It all began on a long drive home in 2008, a few weeks after Greg Bird was sacked from the Cronulla Sharks for glassing his girlfriend. The conversation in the car had died off, and as he is wont to do, my giant friend just blurted out the first thing that came to mind:
"You know what would sell? A T-shirt with Greg Bird's face on it that says "Don't get mad, get glassy".
We all chortled about it, and the conversation probably moved onto some other topic very promptly, due to our itty-bitty widdle attention spans.
Of course, later on I realised that the Daily Telegraph's then-current fear campaign was about glassing, and I pondered how I could take advantage of this. How much research do they put into their stories? What would be the best way for somebody to trick them into advertising a product for free?
Of course, when you're trying to outsmart the Telegraph, it doesn't take much thought.
In steps, my nefarious plan was:
1. Design an offensive, glassing related T-shirt on http://www.cafepress.com/, costing me nothing and providing me with nothing but profit.
2. On the Daily Telegraph website, go to the 'Submit a story idea' form and, under the name "Dallas Weiland of Nowra", write a complaint about my own t-shirts. Use bad grammar and no capital letters so that I fit in with the expectations of their readership.
3. Buy the Saturday Telegraph that weekend to find my T-shirt on page 8, along with this story.
Above: Shirt, shirt's victim. Absent: quality journalism
And, before you start judging me too harshly, have a guess who the only person I sold a shirt to was?
That's right, Lauren Williams, the 'journalist' who wrote the story.
Instead of reporting on it as a news item, Lauren went out and found a random victim of glassing in order to spin the story around and make the T-shirt seem like the bad guy.
Of course, any tabloid that tries to make a Government campaign to educate drug users about risk minimisation into some kind of State sanctioning of narcotics use on the exact same page as a story about how praying cured a woman's cancer can't be expected to give balanced coverage of anything, really.
Perhaps the Government should sponsor prayer sessions to make people's curiosity about drugs disappear?
And only recently, when Carl Williams was killed, the very front page of the Telegraph opened with the words "And so Fat Carl is dead. Boo Hoo."
Yes, Carl Williams is no loss to the world. But really? Is this the way to report a news story? Newspapers exist to inform, not to influence opinions.
But if you're a News(Ltd)paper, the line between news and opinion gets thinner every day, if it's even still there.
