Next week will be the last regular edition of Media Scrum for the foreseeable future, but before we get there, there's a couple of things we'd like to get off our chests while we've got the chance.
Firstly, and we mean this most sincerely, fuck you anti-vaxxers, and your harmful bullshit. Fuck you for spoiling conspiracy theories, which used to be fun speculation about who was on the grassy knoll, or just watching The X-Files, and is now the #1 reason for muting family members on Facebook.
You're not smarter and more informed than everybody else, just because you watched a few dumbarse Youtube videos, you're a fucking moron who is causing actual harm to people all over the world by spreading blatant misinformation, just so you can feel superior to all the other sheeples.
It's not just the fact that measles is making a comeback in a big way, it's the way fanatics use these odious theories to justify actual massacres around the world, where health workers who are only trying to make people's lives better are targeted because some violent fuckwits think it's okay. This shit has consequences, and is scientifically baseless, and if you spread it, you are actively making the world a worse place. You fucking tools.
Fuck the 24-hour news cycle, which has distorted perceptions of the news media in such an awful way. It's bad enough that we have to deal with Fox News - which has caused more nastiness in the public discourse than literally anything else on the planet, making everyone look bad by being unrelentingly awful in every way - but it's also changing the way we consume news for the worst.
These channels and stations filled the airwaves with vapid analysis and other bullshit instead of actual news, because they don't have the resources to actually gather the good shit, and now a large segment of the public can't tell the difference between facts and opinion anymore, because all this shit has been hammered into them.
Fuck you, anybody who thinks they can threaten or physically harm journalists for doing their goddamn job. Munters still send threats from comfortable anonymity, and many of them are from fuckwits who just think they're having a laugh, but it isn't very fucking funny at the other end.
If you ever threaten somebody with physical harm for writing or saying something you disagree with, you've lost any fucking argument you were trying to make. You're the fucking loser, and can fuck off and simmer in your own bile.
And while we're there, fuck the police who never do anything when reporters and camera people are shoved and attacked on the street. You see this happen every fucking week, right outside courtrooms, making a goddamn mockery of the whole idea of law and order, at the very place that has been built to uphold it. These people are doing their jobs, and the cops who stand by while they get shoved out of the way, or have their cameras snatched away, aren't doing anybody any fucking favours.
Fuck you, rubberneckers who won't admit they are rubberneckers.
Whenever we drive by a car crash, no matter how minor it looks, we all slow down and take a look. It's only human nature. There is, of course, always a tone of resigned disgust from the police and transport authorities when the traffic builds up on the motorway because of all the rubbernecking. If only people would carry on as normal, and resist the urge to gawk at the carnage, everything would go a lot smoother.
And we all share in that disgust, especially when we're stuck in that traffic for an extra 20 minutes on the drive home from work. What sort of ghoulish creep stops to look at a crash site?
But why wouldn't you slow down for a look? Every other son of a bitch is also slowing down, and if you don't, you're going to ram into the arse of some other gawker. There's also the safety issue,and the need to keep speed down around a crash site. And because it's interesting and strange, creating an unbearable curiosity - what actually happened?
It becomes a story over the dinner table, or a reminder of the fragility of our road system, and of our own mortal forms. Rubbernecking is as human as breathing, and no amount of moaning ever really changes human nature.
This beautiful hypocrisy is mirrored in our consumption of news, because it's not you clicking on the bullshit, it's everybody else. All that salacious stuff about vapid celebrities, or outright property porn, that's never you.
Admit that you like the shit, or we're not going to get anywhere. Or just stop whining about it, put the fucking foot down when you go by an accident scene, and don't peek. Websites don't care why you're clicking on it, they'll count the fucking clicks anyway.
Fuck you, if you've ever been one of those fuckwits that moans that the media hasn't been doing their jobs, and are convinced that the entire media hasn't covered a certain topic, because they're too fucking lazy to spend five seconds googling, which would reveal that everybody has been covering the exact thing you're talking about.
(In other words, yes, people are still following the long-term after-effects of the Christchurch earthquakes. Nobody has forgotten shit.)
For that matter, fuck you single sourcers, who only rely on a single newsroom for all their information, and then act all smug and shit, as if willful ignorance wasn't something to be absolutely ashamed of.
Only fuckin' idiots get all their news from one place, whether it's a single website or publication or broadcast. There is so much going on, in so many places, with so many different editorial directions, that the best way to keep on top of it all is to take on something from lots of different places.
Sticking with one source of all information means you're incredibly likely to fall for some dumbarse ideology, and will never get the full picture, especially on big, important stories.
And finally, as always, fuck you Winston Peters, just on general principle. Sometimes we think you're starting to sound pretty cool, and then you decide that the whole country should have a fucking say on female health issues. So fuck you, Mr Peters. Fuck you very much.
- Margaret Tempest/Katherine Grant
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