Today the Dominion Post, our capital city’s newspaper of record, features as its below-the-fold front page article the demented rantings of the online reactionary lunatics. (Not so prominent online, thankfully. The comments themselves are here, and they’re just as stupid as you might expect.)
Anyone who reads comments anywhere online will know these people – emboldened by anonymity, aggrieved by a world too complex for them, they seize the opportunity to decry political correctness and to call for a return to barbarism. They’re everywhere, sadly, but they are also a vanishingly small percentage of the total population.
They have been mercilessly lampooned for a long time, even by such outlets as the Private Eye, which for all its many virtues is hardly up with the play in the internet age. There is an addictive website devoted to ridiculing the more idiotic bletherings of this disgruntled rump. And yet, there they are, reported as front page news. As if they matter; as if they’re worth listening to.
Another fine journalistic decision by the DomPost. You know, I bet if you google for five minutes you can find people online calling for Obama to be lynched – that can be your front page story tomorrow!
5 thoughts on “More DomPost WTF”
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Holy Crap!
I can’t even believe that someone was hanged in NZ as recently as 1957.
They used to hang people at the prison in Te Aro. That site is now Te Aro School – the execution ground is about where that large mound in between the playground and the Boyd Wilson field (the varsity sports ground) is, from memory.
Brings it home, eh?
I’d be careful before going down a path of arbitrarily saying peoples opinions don’t matter M. I agree that they are backward dinosaurs, but they have the same right to free speech that you do. As for the Dompost, I don’t think they were particularly validating the opinions. To me it looked like a case of giving them enough rope (pun fully intended).
sam: I’m not challenging their free speech at all – I’m challenging the DomPost’s editorial judgement, which I think is deeply flawed. The opinions of this tiny collective of reactionaries simply do not matter enough to go on the front page of a newspaper. And from where I’m sitting, giving prominence to these toxic opinions is bad enough.
…and the second quote on the article about the comments brings in Eugenics, thus basically proving your point.