The Courier-Mail Molests Children And Then Feeds Them To Sharks!

The Courier-Mail is Brisbane's only local daily newspaper. I do not like it very much. Its journalistic style impresses me as tabloid, always going for the sensationalistic and exploitative angles, and catering to the lowest common denominator of the newspaper-reading public. I just don't find it very professional.

It's probably very similar to the New York Post. But that newspaper exists in a city that also has the venerable New York Times. The only competition in Brisbane is The Australian, a national newspaper. Fortunately, The Australian seems to be a decent paper, with intelligent writing and a goodly amount of journalistic integrity. It's not quite as populist as USA Today, the American national newspaper.

Anyway, here's an example of The Courier-Mail's style, and the article that prompted this blog entry (though I'm writing it a few weeks later, as I do).

Recently, the paper has been running a series of articles on "predators" attacking women in public parks and on jogging/cycling paths. This has been presented as A Big Problem, even overshadowing the usual articles about the worst Australian drought in recorded history.

I should stop for a moment and state that I believe violence against women is a real problem and one that should be presented for public consideration and discussion and action. (I find violence against men to be a problem in society, too.) In that sense, the articles are OK, perhaps even commendable.

But I also recognise violence, especially against women, to be an easily exploitable emotional issue and one that tends to create and foster fear - which, of course sells papers. Especially if there are no real limits on the amount of hyperbole used.

So one day there was a front page article about a recent attack. A young woman was playing with her dog, a dachshund, in a park near her home. A man appeared and grabbed and/or threatened her. The dog attacked the man, who kicked the dog and then ran off. There were no witnesses.

That was it. That was the story - though it was told with more words in the paper. Certainly, it was an unpleasant experience for the woman. But *front page* news? Was that the biggest thing that happened that day, including on the international scene?

What really got me, though, was the headline, in VERY LARGE TYPE:

NO END TO EVIL

That's a headline that would work well for a story about the horrors of Auschwitz. But, to The Courier-Mail, I guess that's about the same as a woman being grabbed and then her dog chasing away the grabber.

I don't like The Courier-Mail.

(I do often buy it on Sunday, though, for The Big Quiz. It's a [hard!] trivia quiz of 40 questions, with too much emphasis on Australian sports and obscure Australian geography. The Sunday gaming group likes to compete on who can answer the most questions.)