The State of Journalism: ‘Misguided becomes truly evil’

Oh, oh, oh. Just when you thought journalists were merely incompetent and stupid, or just spineless cowards caving in to the powers-that-be all. the. god. damn. time, or (and who’d blame you for thinking this?) shameless cynics without souls, slithering cockroaches in the dark, adopting spurious ‘moral’ postures for the sake of creating sensation… ALONG COMES A NEWSPAPER that, on the face of it, actually wants you dead.
Here’s an unbelievable media story highlighted on Graham Linehan’s blog Why, That’s Delightful! on 14 April 2009: The Daily Mail is running separate campaigns about the HPV vaccine, one in Ireland and one in the UK. In the Irish edition, the paper is all for the vaccine, and in the UK edition it’s against it!
Linehan quotes Martin Robbins from layscience.net:
‘Are they insane?! …The revelation that the Mail is pushing two contradictory positions on a major public health issue on either side of the Irish Sea, proves once and for all that they don’t give a crap about the impact such stories may have on their readers. It’s a whole new level of sick. It’s crossing the line where misguided becomes truly evil.’
Hmm, if you think about this, if the vaccine’s dangerous, they’re trying to get Irish people to take it and die, and if the vaccine’s beneficial, they’re trying to get British people not to take it and, as a result, die. Either way, it logically follows that this news story is nothing less than the attempted murder of readers!
So, uh, eh, be careful out there, boys and girls. Don’t believe anything you read in the papers! (Especially the girls, I mean, this is a cervical cancer vaccine…)

barry
Barry Kavanagh writes fiction, and has made music, formerly with Dacianos.

Contact him here.

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