Tag Archives: Daily Telegraph

Daily Telegraph: We decide which girlfriend is better

Posted on November 26, 2012 by | 18 Comments

This is one of the main stories on dailytelegraph.com.au today: Michael Clarke’s batting average is an advertisement for a happy home life:

MICHAEL Clarke is the best advertisement for marriage and a settled home life.

His batting average since marrying stunning model Kyly Boldy in May is an equally stunning 263.5

It’s a big improvement on the old soap opera days of the Lara Bingle relationship when he more often appeared in Sydney Confidential than these sporting pages.

This columnist spent Sydney’s glorious Sunday afternoon behind a computer searching cricket records for a Boldy v Bingle comparison.

Boldy bolted in with an average of 75.2 (since their relationship became public at Clarke’s 30th birthday in April 2011) compared with Bingle’s 54.4.

It’s by Phil Rothfield, the Tele‘s sports editor.

This is the photo inside:

Daily Telegraph image with Lara Bingle, Michael Clarke, Kyly Boldy

At the Daily Telegraph, we rank women on their usefulness to men.

Yes, it’s meant to be a bit of fun. I get that. And, yes, the figures are meaningless without indicating how they were calculated. But there’s something else going on here that should worry editors (more on that later).

There’s a weird quote in the piece:

“With Lara, it was all about her,” said one source. “With Kyly it’s all about him.”

One source what? Is it someone on the cricket team? Is it a quote from twitter that you haven’t attributed? Is it another sports journo? Is it the fashion editor? Seriously dude, some context please. I’m also a little worried about the person behind the quote. Any relationship between two people that’s “all about” one person isn’t healthy. No, I’m not saying Clarke’s relationships are unhealthy. What I am saying is that someone who thinks the focus in a relationship should be completely on one person is yet to understand that a relationship between two people involves two people. Gawd, can you imagine going out with someone who thinks like that?

One thing that seems to have escaped Rothfield is Clarke’s age. When he was with Lara Bingle, he was in his 20s. Now he’s in his 30s. From what I know about professional cricket – which, admittedly, isn’t much because boring – most players improve in their late 20s to early 30s, which is why they don’t give the captaincy to a teenager.

Another thing that’s escaped Rothfield is the role his newspaper played in creating that “soap opera”. If they hadn’t published the nude photo of Lara Bingle – the one taken without her consent – there wouldn’t have been a soap opera. If photographers hadn’t been hounding the couple, there wouldn’t have been a soap opera. If News Ltd and Fairfax didn’t publish those photos, the photographers wouldn’t have been hounding them and there wouldn’t have been a soap opera. If News Ltd and Fairfax weren’t publishing opinion pieces saying that she wasn’t good enough for him, there wouldn’t have been a soap opera. How on earth could a young couple function under that sort of intrusion and vitriol?

The rest of Rothfield’s article mentions a couple of other sportsmen who became better at their jobs once they grew up. Apparently this has nothing to do with getting older and realising that they can’t carry on like teenagers anymore because of the hangovers and because the MSM will tell everyone, and everything to do with finding a good woman. Ah, good women versus bad women, in a judgement that’s based purely on whether they make a man better at his job. Someone remind me, what year is it?

Like I said, I’m sure Rothfield’s article is meant to be a bit of fun. I can’t imagine that he actually believes that Clarke’s success is due to his relationship and not to his hard work at training in the almost-two years since he’s been captain. If the former was actually the case, then relationships would be a compulsory part of sporting contracts. “Sorry mate, you might be belting boundaries off every ball, but you can’t be on the team until you get married. Them’s the rules”.

There are a few steps between what was probably a comment at the pub, to spending a day researching something – spending White Ribbon Day working on an article about how women are pretty objects but their real value is in how quiet they are – to submitting it to your editor, who decides that it should be published. And then the person putting the website together overnight decided to put it somewhere prominent, and then the morning editor decided to keep it there, and so did the afternoon editor. At each of these steps, didn’t anyone say, “um, guys, don’t you think this is a little disrespectful?” Or, “don’t you think it’s a little weird to be writing about someone else’s personal life like this?”.

There are currently 41 sports stories on the dailytelegraph.com.au sports homepage (not counting results tables). One is about women’s sport. One. The very last story. And it’s only 206 words:

Only one story features a female athlete. And it’s the very last one, right at the bottom.

Yep, that’s right, a story about sprinklers going off in a game involving no Australian players is considered more important than a story about a female athlete. There’s no mention that an Australian team was in the top four of the International Women’s Club Championship. No mention of the W-League over the weekend. At least smh.com.au has a story, even if they didn’t bother sending a journo (it’s AAP copy).

When you think about why women’s sport doesn’t get a lot of media coverage, it couldn’t possibly be because sports editors and sports journos think women are there to look pretty and shut the fuck up, could it? Because while Rothfield and all those other decision-makers might have thought it was just a funny little article, that’s what it’s really about. Praising the woman who is seen and not heard. Even better if she’s “stunning”. It might be something to think about next time the editors sit down – and they do regularly – and try to find ways to attract more female readers.

→ 18 Comments

Posted in Celebrity, Journalism

Tagged , , , ,

The curious case of trolls and the Daily Telegraph

Posted on September 15, 2012 by | 12 Comments

I wasn’t going to write about trolls. I don’t need to add my voice to the noise.

But then I saw that the Daily Telegraph is running a campaign against abuse on twitter, and that Ray Hadley is involved and well, once I stopped laughing…

… and laughing…

… I thought, what this IMHO of opinionated voices needs is one more opinionated voice. (Thanks to @enoughsnark for this excellent collective noun. Other great suggestions were a shockjock of opinionated voices (@bluntshovels), a Zemanek (@benpobjie), a talkback (@wombat1974) and a NewsLtd (@purserj). I like the last one a lot, but felt the collective noun needed to incorporate left and right voices.)

Now, leaving aside the fact that the Tele has confused trolling and cyber-bullying, it is this Ray Hadley who is campaigning against people saying abusive things:

Ray Hadley quotes from The Hamster Wheel video above:

“Thank you Julia you imbecile”

“The bloody stupid dangerous woman in the top job” (this was listener feedback that Hadley chose to read out, thereby giving it his approval. Most of us would see a nasty comment like that and bin it.)

“Our vitriolic bitter lying condescending arrogant facade of a prime minister” (listener feedback that Hadley chose to read out.)

“Take the gloves off Tony Abbott stop being Mr Nice Guy and rip and tear we need you” (listener feedback that Hadley chose to read out.)

(Thanks to Anne Summers for reminding me about this clip. I highly recommended checking out the x-rated version of her speech, Her rights at work: the political persecution of Australia’s first female Prime Minister.)

As far as I know, Hadley hasn’t apologised for his abusive comments – unlike NRL player Robbie Farah. Farah is also involved in the Daily Telegraph‘s campaign and it was pretty quickly revealed that there was some pot kettle black going on: he’d tweeted that the PM should get “a noose” for her birthday.

Farah apologised:

In the course of this I have been alerted to a ‘tweet’ I made last year in relation to the Prime Minister which was in hindsight clearly offensive.

At the time I did think about what I had done and removed the ‘tweet’ soon after posting it but that of course doesn’t repair the damage.

I make no excuse and offer my sincere apologies. I can only say that I have learnt a lot in recent days and I hope that everyone in the community can learn about the pain that we can cause through such comments.

Hopefully the whole situation will only serve to encourage everyone to think about what we are really saying before we hit the ‘send’ key.

I reckon this is a pretty good public apology. There’s no pathetic ‘I’m sorry IF anyone was offended’ – which we all know means ‘I’m not sorry and I haven’t bothered to think about why my comment hurt people’. Mind you, that Farah sent the tweet a year ago and is only apologising now makes me wonder if it’s because he was caught out being a hypocrite. But it could also be that it wasn’t until he was on the receiving end that he realised how much these nasty comments can hurt people. I hope it’s the latter, because I prefer to give people the benefit of the doubt.

It’s important that we allow people to learn from their fuck-ups, because learning from fuck-ups is one of our best qualities. It’s clear from Farah’s follow-up tweet at the time, that “no one said anything about suicide” (explained in the noose link above), that he didn’t realise he was saying the Prime Minister should kill herself. That in his mind, giving someone a noose was somehow disconnected from what that noose should be used for. It’s like those idiots who call a woman a slut because she won’t have sex with them. Derrrrrr-brains.

The real power in Farah’s apology is in encouraging people to think about what they’re really saying. If he’d just said sorry, it would leave it open for the “political correctness gone mad/can’t people take a joke” crowd.

Anyway, back to the Daily Telegraph. Knowing that the moderators at dailytelegraph.com.au have published some pretty awful comments in the past, I went searching for examples so I could say, “Ha! Hypocrites!”. I looked for stories involving Lara Bingle, Julia Gillard, Gretel Killeen – women who are regularly abused by readers and are rewarded by having their comments published. And I found nothing. All the comments on these stories have disappeared.

So I looked more generally at political stories – particularly those involving the words “carbon tax” or “asylum seekers” – and found nothing. All the comments are gone. Now, it’s possible that dailytelegraph.com.au stopped paying moderators to publish comments a while ago and, not being a regular reader, I didn’t notice. And by turning off the comment function, it meant that all the comments vanished. It’s possible.

It’s also possible that when they decided on their #StopTheTrolls campaign, they’d figured they’d better make themselves look squeaky clean and get rid of the evidence that they’ve been happily publishing anonymous abusive comments for years. If that’s the case, then they should have the balls to acknowledge it.

→ 12 Comments

Posted in Journalism

Tagged ,

Presenting a story

Posted on June 26, 2012 by | 12 Comments

This is one of the main images at dailytelegraph.com.au at 2.30pm. It’s been there for hours, possibly all morning (possibly since last night, since it has a timestamp of 11.07pm):

Daily Telegraph Grant Hackett story

Daily Telegraph’s Grant Hackett story

OH MY GOD THE NATION IS DIVIDED!

(And what’s with the old-fashioned “marital home”? Calling it a “marital home” doesn’t make you sound more proper-like.)

But click through and you get this headline: Grant Hackett’s interview about drunken destruction of marital home on Sixty Minutes divides media commentators.

It’s a little different to what’s being spruiked on the homepage, isn’t it?

BUT WAIT, WHAT’S THIS?

First sentence and we’re back to OH MY GOD THE NATION IS DIVIDED:

IT was the interview that has divided Australia.

Second sentence:

However support for Grant Hackett from Channel Nine staff during Sunday night’s controversial 60 Minutes interview has raised questions of media bias.

And that’s a different story again. I’m confused. Is this a story about the nation being divided, or is it a story about media bias?

And then the rest of the story is about what five journalists said about the interview on twitter last night. Yawn.

But since we’re here, we should dig a little deeper. What evidence is there of that media bias? Not much. Just one tweet from A Current Affair journo Tom Steinfort:

Strangely, however, Nine staff sang a very different (and unobjective) tune including Steinfort who Tweeted; “While I obviously don’t know the details of what happened, I can say that Grant Hackett is one of the nicest people I’ve worked with.”

And a reply to that tweet from Channel 9 sports reporter Danny Weidler:

“I do know the details and my opinion is the same as yours.”

OH MY GOD THE RESPONSES TO THE INTERVIEW RAISED QUESTIONS OF MEDIA BIAS!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

BIAS!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

And oh, how I laughed and laughed at the Daily Telegraph having a go at someone for not being objective.

Now, a headline is supposed to tell you what the story is about in a way that makes you want to read it. So this Hackett story fails the first bit, but probably not the second. However, if the headline is lying in order to get you to read the story – ie, that the nation is divided when it’s actually only a few journos on twitter – then we can also call it a fail.

In Media-generated Shortcuts: Do Newspaper Headlines Present Another Roadblock for Low-information Rationality?, political scientist Blake C. Andrew writes that it’s important to monitor the relationship between headlines and stories because “headlines can have a powerful effect on the attitudes that people adopt” (2007, p. 25). Andrew looked at newspaper coverage of the 2004 Canadian federal election and found that the campaign reported in the headlines was “substantively different” to the campaign in the actual stories (2007, p. 38). If you just saw the main image at dailytelegraph.com.au (and I’m considering the main image as the headline because that’s the first introduction readers get to the story), you’d think it was BIGGER! MORE IMPORTANT! than it actually is. I’m not saying the story isn’t important – it’s important to the people involved, and also to the bigger issues of how much bad behaviour we allow athletes (and former athletes) to get away with, which wasn’t even mentioned in this Tele story, and where we should draw the line in terms of privacy – but the headline implies more importance than is contained in the body copy.

So, as a journalist, you can be honest about what the story is about, or you can have so little faith in people reading it that you pretend it’s about something else. It’s all about presenting the story to your readers.

And here is a picture of a baboon presenting:

Baboon presenting

That’s a mighty fine baboon’s arse

Reference:
Andrew, B.C, (2007), ‘Media-generated Shortcuts: Do Newspaper Headlines Present Another Roadblock for Low-information Rationality?’, The International Journal of Press/Politics, vol. 12, no. 2, pp. 24-43.

→ 12 Comments

Posted in Journalism

Tagged , ,

A new low in journalism

Posted on February 14, 2012 by | 10 Comments

The third top story on News.com.au tonight is a photo of the dining table inside Whitney Houston’s hotel room. [Update: I originally published this post with a screengrab of the story, but having that photo on my blog didn't sit well with me. It made me just as bad as them. So, it's gone.]

Third top by placement, put there by an editor. I ummed and ahhed about clicking on it, but needed the timestamp. It’s been there for five hours. Five hours. Since it’s 9.30pm, that’s most likely two shifts. Two different news editors have decided that it’s ok to run this story.

News.com.au is running images of Whitney Houston's hotel room

A new low in Australian journalism

The first – apparently most important – bullet point: Whitney’s last meal: Hamburger, fries, turkey sandwich. Followed by speculation.

Do we need to know what Whitney Houston had for dinner? No. The answer is no. It’s 99.9999999 out of 100 times always no.

It is grief porn. It has no real news value. It is there to make people think they might see something gory. For shame, News.com.au, for shame.

Update: I published too quickly. It’s the main pic at dailytelegraph.com.au, with the caption:

SEE inside the hotel room of tragic pop star Whitney Houston before her death, including the final meal she ordered.

It’s not a fucking theme park ride.

→ 10 Comments

Posted in Celebrity, Journalism

Tagged , , , , ,

There’s objective journalism, and then there’s the Daily Telegraph

Posted on November 9, 2011 by | 15 Comments

There are days when I pull a muscle in my eyes from rolling them so much. Today is one of those days. Check out this fine example of “objective” headline writing from the Daily Telegraph: Just who’s going to pay our bills now that the carbon tax has passed.

Um, that would be the Government. You know, the generous compensation package that your own newspaper reported on during June.

Of course, the reporting by Gemma “302 words on how Gillard is a hypocrite because we’ve calculated the emissions from flying a single pair of shoes from China” Jones is just as, ahem, balanced and objective:

But as the carbon tax Julia Gillard vowed never to impose was passed into law, yesterday marked a dark day for the majority of Australians opposed to it.

Oh, puh-lease. Anyone with half a brain knows that minority governments involve compromise in order to work.

Liberal MPs seized on a handshake between Mr Brown and Labor Senate leader Chris Evans.

“That handshake between the leader of the government and the leader of the Australian Greens says it all about the betrayal and the sellout of traditional Australia Labor Party values to the Greens,” Liberal senate leader Eric Abetz said.

OH NOES! A handshake! I shook hands with a charity collector this morning, so clearly I have sold out to ChildFund Australia.

Later, Jones “objectively” writes that Bob Brown was “crowing” over the victory. (It is possible that the story was changed in subbing, but it’s unlikely given her prior form.)

Now to another “objective” story in the Daily Telegraph, this one from Andrew Carswell: Hot to Trot on Karl Marx’s dogma at the federal government’s media inquiry:

THE first academic chosen to appear at the federal government’s media inquiry yesterday is a Marxist who once claimed Western democracy was a charade.

A fine example of playing the man, not the ball.

Martin Hirst, an associate professor of journalism at Melbourne’s Deakin University, joined three other prominent critics of News Limited, publisher of The Daily Telegraph, in speaking at the opening day of the inquiry, claiming there were not enough strong left-wing opinions in the mainstream media.

It’s easy enough to test whether this is just a lefty-pinko claim. Let’s name the regular mainstream media columnists, shall we? The ones who write each day/week and feature on the MSM’s websites as regular contributors. On the right we have Miranda Devine, Andrew Bolt, Piers Akerman, Gerard Henderson, Paul Sheehan, Janet Albrechtsen, and pretty much everyone who writes for The Punch. Plus there’s an increasing number of Liberal politicians, both current and former, who write for Fairfax. On the left we have John Birmingham, Ross Gittins, Jessica Irvine. That can’t be right.

While they may not be mainstream, Professor Hirst’s views are certainly strong, and considerably left.

He holds views that are “considerably left”? Quick! Someone arrest that man for being in possession of opinions not shared by the Right.

The Daily Telegraph can reveal the professor and prolific blogger has been a contributor to the Marxist Interventions web portal, on which claims are made he has been “the only Trotskyist to ever work in the federal press gallery as a journalist”.

Yeah, that isn’t a scoop. It’s publicly available information on the Marxist Interventions website, where it states: Martin Hirst has been active in socialist politics since 1975 and claims to have been the only Trotskyist to ever work in the federal press gallery as a journalist. To suggest that it is top secret information that you have dug up is to lie to your audience. And it’s just as ridiculous as writing “The Daily Telegraph can reveal that Peter Costello was a former federal treasurer”.

In his submission yesterday, Professor Hirst attacked News Limited for slanting stories in a way that was against the government, saying: “If they can find a way of attacking Julia Gillard … They will do so.”

Uh, Carswell, this post begins with Exhibit A.

→ 15 Comments

Posted in Journalism

Tagged , ,

Comments and credibility on news sites

Posted on November 7, 2011 by | 14 Comments

A journo friend sent me this link and suggested it was one for NWN: An abusive battlefield for women at ADFA.

Many journos send me stories to blog about because they can’t. They have been silenced by heavy-handed policies that ban them from saying anything negative about their organisation and about their competition. Which means that anyone working for Fairfax or News Ltd can’t critique anything written by anyone else working for Fairfax or News Ltd. It’s something I’ve written about here before (in a post I had legalled yet my editor at the time still tried to bully me into removing it), and also in the NSW Writers’ Centre magazine, Newswrite, about how my job was waved in front of me when I wrote about one of the organisation’s other publications.

This silencing goes on in newsrooms too. In the last place I worked, any attempt to talk about the way we covered stories meant I was Trouble. A Difficult Employee. It meant I’d never get a pay rise, never get a promotion, and was encouraged to leave. Audiences (and journalists) were abandoning – and ridiculing – the publication, yet the editor, Mr Toupee, was not to be questioned. Surely the most obvious question to ask when audiences are laughing at you is: maybe we’re doin’ it wrong?

But I digress.

Back to the ADFA story:


MORE than 70 per cent of female students at the Australian Defence Force Academy (ADFA) have experienced some form of sexual harassment, according to a high-level inquiry.

Despite this, the majority of women surveyed by Sex Discrimination Commissioner Elizabeth Broderick were positive about the military academy.

The second sentence sits uneasily with me. Instead of giving more information about that statistic – and that 70 per cent of female cadets are sexually harassed is ridiculously, outrageously high – the journo (Ian McPhedran) moves on to imply that the Broderick review says “hey, women get sexually harassed but it doesn’t bother them so we shouldn’t worry about it”. The information in that second sentence is important, but it shouldn’t be used to dismiss the first sentence.

I’ve had jobs that I’ve enjoyed, even though some dickhead sexually harassed me. The douchecanoe wasn’t someone I worked for or with, just someone in the same company on a different publication, so the two issues were separate. I’m not saying this is the universal experience. But it is tied to what the McPhedran article doesn’t mention – and I don’t know if the Broderick review asked – about whether the harassers a small group of fuckwads or if they are the majority of cadets? If it’s the former, then it’s easier to stop. If it’s the latter, then there’s a cultural problem inside ADFA and also outside ADFA if we are raising loads of people who think this is ok.

And, of course, since the article is about men doing bad things to women, the journalist has used language that removes the men from their actions. Check this out:

The Broderick Inquiry is one of six launched by Defence Minister Stephen Smith in response to the “skype sex scandal” earlier this year when secret film of a female student having sex was shared among male cadets.

There is no mention of the male cadet who made the film. There is no mention of the plan the male cadets made beforehand to film the sex. The film just happened. Possibly as the female cadet was having sex with herself. Oops. I don’t know about you, but that happens to me all the time.

But the true “joy” in this article is in the five comments that some bright spark at dailytelegraph.com.au decided to publish. I hate to think of the ones they didn’t publish:

Ubique1964 of Sydney Posted at 8:16 AM November 03, 2011
LOL is she really serious:- Ms Broderick has made 30 recommendations for cultural change to attract more women into ADFA and the military. They can’t control the woman in the Defence Force now and they want to add more fuel to the fire, look out fellas. Yes that is right, I AM implying that it is not always the blokes fault.

Yep, that’s right, ADFA can’t control the women who are forcing men to sexually harass them. Probably by wearing their army uniforms just a little too tight. And saying hello to fellow cadets. That’s a true sign of a slut who is asking for it.

Dan of Sydney Posted at 9:04 AM November 03, 2011
This sounds like a friday night at any pub in Australia. A storm in a teacup.

Dan of Sydney likes to sexually harass women on Friday nights. My guess is he’s a complete loser with no social skills who gropes women in crowded venues because that’s as close as he’ll ever get to a woman’s body.

Ex Digger of 10 years of Sydney Posted at 10:55 AM November 03, 2011
And if they can’t handle the unwelcome suggestions, I wonder what will happen to their feelings once some insenstive jerk starts firing Ak-47 rounds or an RPG at them! Perhaps they could complaint to the UN about the unwelcome advances made by the bullets and how the enemy should be made to stop such actions against females. And then of course, see a lawyer about compensation… Heaven forbid we should hurt anybodys feelings whilst training them to be unfaltering “leaders” on the battlefield. Nobody likes a soldier until the enemy is at the gate.

Can you imagine having to work with this knob? Being groped by your workmates is just part of the training, and if it hurts your feelings, then you aren’t tough enough.

I judge a news site by the stories they run and by the comments they publish. To be seen as a credible news source, you can publish the stories and comments that add to intelligent/useful discussion, or you can be the dailytelegraph.com.au.

→ 14 Comments

Posted in Journalism, Language

Tagged , , ,

The line between reporting and stalking

Posted on August 8, 2011 by | 27 Comments

The level of detail in stories about Madeleine Pulver is just creepy. Yesterday’s Sun Herald reported that she went for a swim in the morning with a friend, then went home and changed clothes, then went to play hockey. Today’s Daily Stalkergraph – oops, Daily Telegraph – reports that she went out in the morning for a coffee, then went out again with two friends at 1.30pm. Clearly the journalist Amy Dale and photographer followed her, because she reported that the three girls then met up with a male friend, and then went to “Sushi Train on Military Rd, where they spent more than a hour”. What the fuck?

Journalists from print, tv and radio, as well as photographers and probably a few international journalists, have been loitering outside her home for six days now, reporting the every move of a victim of crime.

And, of course, we have the gormless reporting of Mr Pulver asking the media to leave them alone: Maddie’s father appeals for privacy as she faces HSC trials:

Media outlets have remained outside her home and school since the incident and have reported extensively about her weekend activities with friends.

Seriously journos, how can you not get that he’s talking about you? You should be too embarrassed to report that.

I challenge any news editor to justify the stalking of this teenager. I challenge any news editor to justify the level of detail they are reporting. I challenge any news editor to argue that what they are doing is right. Hasn’t she been through enough without some dickhead timing how long she spends eating lunch?

→ 27 Comments

Posted in Journalism

Tagged , ,

Manipulating readers at the Daily Telegraph

Posted on June 22, 2011 by | 22 Comments

At the Daily Telegraph they cover all the important news:

Daily Telegraph editor's pick

Daily Telegraph - any opportunity to run a Middleton story

Yep, that’s right. Unsubstantiated gossip about Pippa Middleton not wearing undies is the editor’s pick of the day.

They also don’t let the facts get in the way of an opportunity to run a story that bashes asylum seekers: Taxpayers cop $1.5 million bill for asylum seekers phoning home:

TAXPAYERS face a $1.5 million phone bill this year to cover long distance and local phone calls from asylum seekers and staff in just one immigration detention centre.

Ohmygod those greedy good-for-nuthin’ asylum seekers… hey, wait a minute, check out the next sentence:

The Department of Immigration last week issued a tender seeking phone companies to cover the cost of telecommunications from the detention centre at RAAF Scherger near Weipa in northern Queensland.

Gee, that’s not quite what the headline implies, is it? And by not quite, I mean not at all.

What was it that Darren Hassan said last night on the excellent Go back to where you came from, about the media manipulating us to feel empathy towards asylum seekers? When he said that, I larfed and larfed. He was so angry about being scared that he was trying to make it the asylum seekers’ fault.

The Tele story goes on to say there are 600 asylum seekers being held in detention, and about 210 employees (Serco staff, lawyers, interpreters, health workers and defence personnel).

The department said that it could not break down the total cost of the calls between detainees calling overseas and the calls made by staff.

It denied that the bulk of the $1.5 million would be used by detainees.

“It’s a contract for what might be spent in the next 12 months at the entire Scherger base,” a spokesman said. “That telecommunications cost is for all operations.

It’s not quite what the Tele wants you to believe, is it?

This isn’t the first time they’ve run this story. Check out the sidebar of related links:

Daily Telegraph sidebar

Daily Telegraph - running the same old stories

I guess it’s good to know they’re keen on recycling.

→ 22 Comments

Posted in Journalism

Tagged , , ,

Stalking a child

Posted on June 8, 2011 by | 18 Comments

There’s something particularly creepy about the news media’s obsession with Suri Cruise. And by news media, I mean mainly News Ltd.

The latest is this story in The Daily Telegraph: Suri Cruise has a shoe collection worth $150,000 plus (search engine optimisation has certainly ruined the art of headline writing, hasn’t it?).

Yep, a story about a five-year-old’s shoes.

Imagine having to deal with this every time you leave your house:

And this:

Katie Holmes

The shit that Katie Holmes and her daughter have to deal with every day (image from denimology.com)

And for what? So we can have a photo of them leaving the house. Perhaps they close the front door in a way that’s newsworthy?

But where does it stop? When Suri’s body starts to develop, we’ll have magazine covers with her growing breasts helpfully circled so we can all see. Because that’s not creepy at all.

According to celebritynetworth (the shit you find on the internet, hey?), Katie Holmes and Tom Cruise have an estimated net worth US$275 million. I have no idea if this is accurate, but I’m not interested in wandering around the internet looking for a celebrity’s income. It actually sounds a little low when you consider that Cruise was paid US$70 million for War of the Worlds and another US$70 million for Mission Impossible. Either way, it’s not at all surprising that they can buy their daughter whatever she wants. But does it really warrant a story on all of News Ltd’s Australian websites, asking us to judge a child as though she was an adult spending her own money?

That a five-year-old’s outfits are being documented by the, ahem, “news” media is just weird. It’s also creepy that journalists are writing stories about what a child is wearing. It reminds me of those websites that were counting down the days until Hayden Panettiere and Mary-Kate and Ashley Olsen were legally able to have sex. As though ANYONE connected to those sites would be in with a chance. There’s probably already a Suri Cruise one. Some people are so fucked up.

→ 18 Comments

Posted in Celebrity, Journalism

Tagged , , ,

Boobs galore at the Daily Telegraph

Posted on December 3, 2009 by | 4 Comments

Check out the Daily Telegraph‘s homepage today:

Boobs at the Daily Telegraph

They’re not even trying to be a news site any more.

→ 4 Comments

Posted in Journalism, Sex

Tagged , ,