Saturday 2 August 2008

Page 5 girl returns

What is becoming of the Cairns Post?
It now is certainly the Post with the Most. The most sexually charged photos that is. Bill Henson's photos pail into insignificance when you compare the regular girlie pics that this local regional newspaper print as so-called news.
Not a week goes by now without a reference to their on-line 'Bikini gallery'. Is this the type of service that a community newspaper now serving a city of 140,000 thinks is newsworthy?
Yesterday's page 3 girl, was moved to page 5, however she was yet another piece of cheap soft porn that we've come to expect from the Cairns Post amongst it's regular "news" diet.
When there's a myriad of locally significant community and important issues to debate and air, local media dropping to this level of fill, show their immaturity to find real news.
I've often raised this matter before, however, the photos are now becoming more provocative and deliberately titillating. Often they even print this stuff on the front cover on a regular basis and tout it as news. If editor Mark Alexander and his chief of stiff, I mean staff, Gavin King thinks this is a way to engender some credibility from a news-hungry audience, then they're extremely mislead.
Such photos are probably some tradies dream no doubt, but such continual features like this, simply cement this newspaper in the halls of trashy below the belt journalism.

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

"If editor Mark Alexander and his chief of stiff, I mean staff, Gavin King thinks this is a way to engender some credibility from a news-hungry audience, then they're extremely mislead."

There's your mistake right there. You think they're going for credibility. These guys have undoubtedly been educated in the News Corp way of things, pioneered by the Sun in the UK: no real news, just tits, sports, gossip and articles telling people how they should feel about some push-button issue, all using words of no more than three syllables. Picture book kids stories have more content than the front page of the Cairns Post most days, and are more subtle about their intended moral-of-the-story and who the bad guy is too.

Face it, in a one-paper town, they can put whatever they want in on their pages, and if it sells copies (as babes in bikinis always will) then that's what they will go for. They know their market share for news is diminishing; when I can know about national and international news as it happens, why would I want to read about it in a news paper two days later? Especially since these days, they pretty much just rip the AP wire story complete without changes off the very same website, word for word reprinted. And local news costs money to employ local reporters to actually "report" and not just reprint press releases.
Newspapers can still be relevant (see: The Guardian, and even from News Corp, see: The Sunday Times; I was going to say Sydney Morning Herald, but if their website is anything to go by, it is going downhill too) with expert opinion and in-depth reporting of complex issues unavailable on the fast-paced 'net... but that doesn't sell as many copies or generate as much ad revenue as titillating pictures, vapid "celebrity" gossip and emotionally loaded pseudo-news articles that re-enforce peoples unfounded fears and suspicions. So that is what we get.

The solution is, of course, to stop rewarding this behaviour. Stop buying the Cairns Post. Stop buying ad space in the Cairns Post. Do not support their efforts to pander to the lowest common denominator. They will either come to their senses (unlikely) or continue to degenerate into a mockery of a news paper, a daily version of Sport Illustrated (most likely). Hopefully then, someone, some people or something else would step into the void created by their removal from the news market.

Until then, I say ignore them until they change or disappear.

Anonymous said...

Hey Dickhead Blog editor ... dont ya think it's a bit rich baggin' the local paper when this blog tries to humour itself with jokes about catholic priests and 4 year olds.
Give me tits anytime ...

Anonymous said...

Quickie, The girl is JUST 16, she cant even vote, buy booze nothing! she is just legal for conventional sex, not legal for the other kind you dirty perve! give me jokes over pictures like this, which makes other girls her age question how they should look.