I don’t care, I’m going to moan about them anyway. That was my response after being told I’m too easily irritated by minor things, and they probably don’t make blog posts that can be described as interesting. But it’s not going to stop me.

Front loading on news programmes is annoying. This is the conclusion I’ve reached, after seeing an epidemic of front-loaded introductions to news reports spreading across all UK news outlets. It’s like somebody reading the Daily Mail outloud, and it’s incredibly tedious and irritating.

Worse, though, is that it undeniably introduces an element of bias, through implicit agreement with the statement made. News broadcasters often say things like:

The death toll from the Chernobyl Nuclear accident twenty years ago today will be much higher than government estimates predict. That’s according to Greenpeace…

There, they are clearly agreeing with Greenpeace over and above what the Government estimates might suggest. You can never imagine them using this construction for something they find controversial, or that they might disagree with:

Asians are invading Britain and stealing the jobs of hard working white people. That’s according to the BNP…

It would never happen.

On top of this, I have no idea what to make of the statement that is being read to me until I know the credibility of the source. Compare:

Tony Blair should resign immediately in order to protect the future prospects of the Labour Party, backbench MPs have said today.

Tony Blair should resign immediately in order to protect the future prospects of the Labour Party, his cabinet have said today.

The first one’s a non-story, the second is huge. And yet they delay bothering to tell me until they’ve got the quote out of the way first. Irritating! What’s wrong with

Tony Blair’s cabinet have today announced that they beleive he should resign immediately in order to protect the future prospects of the Labour Party.

I realise it pushes the content of the news story back by, ooh, two seconds, but it actually allows me to assess whether the story is a real story or not straight away.