Pornography.

The radio coverage of Raoul Moat's last moments made me realised that we are, in general, more interested in the outcome of events than the processes by which those outcomes are reached.

I've come away from football matches uninterested in how well the team played - whether they won or lost was my only concern. When I got an infection in my finger, I didn't concern myself with the medical properties of the antibiotics prescribed. As long as they worked, I could carry on in ignorance.

It's analogous to the western view of sex; to generate an orgasm in any way possible. There is an initial state, and there is a goal state, and the route betwixt the two is quite frankly for the birds.

So it was on the night Raoul Moat died. The radio presenters had decided their preferred goal state was for Moat's life to be ended, and agitated for this possibility as often as possible. Audible pornography - give us the money shot, complete with its final, corroborating scream, and then we'll return to the conventional news cycle.

Again, what follows are more-or-less verbatim fragments of BBC Radio Five Live's handling of Moat's final hours - with the excitement building as the orgasm neared:

• Some people are laughing and drinking in a pub. We've had a wedding in the village and I don't think the residents wanted that to dampen their mood.



• A.....a.... bullet? If he did become suicidal, if he advanced on police lines, they may then be forced to use lethal force against him because they can't do anything else.



• They're going to precipitate him blowing 'is own 'ead off.


Then, at after one in the morning, the ejaculation.


• There has been a shooting just now while your colleague was on air. He laid down and shot himself. - I'm looking at it now. I think there were two. Paramedics are leaning over the man and, er, there's a cordon of police around and that's about as much as i can see.



• He laid himself down and the shots rang out. I believe there were two shots.



• I believe they are loading a body onto a stretcher. There looks to be very little, if you like frenetic activity - possibly holding a drip in the air. But they are loading the stretcher into the back of the ambulance and I'm sure it'll be leaving the scene very very rapidly.

No matter how, Moat must die. No matter how, I must give you an orgasm. No matter how, the team must win. The age of the internet and rolling news has reduced the world to a starting-point and an endpoint, in which we take pleasure or feel pain. Everything else is too complicated, or boring, and we feel free to overlook, pornographers that we are.