Not sure if I picked this up from somewhere or whether I made it up myself, but for sometime I have been saying that 'you can tell the level of comfort in a society by the headlines of its independent press'.

A great example of this is the 'falling' profits at M&S. Is that the best news they could find on the day or has it become so ingrained in the news culture that have to let us know the profits of the supermarket giants? Don't get me wrong, if M&S was going out of business, I might want to know about it or if I was reading the Financial Times, otherwise I don't. I suspect most of us do not own shares in M&S directly. Our pension funds might but if falling M&S profitability was affecting my pension so detrimentally, then someone needs firing... at the pension fund!

I don't care about M&S's profits (maybe losses might interest me for one paragraphs worth). I don't even shop there and even if i did, this quarter's smaller profits do not appear to be closing the local branch. How much more comfortable do you want to be?

[First published on my NotTheNews blog on specified date]