It was a sad and enfuriating day for me today. At university I studied journalism with great fervour, picturing myself as an Aussie, yobbo Hunter S. Thompson. In my studies I developed a keen respect for the ethics of journalism: what made a good story. How to follow up a lead. The legal in's and out's.
Ever since those heady days of amatuer journalism I've noticed the shocking truth of news reporting in this country. Putrid shows like A Current Affair and Today/Tonight aim for the cretinous and gullible, while the 'reporters' have the audacity to claim that their work is 'Hard Hitting Investigative Journalism'. The fact of the matter is that these hacks are the used-car sales men (and women) of the news world. They are buffoons, getting stories via email from ignorant victims.
These shows have no sense of originality either. It seems as though every month we are confronted by what we're really being served in meat pies. How our shonky butcher is selling us mutton dressed as lamb.
Usually I can let these shows float in their own flotsom, because only the stupid or bored would watch them. But lately the same sorts of shoddy reporting preactices have beeen worming their way into the general media. This is typified by Channel 7 airing pictures of MP David Campbell emerging from a gay sauna club. The fact that Channel 7 stalked him to get the pictures and then actually put them to air, despite ANY political relevance whatsoever is quite simply pathetic. Whoever gave the green light for this story should be tied to the back of a Channel 7 news truck by their annkles and driven around Sydney at 45 km/h.
I feel for David Campbell. There was no validity to that story at all, it would seem Channel 7 set out on a campaign to ruin him. We should now stalk and film the executives of Channel 7 and find the skeletons in their closets. I'm sure there would be revelations of raging drunkards, snorting massive lines of cocaine off the bare arses of ten year old Asian boys.
So until I see the big-wigs of Channel 7 with their pants around their ankles, baring a butt plug, I shake my head at the state of Australian journalism. The news is dead.
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