Cover the actual news on your news website with advertising dressed up as news for the first ten seconds after your readers arrive at your site.

Genius.

Further to this morning’s post about the American Family Association’s gay filter, I was saddened while reading The Australian over a brunch latte (piss off, it’s school holidays) by the fact that News Corporation sees no need to run the same wire story through a similar gay filter.

So I corrected it for them.

The pen is mightier than the printing press

But hang on — what’s that?

Self-referencing exclamation marks

Deary me. I think there needs to a dick filter as well to ensure that there are absolutely no gaymosexual references at all.

For a few weeks now I’ve considered installing a filter in GrodsCorp’s blog software to automatically change certain words to other words. For starters, it would be really funny to one day have every occurrence of the word “the” replaced with the word “Fleshlight”. Also, it would be hilarious to have every occurrence of the words “John Surname” replaced with the words “John Surname is not at all — not even a little bit — funny”.

But somebody’s beat me to it.

The American Family Association obviously didn’t foresee the problems that might arise with its strict policy to always replace the word “gay” with “homosexual” on the Web site of its Christian news outlet, OneNewsNow. The group’s automated system for changing the forbidden word wound up publishing a story about a world-class sprinter named “Tyson Homosexual” who qualified this week for the Beijing Olympics.

The problem: Tyson’s real last name is Gay. Therefore, OneNewsNow’s reliable software changed the Associated Press story about Tyson Gay’s amazing Olympic qualifying trial to read this way:

Tyson Homosexual was a blur in blue, sprinting 100 meters faster than anyone ever has.

His time of 9.68 seconds at the U.S. Olympic trials Sunday doesn’t count as a world record, because it was run with the help of a too-strong tailwind. Here’s what does matter: Homosexual qualified for his first Summer Games team and served notice he’s certainly someone to watch in Beijing.

“It means a lot to me,” the 25-year-old Homosexual said. “I’m glad my body could do it, because now I know I have it in me.”

[...]

Fred Jackson, news director of OneNewsNow, tells the Sleuth his organization has now fixed the software glitch. “We took the filter out for that word,” he said, without uttering the “G” word.

Couldn’t have happened to a nicer bunch of gay-haters. Oh, hang on. They don’t hate teh gays, apparently.

“We don’t object to the word ‘gay,’” Jackson explained, except “when it refers to people who practice a homosexual lifestyle.” And the “G” word, he says, has “been co-opted by a particular group of people.”

That’s like saying that I don’t hate Asians, I only hate the people who practice an Asian lifestyle.

(Thanks to Billybob for sending me this article.)

If your client has just walked out of court after this…

A paramedic accused of digitally raping a drug-affected woman in the back of an ambulance was found not guilty today following a three-day trial.

…don’t let him stop for media interviews on the footpath outside a pub called “The Fiddler” because closeups of the pub’s sign will be used in television reports of the story on ABC News.

Time for a new competition here at GrodsCorp. We give you a news headline and you write the first paragraph of the accompanying story. Today’s headline is from The Sunday Age and it should trigger some very interesting ideas.

ECSTASY IN MAN’S PANTS

Entries in comments; winner announced COB Tuesday.

Channel 7 have replaced Channel 9, not only in the ratings, but in pro-Liberal bias in their news reporting.

Consider this morning’s 10:30 news.

Channel 7 devoted about a minute to Kevin Rudd’s budget reply, promptly followed by a surprise interview with John Howard, in which he spent 3-4 minutes continually blasting Rudd and the ALP with a succession of empty comments. The newsreader (not bothering to contain her smirk) helped by asking our beloved PM hard-hitting questions along the lines of “Your campaign appears to have the momentum of a runaway freight train, why are you so popular?”.

This kind of journalism makes my stomach churn.

In other budget news, Kevin Rudd’s reply actually had more viewers than Costello’s budget announcement. No mention of this on the usual suspects.

Why am I not surprised?

The Age and other online news websites have long ago given up placing real news prominently on their front pages; one must now fight through the wire service celebrity “news” sensationalised pap to find any sort of real news. The pessimist in me suspects that page views on these sites must be going up, otherwise the celebrity shite would disappear. The optimist in me hopes that, like me, other online news consumers are fleeing in droves to real news sites such as ABC News Online.

But, hang on, what’s this I see on the ABC News front page this morning?

Oh, for feck’s sake.

“Look! More lefty, vegetarian, socialist groupthink!” shrieks Andrew Bolt, pointing towards The Age’s daily poll which, shock horror, shows that Age readers tend to hold anti-John Howard opinions.

Now, I’m no fan of The Age’s daily poll. I think it’s just another symptom of that paper’s ongoing descent into a dark and smelly pit of lifestyle fluff, celebrity “news”, triumph of advertising bait over genuine content, and sensationalism. You doubt me? Check out some of these hard-hitting questions from recent editions:

“Roman holiday? : Does Amanda Vanstone deserve a plum diplomatic post?”

“Goodbye wave? : Should the Mexican wave be banned at the MCG?”

“Offshore Blunnies : Will you still buy Blundstones once the company moves its manufacturing offshore?”

“Caffeinated cola : Should the caffeine be removed from Coca-Cola?”

“Etiquette : Do Melburnians display a lack of manners on public transport?”

“Eve fatigue : Is New Year’s Eve overrated?”

“THE GREATEST? : Is Shane Warne the greatest bowler of all time?”

Kill me now. These pathetic attempts to involve the reader are so hot right now. I mean, even SBS has them in its tarted-up 6:30pm supernews (with super ad breaks).

(And speaking of SBS’s supernews, does Stan Grant’s hypercolour fake tan make anybody else’s eyes hurt?)

But back to Bolta and his global lefty groupthink conspiracy theory. You see, according to Bolta The Age and the ABC are the only news organisations on earth that attract a majority of their readers/ viewers from the same sphere of political belief. You’d never see a pathetic reader poll on the pages of the Hun with results leaning heavily towards conservative opinion. And do you know why? They never make sense:

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.