Wednesday, November 23, 2005
The decaying Herald
With newspaper circulations spiralling ever downward, and international source information available at the fingertip, one wonders why a localised leftist tabloid like Australia's Sydney Morning Herald bothers footing the cost of stationing reporters overseas.
Herald reports in any case, much more often than not, echo Britain's Guardian, or Reuters, or the BBC.
The paper's reporters, similarly, seem to progress up the food chain as they echo relativist and Amerika-loathing flora and fauna like Chomsky, Fisk and Our Johnny Pilger.
Why pay for an echo? In the Internet era one can, of course, access the devil direct.
Surely noone wants to pay to read pimple-faced Bradley somebody piously puporting to give the US President a failing "report card" (sic) on one page, and some rugby boofhead with journalistic pretensions drooling over a speaking tour to Perth by hyperbolist Maureen "I hate W" Dowd on the next.
Let alone smarmy Washington-based tortoises like M. Gawonka (I think that's his name) giving an "inside" account of something that was described in infinitely more colour and detail - and with identical bias - in the Times or the Post a week ago.
Not that the Herald does not have a few quality columnists. But Miranda Devine, Paul Sheehan and Gerard Henderson can be bookmarked and read without swimming through crud.
That the Herald tolerates rightists and centrists on the payroll at all might simply be to do the minimum necessary to bring an expanded readership.
More likely it's so that management may pretend the kind of "balance" and bogus moral high ground that George Orwell famously torched so long ago, mutatis mutandis:
"…(T)here is a minority of intellectual pacifists, whose real though unacknowledged motive appears to be hatred of western democracy and admiration for totalitarianism. Pacifist propaganda usually boils down to saying that one side is as bad as the other, but if one looks closely at the writing of the younger intellectual pacifists, one finds that they do not by any means express impartial disapproval but are directed almost entirely against Britain and the United States …"
Yet the Herald, decades after Orwell, plods along under the boneheaded misapprehensions that such (mutatised and mutandised) relativism:
a) is not completely transparent;
b) stimulates readership; and
c) earns credibility.
Hence west-critical relativist gems continue to fall out of the Herald like mangoes from Queensland trees.
Lovechild reporters like Paul McGeogh and Peter Hartcher continue to get star billing, the former with endless, credibility-challenged and no doubt costly doom and gloom reports from Iraq.
Hartcher, on the other hand, delivers a stream of op-ed pearlers like today's, the crux of which was that public opinion was with US President Bush when he invaded Afghanistan, but against him in Iraq; therefore Iraq is/was a mistake and Bush a failure.
He describes the 9/11 atrocity as a military "strike", just like the US "strike" on Iraq (in the same sentence).
Then there was the dissembling mumble filed yesterday by Ed O'Loughlin, the Herald's man in Israel/Palestine. According to Ed, and the headline, it wasn't clear whether Hezbollah or Israel initiated the recent conflagration along the Israel-Lebanon border.
Even though:
d) the blow-ups were coordinated by Hezbollah - at different points on the border;
e) a United Nations representative condemned Hezbollah for initiating the attacks;
f) the entire UN Security Council, except for the one Arab representative thereon, chided Hezbollah for initiating the attacks; and
g) the conflagration started in the Shebaah Farms part of the border, which Hezbollah has aggressively claimed is Lebanon's ever since the Israeli withdrawal from Lebanon some years ago.
Perhaps it's just an innocuous report, a typical Herald offering, but nevertheless: what a sad day for the paper when a much more balanced, clear and factual account of the incident can be found - in simultaneous real time - by simply clicking on the Israeli Ministry of Foreign Affairs web site!
There you will also find useful, relevant, pertinent background. Like the fact that even the UN condemns Hezbollah's contesting the Shebaah Farms territory, recognising the border as legitimate.
O'Loughlin, the Herald's sponsored expatriate, merely describes the zone as "disputed" territory that Israel "occupies".
