Look, don’t get me wrong. I’ve come to expect nothing less than lifestyle filler in The Sunday Age (with only a slight increase in the quantity of news in the Monday-Saturday version) which is why McBec and I cancelled our seven day subscription to Melbourne’s broadsheet tabloid a few months ago. But cruising The Age’s website just now I notice that nothing has changed since I last had a physical copy of the paper with which to line Napoleon’s litter tray.

THE next time you order an iced quad venti sugar-free vanilla non-fat with whip caramel macchiato at Starbucks, ask yourself what you’re really after.

According to Victoria University researcher Po-Tsang Chen, coffee-drinkers who flock to chain cafes are craving brand recognition as much as the arcane combinations of caffeine.

Dr Chen has completed a four-year study of Melbourne coffee-drinkers, revealing a divide between those who go to chains, such as Hudsons Coffee or Gloria Jeans, and independently run cafes.

Gotta hand it to The Sunday Age because they’ve really identified their target audience and they’re giving those inner city, aspirational latte lefties exactly what they want: confirmation of their eliteness based on their preference for trendy independent cafes.

And if I ever meet the sub-editor responsible for this headline I’ll freakin’ glass him or her: “Well, latte-da - your coffee shop says things about you”.

Unwrapped The Age this morning to read over my breakfast and thought the newsagent had delivered MX by mistake. The front page was splashed with a story of high-level and insightful political analysis entitled “Stripe me pink! It’s the battle of the suits.” Your understanding and perception of Australian politics will never be the same after reading this article:

IF you prefer your suits, like your politics, hard-wearing but none too fancy, then John Howard is your man.

He’s a double-breasted, old-school-tie, every bloke’s bloke, with hardly an eyebrow, suit or spectacle frame altered for years. If, on the other hand, you fancy a bit of slick with your classics, a bit of cute with your conservatism, then it’s Kevin Rudd. His suits are modern, immaculate, probably European, but not in a flashy over-the-top way. Same with his spectacles: snappy oblongs, but not too snappy.

Snappy oblongs, but not too snappy. This is the front page of Melbourne’s (supposedly) quality broadsheet, for feck’s sake!

And although Mr Rudd’s rather endearing hair-do does appear sometimes as if it were combed by his mum, it also has a chameleon ability to change in certain lights, from dignified grey to school prefect blond.

Oh, spew!

Mr Howard’s suits, for example, are decent and serviceable, but suggest a struggle between “I can be a modern guy, too”, and “I’ve got better things to do than fuss about fashion”. He picks from a relatively sparse wardrobe of single and double-breasted suits, even though the latter gives him a hunched, boxy silhouette, out of fashion so long it’s on the way back. White shirts are a flat canvas for his ties, which range from “old collegian” stripes to some paler silks that scrape into modernity with a single-breasted suit, but sit awry, suggesting a lag behind the times, with a double-breasted.

At least this pathetic story is languishing in the entertainment section of The Age’s website.

A few days ago The Age ran an opinion piece arguing that newspapers were a special news medium in that they offered serious, important and in-depth news coverage. The piece said “any idiot news medium can handle the Paris Hilton story,” and today The Age has proved itself to be the idiotest of them all. Check out the front page:

Oh, and don’t forget the editorial:

It might be tempting to read her story as an only-in-America farce, and there is certainly an element of that, but underneath it is a serious issue: if you break the law — no matter how rich or famous you are — you have to face the consequences. This is a valuable lesson for any young person to learn.

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!