Look, Important Numbers!

Sky News has spent today apparently seeking to consolidate its position as the tabloid BBC, as if that were necessary, with a staggeringly facile national debt counter ticking away on screen, obtruding into any other coverage like a running sore. The idea is hardly new: New York's National Debt Clock in Times Square did this for years until running out of digits last year. Sky may have thought in all innocence that it would serve as a potent visual aid for the concurrent stories it was running on the impact of the recession.
But there are just a few things amiss with this: firstly, the clock in Times Square was a background feature in a location preoccupied with all manner of things other than issues of national concern, and could therefore be justifiably called a sobering reminder of there being other things in heaven and Earth to think about besides your Broadway show/hooker/hot dog of the day. Sky's counter, on the other hand, is only seen by a captive audience. It's hectoring to the converted. And it's a lie. The drama of the steadily rising precise figure is built on a false premise: the sum shown is assuredly based on some calculation but isn't actually real.
What grates the most, though, is that somehow it's meant to bring home the truth of recession to viewers who, if affected, are hardly going to be interested in some huge abstract amidst the immediacy of their own troubles. Are they to feel consolation or at least schadenfreude at the whole nation being fucked too? If, on the other hand, they're fortunate enough to be cocooned from all this, the obvious inference to be drawn is that this is Sky's way of grinding its heel into the back of the Government, for those viewers' satisfaction. All day long.
Simultaneously managing to be patronising and infantile: it's quite a feat.