Sally Morrell, the Herald Sun’s most stunningly vacuous columnist, hates Twitter.

I LOVE the net, like the blogs, and tolerate even Facebook for the teenagers. But Twitter is for the birds – and the birdbrained.

[...]

But it’s now clear that “twit” was a noun just looking for a verb.

The beautiful irony? 18 out of the 25 paragraphs — a whopping 72% — in Sally’s “article” (the word “article” implies journalism so I put it in inverted commas) are under the 140 character limit for tweets, making Sally Australia’s best Twitter journalist. 140 character bursts of vapidity with no greater meaning or purpose, connected by not a single coherent idea. Perhaps it’s time to compile some more Sally stanzas.

The Age loves to get its readers to do the journalism for them. This morning there were widespread delays across the train network and instead of walking across the road from The Age’s office to Melbourne’s largest train station for a few pictures of the “chaos”, they’ve asked readers to take the snaps instead.

Shameless.

In a blatant attempt to bury potentially embarrassing material, the Victorian state government has today tabled over 200 reports in Parliament.

With criticism-worthy nuggets of gold almost certainly hidden somewhere in the reports, you’d be forgiven for expecting Victoria’s broadsheet to do some — um, how you say? — journalism for us. You know, a bit of reading, analysing, questioning and reporting. But this is The Age, remember. That’s not how Fairfax rolls anymore.

You want journalism? Do it yourself.

The work experience kid was too busy writing tomorrow’s editorial to read all 200 reports

I’d love to know which goose asked this question of Brendan Nelson (who’s come out of hiding to non-answer some questions while overseas.)

QUESTION: Is it upsetting for example you know there’s now a Facebook page trying to recruit Peter Costello to the leadership? Is that sort of thing personally insulting?

Oh, for fuck’s sake. In terms of quality journalism that’s up there with “[insert search term here] returns 100,000 results on Google” and “look at this dumb thing that some dumb person has put on eBay”. And anyway, there are five different Facebook groups that support Costello’s ascension to the leadership and Prime Ministership.

That’s a massive grand total of 197 people on Facebook who want Peter Costello to lead the Libs. Hardly the groundswell of support that justifies a doorstop question.

Oh, and then there are these groups. I’m lovin’ that first photograph and the threat of ritualistic beheading.

That’s 59 people who oppose Costello’s leadership; just under a third of the number of those in favour. Where’s the dopey journalist’s (sic) question about those groups then?

But perhaps the most insightful Peter Costello group on Facebook is this one.

Peter Costello: pwned.

Andrew Bolt is the associate editor of Australia’s highest selling newspaper. He writes a bi-weekly column in that paper and authors a very popular blog on that paper’s website. He is a regular guest on dozens on television and radio shows. Despite your take on his views you must conclude that he is an intelligent man. Yet Bolta is surprised — nay — shocked that Channel Seven’s cesspit “current affairs” program, Today Tonight, has played silly buggers with an interview he provided and quoted him out of context.

Remind me to be much more careful before agreeing to appear on a Today Tonight piece, especially if it’s about the “stolen generations”.

I was asked to discuss Bruce Trevorrow’s big compensation payout for being a member of the “stolen generations”.

I explained in snappy bites the reasons why this case – desperately tragic though it was – was not proof of the “stolen generations” at all.

[...]

None of this was included in the interview. The only comments I was allowed to make were ones denying the existence of a “stolen generation” – as if I had no idea there was a Trevorrow who was the living proof I was wrong.

This was no accident. Today Tonight wanted to present an “exclusive” – the first “stolen generations” victim to get compensation, and nothing was allowed to disturb the narrative.

Perhaps there might be a role in schools for the media literacy lessons that Bolta so despises.

After three decades at the network Ray Martin has quit Channel Nine.

Despite Martin’s apparent goodwill, his departure comes as a black cloud hangs over the Sunday program, which he was to host when it returns this Sunday morning.

Sources say Martin has clashed with network bosses over changes to the Sunday format in the last two weeks, which Martin felt would “gut” the 25 year old program of its journalistic gravitas.

The “gravitas” of which Martin speaks has been a hallmark of his contribution to Australian journalism over the past 39 years. How could any self-respecting Australian forget the kind of hard-hitting investigative reports, arse-licking John Howard “interviews”, Commonwealth Games commentary, and celebrity pap that Martin used to bring us on A Current Affair during his six years hosting the program?

And of course there’s the legendary John Safran confrontation after Martin’s filthy ethics-neutral journalistic tactics were turned back on him.

No matter how bad Martin’s journalism was it was never as bad as his fashion sense.

Blue, pink and yellow: together at last

And no matter how bad Martin’s fashion sense was it was never as bad as Mike Munro’s.

For the love of God, are they Tasmanian tigers?

Ray Martin: good fucking riddance.

The recent Lachlan Connor action has reminded me about something I meant to blog at the time but completely forgot about. In the middle of November I received an email from a journalism intern at Crikey addressed to Lachlan Connor.

From: Alesha Maree Capone (XXXXXX@student.rmit.edu.au)
To: lachlanconnor@gmail.com
Date: Nov 13, 2007 5:06 PM
Subject: Re: Hillsong stuff

Hi, I’m an intern at the journalism site crikey.com and I’m wondering where you found this quote “lesbianism as a sin that their residential program assists girls to ‘walk in freedom from.’” that is was posted on your blog on 22 October?
Thanks- this would be a big help with a story I’m working on

Easy enough mistake to make, I suppose, given that his name is on the front of the website. So I answered her question and politely informed her that Lachlan didn’t exist.

From: The Editor (XXXXXX@gmail.com)
To: Alesha Maree Capone (XXXXXX@student.rmit.edu.au)
Date: Nov 13, 2007 5:51 PM
Subject: Re: Hillsong stuff

Hi Alesha,

The quote comes from here (http://www.talkaboutparenting.com/
group/alt.adoption/messages/437079.html) and is spoken by Sarah Scantlen, Assistant Programs Manager at Mercy Ministries:

Approximately 40 girls live at Mercy for up to a year, coping with everything from drug abuse, suicidal thoughts, eating disorders, unplanned pregnancies and lesbianism. “We do have girls who have a history of lesbianism, and that’s definitely an issue that we deal with,” says Scantlen. “We are cautious to make sure that we’re not putting them in an area where there’s going be more struggle or temptation because this is a girls’ home. In dealing with it in counseling, they have been able to walk in freedom from that.”

Do you reckon you could email me a copy of the finished article?

Cheers,
The Editor

ps/- Lachlan Connor is a fictional YouTube politician created by my site (http://www.grods.com/lachlan-connor-independent/). Sorry about the confusion.

I reckon I spelled it out pretty clearly so imagine my surprise when I received this email the next day addressed, once again, to Lachlan Connor.

From: Alesha Maree Capone (XXXXXX@student.rmit.edu.au)
To: lachlanconnor@gmail.com
Date: Nov 14, 2007 3:54 PM
Subject: Crikey article
mailed-by student.rmit.edu.au

Hi Lachlan,
You can find the article at the link below. Thanks very much for your help- Alesha Capone.

http://www.crikey.com.au/
Politics/20071114-Borders-between-charity-and-Hillsong-church-thin-.html

That’s some fine attention to detail right there.

A new tactic from Andrew Bolt in his ongoing campaign to disprove human-induced climate change: call Al Gore fat.

Reader Babs wants Al Gore to offer the offsets that will really benefit humanity:

I’m waiting for someone… ANYONE… to come up with a Calorie Offset programme. If it works the same as “Carbon Offsetting”, just think. I can eat whatever I like but as long as I hand over cash, I’ll never put on weight!

Two points:

1) This is the kind of informed, intellectual commentary that makes Andrew Bolt such a respected member of the journalism profession; and

2) How long before Timmeh Blair adopts the same tactic as part of Andy and Timmeh’s ongoing groupthink campaign?

There has been some atrocious Ben Cousins-related media coverage lately but today’s News Limited feed, covering Cousins’ flight to LA, plumbed new depths:

A Qantas flight attendant who looked after Cousins on the flight … said Cousins was given a copy of the sports pages of one of the Sydney newspapers during the flight.

Cousins, riding in business class alone and wearing his trademark snakeskin boots, jeans and loose, white V-neck T-shirt, apparently had a good flight. “He slept for a lot of it,” the flight attendant said.

The crew also enjoyed having Cousins onboard for the 14-hour flight. Qantas gave him one of the best seats on the plane, 11B, the flight attendant said. “My female colleagues particularly really loved having him on the flight,” the flight attendant said. “They thought he was a hottie.”

This is absolutely appalling journalism. There was no mention of several facts of pivotal importance, and several key questions remain unanswered:

* What did Cousins select from the in-flight menu?
* Did he drink lattes or flat whites? (Of particular interest to some bloggers)
* What did he watch/play with on his in-seat LCD screen?
* Did he pay attention during the pre-flight safety demonstration or did he look aimlessly out the window?
* Did he puke in one of those paper bags?
* Was the plane a Boeing 747, a 777 or an Airbus A340?
* What was the pilot’s name and did he welcome passengers with a witty remark?
* Was Lisa Robertson onboard and, if so, did Cousins spend any protracted lengths of time in the lavatory?

Picked up a copy of the New Zealand south island’s main newspaper, The Press, to read at the airport yesterday. On page two the paper reproduced the widely reported recent story about the Canadian man who was injured after his iPod’s earphones channeled a lightning bolt.

Wired for sound? You could be wired for death.

Wearing an iPod or other portable device could increase your chance of being struck by lightning.

A Canadian man suffered wishbone-shaped burns across his neck and chest, ruptured eardrums and a broken jaw when lightning travelled through his music player’s wires.

Bam! What an opening sentence. That’s four years of journalism degree right there.

However, the article continues. In order to spice up the wire story and pass it off as fresh journalism The Press sourced some useless statistics from the NZ government:

An ACC spokeswoman said although there had been 34 recorded cases of lightning strike in New Zealand over the past five years, none had involved portable electronic devices.

Whew, that’s a relief. Oops — spoke too soon.

Other types of injuries had been linked to straggling wires.

There were claims for tripping over Nintendo cords, one sibling assault with a games console and one boy had suffered an injury when his brother tripped over a wire, pulling a DVD player onto him.

Jumpin’ Jesus! New Zealand sure is a dangerous place.

But the best part of the hysterical article (page two, remember) is a desperate attempt by The Press to find a local angle by sending a journalist with the world’s most awesome name — Beck Eleven — out to Christchurch mall to rustle up some vox pops.

Melissa Bloxham, 18, listening to the new Nickleback album on her iPod Shuffle, said the prospect of attracting lightning through her device was a bit scary.

“I never thought of it before and I’m not sure it would really happen but if it’s true — oh my God.”

Leo Beckett, 18, said he had not been troubled by lightning but had once caught his headphone wires as he got out of a car, jerking his neck.”

You can’t make this shit up.

The Press shares the same masthead design as The Age, with the Royal Arms and the latin motto Nihil utile quod non honestum. I think there’s something in that for all of us.

Trawling around the blogosphere (Hi, Slipheed!) unearths some weird and wonderful things. How’s the form of this guy who runs a blog called Double-Think ranting about left-wing media bias in a post called “The Age show their stripes”?

The state of modern journalism in general is appalling. Students of journalism and media, across the country and in many tertiary institutes, are not taught one of the most basic principles of news reporting – separating opinion from fact.

There is room for editorials and opinion pieces. In fact, there is a huge demand by readers to read different opinion pieces. But news is news, and the front pages of newspapers are supposed to be free from editorializing, colorful language, spin, cartoons and imagery.

The Age and SMH are 2 of the worst newspapers in Australia, because they proudly violate this concept on a near daily basis. The left wing hatred and cynicism towards Howard, climate change hysteria, animosity towards liberty and capitalism pervade almost every paragraph.

Hang on, I thought. Surely this dude can’t seriously contend that News Ltd. tabloids don’t regularly and proudly violate these very golden rules he speaks of?

The Herald Sun also editorialize their headlines, but with a different bias – a more patriotic and nationalistic one. Its usually focussed on demonising criminals and social misfits, as “monsters”, and celebrating soldiers, patriots and the winners of awards as valiant heroes.

Patriotism, nationalism and valour. Oh, well, that’s all right then.

The tagline of the Double-Think blog is:

“Doublethink means the power of holding two contradictory beliefs in one’s mind simultaneously, and accepting both of them”. – George Orwell.

Obviously our blogging mate is demonstrating this principal in his writing for our ease of understanding.

I’ve moaned before about pathetic journalists resorting to the old “conducting a Google search for ‘Chris Johnston is a hack’ returns over 200,000 results” trick. Even Crikey got in on the act last Friday with this lazy editorial effort:

If you type the words “Indonesia”, “airlines”, “safety” and “crashes” into Google search there are 145,000 results

For a while the craze was to breathlessly report every stupid item up for auction on eBay as if the abuse of such systems would bring western democracy to its knees. Luckily that practice seems to have fallen out of favour but I’ve noticed that the new black when it comes to cookie-cutter “journalism” is the breathless reporting of each new incursion into online game Second Life by a company somewhere in the world. Check out this latest effort from The Age:

Telstra BigPond throws open the doors to its island playground within the 3-D online world of Second Life.

It becomes the first major Australian corporation to create a presence there, following a stampede of international companies who have started to use Second Life as a promotional and commercial tool.

Offering a distinctly Australian flavour, “The Pond” – which consumes 11 Second Life sims or “virtual suburbs” – includes virtual recreations of landmarks such as the Sydney Opera House, the Sydney Harbour Bridge and Uluru.

There are also various activities for visitors – represented in-world by characters called “avatars” – to partake in, such as dancing in the Illusion nightclub, knocking back stubbies at the Outback Billabong Bar, hooning around the race track on a BigPond scooter and snorkelling in a coral reef.

But socialising aside, the primary purpose of the island is to promote the telco’s wares.

BigPond billboards appear at every turn, and content from its main online channels – sport, movies, music and games – has been ported in.

Users can get a taste of BigPond’s content offerings, such as music tracks, from inside the world, before being connected to the BigPond Music store to purchase it if they desire.

Great advertisement for Telstra but not much else.

ps/- By the way, isn’t it funny that Lindsay Tanner got a write up in The Age today about his YouTube exploits after I (via Fang) wrote about it last week. GrodsCorp gets quite a few hits from The Age’s IP addresses every day.

HIGH Court judge Michael Kirby has been vilified and defamed by fraudsters who have stolen his identity to post offensive material on the popular internet site MySpace.

The identity thieves posed as the Australian judge to put sordid and sexually charged material on a fake Justice Kirby profile page.

So begins another fear-mongering, sensationalist and pathetic beat-up in the Sunday edition of Melbourne’s imploding broadsheet The Age. Like, shock horror, somebody pretended to be somebody else on the internet. And not only is this act “identity theft” but it “underlines the flimsy or fraudulent nature of much of the internet’s so-called ‘citizen journalism’.” Surely that odour I detect isn’t a whiff of fear about the threat to your pathetic dead-tree “journalism” from the blogosphere and non-mainstream media, Age? And who the hell has ever called MySpace citizen journalism? Long bow drawn.

I’m not entirely sure what The Age expects the Internet Police Force (IPF) to do about this terrible case but as “journo” Reid Sexton seems to imply there should definitely be, like, laws against stuff like this. And penalties. Maybe we should just turn the internet off.

Actually, turning off the internet would result in one important outcome: saving us from death by celebrity “news” overload every time one accidentally navigates towards theage.com.au.

There’s a clue in the article about what may have prompted The Sunday Age to feature such a non-story so prominently on page three:

When asked if MySpace could trace those who created the profile [the spokesperson] replied: “Yeah, potentially.”

But she refused a request to hand over details of the author and said any potential legal issues would be dealt with as they arose.

“Why would we give those details to you?” she said.

And damn straight too! Why would she hand over private customer details to an anonymous voice on the end of the phone claiming to be a “journalist” from The Age? But don’t dare suggest to a “journalist” that they aren’t omnipotent because their instinctive reaction to being disrespected is to seek revenge and vindication through lies, misinformation and sensationalism.

A much more sensible tone was adopted by senior law lecturer at Monash University, Dr Melissa de Zwart, in her comments for the news story. She outlined a possible legal course for Justice Kirby but qualified it all by saying, “ultimately people have to learn that what they see on the internet is not always correct.” Dr de Zwart knows that there are whole generations growing up now with a higher level of internet literacy than any Age hack will ever have. And just as there will always be dodgy crap going on in the internet tubes there will always be lies presented as truth in that self-proclaimed bastion of real journalism: newspapers.

Does Reid Sexton think we should ban newspapers too?

UPDATE: Call the IPF! John Howard’s identity has been stolen too! And Julia Gillard’s! And Kevin Rudd’s! And Kim Beazley’s! Oh, the humanity!

While working as an editor in commercial television news I became aware of the phenomenon of the recurring news story (RNS). These are events that occur annually and will go to air each year virtually unchanged from last year save for fresh pictures and the odd random word change in the voiceover script. They represent everything wrong with television news, being the pinnacle of lazy journalism and easy airtime filler. You know an RNS when you see one: ANZAC day, Moomba parade, World’s Longest Lunch, Good Friday Appeal etc. I was reminded of this phenomenon on Friday while watching ABC news which contained a story about the AFL grand final parade and a story about the killed-in-the-line-of-duty police commemoration.

About 100,000 people lined the streets of Melbourne today to cheer on the teams competing in tomorrow’s AFL grand final. The parade route was awash with (insert grand final competitor #1’s colours) and (insert grand final competitor #2’s colours). Kids came face-to-face with their footballing heroes etc.

Melburnians dug deep today to give money to sick kids etc.

What happens on the day of an RNS is the newsroom chief-of-staff will allocate the piece to either the channel’s newest or most jaded journo – there is no middle ground here. The new journo will get the story because they are at the bottom of the pecking order. The experienced and jaded journo will get the story because they pissed the chief-of-staff off last week. The selected journo will hit the road with a jaded camera crew (there’s no other kind) to shoot some fresh vision to lay over the top of last year’s voiceover script, extracted from the news archive. They will then hit the edit suite manned by a jaded editor (there’s no other kind) and the new journo will micro-mange the story’s assembly while the jaded journo will barely stay long enough to hand over the camera tapes before hitting the pub.

When the RNS goes to air the autocue-bot will read the intro in a knowing voice, with just that right amount of cheese, cynicism and resignation.

And we will sit at home watching, content to consume such crap.