media. I can understand that because sometimes certain sources of news, and certainly some of the old tabloids, display blatant bias. Almost any given front page of the Daily Express might support such a claim.

The dissenters who despise the mainstream media gather in corners of the internet to mutter darkly and exchange conspiracy theories. That’s no bad thing, so long as those who visit such websites admit they are seeking solace in like minds in the same way that a right-wing person might look for it in pages of the Daily Telegraph. For those usually left-wing websites are themselves biased in that they have a fixed view of the world.

The BBC is roundly accused of bias from all sides, especially from supporters of Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn (that’s the last mention of him today: it’s a Sunday and I could do without the hassle). But sometimes the problem lies in the BBC’s cumbersome attempts to be even-handed.

If a news programme wishes to discuss global warming, two guests will be brought into the studio. One will be a scientist who knows what they are talking about and has endless statistics at their fingertips. The other will be a climate-change denier who knows in his bones that it’s all a big conspiracy.

In being even-handed, the BBC presenter will give too much prominence to the climate-denying ignoramus, who is given equivalent status to the expert. In attempting to be balanced, the BBC risks unbalancing the argument.

In a telling irony, those ring-wingers who believe that climate-change is a myth got up by the establishment have much in common with those on the left who feel that the mainstream media is a conspiracy against all that they believe in.

I guess that in the end, all you can say is that we have an imperfect media for an imperfect world.