Glibness — if it had a texture, it would be somewhere between treacle and baby oil. And we — friends — have just endured a monsoon season of glibness. The coming together of the Unicef report on childhood and a deadly blip in the gun murders of teenagers has ensured a drenching as pundits, campaigners and eek-voiced TV reporters have poured out their favoured theories as to why British kids are so much worse than everyone else’s.

It’s true that, mined properly, the Unicef report gives us some worrying insights and raises some interesting questions. And kids bumping each other off with firearms isn’t something we should get used to, and refuse to worry about until they turn their weapons — God forbid — on Times readers. But oh, the nonsense and how hard you had to work to discover that the Unicef data overwhelmingly concerned teenagers, not children; that much of the material was old; and that the authors, of course, had added health warnings.

So the tide of glib gave habitat to entire shoals of political red herrings. When George Osborne battered Gordon Brown for ten years of failing British children on the basis of data that — at their most recent, were collected after five years of Labour Government — it wasn’t helpful. Nor was condemning that distant caricature, Margaret Thatcher.

Campaigners on income inequality blamed income inequality, helped by one significant indicator in Unicef’s measure of childhood problems being income inequality. But why, for example, would income inequality make Swiss kids twice as likely to describe their playmates as kind and helpful? We don’t know. Or, rather, we all knew everything as we rode our hobbyhorses until their flanks were pitted with spur-marks. It was lone parents. It was poverty. It was the decline of discipline. It was the dog-eat-dog society. It was the child-eat-hot-dog society.

Yesterday, in the same fashion, some bloody survey or professional group made the claim that watching television was a leading cause in the rise of childhood obesity. But if you were to consume a decent diet, run for one hour a day and then watch TV for 12 hours solid, you wouldn’t get obese. Because obesity is caused by one thing only — significant excess calorific intake over calorific burn. One despairs.

Not all of the ideas floated in the past week or so have been without merit. But one area of explanation for some of the Unicef results, and also for the prevalence of a gun culture among some teenage boys, seemed to me to be underexplored. It was interesting that, on the criteria chosen by Unicef, the US and Britain should both be at the bottom, with Britain last. Partly because if the key indicators were single parenthood, familial breakdown or income inequality, then the US should have been well behind us. But also because our two countries share something else. We have the most dynamic, competitive, influential and potentially disturbing popular media cultures on the planet.

The ubiquity and power of media in the lives of citizens is never properly analysed in Britain. There are almost no programmes on TV or radio that deal critically with the press or broadcasting, and very few media sections in print journalism that stray much beyond gossip, grovelling interviews with decidedly temporary channel controllers and the occasional good column from an old hand. Yet the ideas that the young — separating from their parents — receive about what is valuable, attractive or (most deadly of all) “cool” are cooked up under the striplights in a thousand media company offices.

Media panics help to define what parents and kids should worry about. One of my daughters wouldn’t walk in the park for a year after Soham, such had been the coverage. When Unicef tells us that around 80 per cent of young people consider their health to be “good or excellent” in every OECD country except the UK, the question arises where that perception comes from, because the reality is different. And was it possibly the case that the “kind and helpful” survey was being conducted around the time that we enjoyed that prolonged media “bullying” panic?

Last week a woman wrote to one of the local papers explaining why she had to take her kids to (private) school by car. She had tried the journey on foot once, she said, but as she crossed the park her seven-year-old had run on ahead, and was “surrounded by boys from the local comprehensive school”. Why was this woman terrified of even the idea of children from the comp. And where did she get that fear from? Certainly not from any spate of attacks on seven-year-olds.

Then there are the ways in which parts of the Anglophone media, from music to TV, from movies to the internet, actively encourage or glamourise risky behaviour among the young. MTV runs the prurient Virgin Diaries, but doesn’t waste much time on warning about STDs. Too uncool. Your top young chaps drink hard, drug hard and screw hard, from real rock bands to star presenters.

Popular media cultures tend to be antieducation and antiintellectual, from Pink Floyd and Brick in The Wall to the endless portrayal of good students as “nerds” and “geeks”. What, one wonders, is the Dutch for “nerd”? The shows for teens — and the casual asides in programmes for adults — are pro-drink, with endless references to the inevitable joys of being wasted, and bladdered. The coolest TV is cruel and exploitative, from Big Brother to gawping at freakshow fatties. On YouTube you can download real footage of bare-knuckled prizefights taking place in suburban backyards in the US, as though we’d slipped a century.

And for the most vulnerable there’s the ultimate tyranny of cool. Yesterday, in these pages, Theodore Dalrymple wrote about meeting “young drug dealers (who) imagined themselves as the heroes of their own funerals, which they themselves would observe and enjoy in some ethereal fashion”. Where did that imagination come from? Don’t give me “from real life”. From battle rap, a street culture informed by the trailer from the movie Get Rich or Die Tryin’, in which a drug dealer — as though he were the hero in war movie — says: “I’d rather die like a man than live like a coward.”

I can’t prove anything, of course. It’s all very complicated. But it seems to me — in my Mary Whitehouse dotage — perverse to ignore the increasingly dark downside of our most successful industries.

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