The White Paper and the last straw
Paper blanks page to expose ‘whitewash’ - Breaking News - National - Breaking News
This is a story from Melbourne’s Age newspaper discussing the front page of The West Australian today, which was completely blank aside from a small paragraph. The idea is that it was supposed to illustrate the “whitewash” of the WA state government in an alleged cover-up of an investigation into the failure of government agencies to prevent the death of an abused baby.
It’s a sad story, and legitimate news, however seeing the newspaper cover this morning just made me angry at the paper itself. The West has never exactly been a bastion of journalistic integrity and quality, but in recent months the paper has been getting more and more sensationalistic and the quality of reporting and particularly the blatant editorializing puts it squarely in the tabloid category. I think for me the decline began to accelerate when they ran a vigorous front page campaign a few months back to get better labelling of fruit, complete with little cut-out forms you could fill in and send to the paper to add your voice to the outcry on this crucial issue! Fruit labelling - front page news? I think not. Every week I find myself cringing at at least 2 or 3 of the front page stories and headlines. Most days I find myself ignoring three quarters of the news reports anyway. The paper has a good detailed sports news section at the back (which is fine) but they also often have sport on the front page, and another detailed lift-out sport section in the middle several days a week. Sport is fine but do we really need that much of it, when most days we get 2-3 pages of federal politics, and maybe 3 or 4 pages of international news (of which well over 50% is usually advertising anyway)?
I’m afraid this white front page is the last straw for me. I’m no longer going to waste my money on a tabloid paper with barely any readable articles. Today my West Australian subscription is being cancelled. Unfortunately our state only has one daily paper so there is nothing to replace it with - I think it will have to be The Australian even though that doesn’t have much WA news. At least the journalistic quality is somewhat better.
Categories : News, Personal | 0 Comments
