Jonathan Green » herald-sun

Facts, agendas and cynical tabloidism

Jonathan Green — Tue, 09 Dec 2008 21:27:13 +0000

Brilliant … Melbourne’s Herald Sun discovers the homeless world cup. How so? Because “at least 15 foreign soccer players” are apparently seeking asylum.

That for one thing seems only natural. Lets see, you’re a homeless street soccer star from Zimbabwe and you don’t attempt to get asylum at the end of the tournament? You’d need your head read. Residency should have been part of the prize package!

But back to our tale … the newspaper ignores the event as it happens (as discussed previously) and then after the fact, hey presto: observable reality coincides with the agenda.

Why do people buy this manipulated, cynical tripe?

Tell us, Herald Sun, what is news then?

Jonathan Green — Sun, 07 Dec 2008 21:40:14 +0000

There must be some independent standard of what makes news … I’d have thought there would be certain baseline commonalities between two newspapers in one city, things that happen that ought be reported. Are newspapers a mirror of surrounding events? Or something altogether more cynical and contrived?

I’m wondering this appropos of The Age and its tabloid Melbourne print companion the Herald Sun. How can the Homeless World Cup rate half a front page in The Age and no mention in the Herald Sun? That’s this morning’s example.

How can last week’s sensational investigative scoop in The Age on leaked police files run and run across all media for days and yet receive no mention – not one – in the Herald Sun. I’ve checked with Media Monitors:

	Press	Radio	Television	Internet	*Total*
Police file leaks	7	267	43	180	*497*

We might write on this at more length in the Crikey email. Someone here seems intent on the manipulation of events to suit their own image of the news agenda. I don’t want to sound hopelessly naive, but I would have thought the point of difference between papers ought to be in the way they approach events not some agenda driven discrimination that admits one version of reality and excludes another. That, I suggest, is not journalism.

Do you want the bad news or the tabloid pap?

Jonathan Green — Tue, 18 Nov 2008 21:22:00 +0000

The economy is in a dire place, the RBA is feeling compelled to act as best it can to apply CPR to the twitching patient. Every cut in rates is just another clue to the depth of despair around the RBA board table. Of course, that’s not how they see it in tabloid newspaper land. Oh no. From each according to their capacity to pay, to each according to the newspaper they read. Here’s today’s Herald Sun, battler’s friend:

INTEREST rates may drop another 1 per cent in an early Christmas spending present for households as the RBA aims to avert a recession.

There’s only one way rates are heading, and that’s down down, deeper and down, as Francis Rossi might have put it. And that’s no Christmas present, that’s a grim portent. Readers of papers that couch grim news in such dissembling pap, should rise up and demand something closer to the truth. It’s a measure of just what a cynical exercise in faux camaraderie tabloid publishing is.