Maybe I’m the last guy in Australia to know about this but the Gloria Jeans coffee shop franchise is co-owned by two men with close links to the Pentecostal Hillsong Church. In addition to this, Gloria Jeans is a major corporate sponsor of Mercy Ministries which “is a non-profit organization for young women who face life-controlling issues such as eating disorders, self-harm, drug and alcohol addictions, depression and unplanned pregnancy.” Mercy Ministries is strongly anti-abortion and views “lesbianism as a sin that their residential program assists girls to ‘walk in freedom from.’”

Even though Mercy Ministries (and therefore Gloria Jeans) fights for women’s freedom from freedom*, their possession of a MySpace page means they aren’t interested in fighting for freedom from bad web design.

* Thanks to Bruce for giving us this awesome phrase.

I was going to start this post by making a joke about how I once tried to use MySpace and was so angered and frustrated by its hideous design, slow loading times, and complete lack of usability that I tried to top myself. But that would be in poor taste so I won’t.

Instead I’m going to have a bit of a laugh at the media’s newest sensationalist campaign in the wake of the tragic suicide deaths of two teenage girls: “Our Society’s Kids Are Addicted to MySpace and Are Catching the ‘Emo’ and are Making Suicide Pacts and Are Killing Themselves So We Must Ban MySpace and the Internet and ‘Emo’ and Childhood.”

Does any news outlet in the country ever let the concept of correlation vs. causation get in the way of a good sensationalist headline any more? Where were the “Listening to Nick Cave Music by Candlelight While Wearing Black Makes Kids Kill Themselves” headlines fifteen years ago?

Go read Jeremy and Adam 1.0 who have both written good posts about this topic.

UPDATE (6pm): Well fuck me dead:

[John] Howard was asked if the government could improve monitoring of the internet or educate parents in a bid to stop a similar tragedy.

“I think the greatest thing that has to be said about this is that parental responsibility in the end is the key to behaviour by children,” Mr Howard told ABC Radio.

“Government can’t educate parents to be responsible if they don’t have an instinct for responsibility.

“And whilst there are things the government can do there is a limit before you start running up against freedom of speech.”

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!