Have a quick read of this…

“Last summer, I went to a friend’s wedding and arrived early to find four Middletons – James, Kate, Pippa and Carole – sitting in the empty church, like beetles wrapped in silk. The first thing I thought was ‘They seem so excited’. And the next thing I thought was ‘They’re really excited’. As in fizzing with hysteria. Going to a friend’s wedding was not only the highlight of their lives, but an object of frothing fetish. It’s just what you do if you are a Middleton and it’s a Saturday”

This is actually an article about Carole Middleton, mother of Kate, grandmother of the poor little new heir to the British throne. In just a few lines, we know exactly where this is going. I’m sorry I called it journalism in the title. I lied. It’s not. It’s mean, nasty, envy-laden and pointless. What does anyone get from writing something like this?

The article appeared in an Australian Sunday newspaper I don’t normally read. I won’t read it again either, unless I want something to despair about. There is a lot being written about the fate of real journalism just now and it’s easy to see why. News papers (with actual news in them) are a dying breed. Online journalism is still not entirely mainstream and those newspapers and magazines which still churn it out are now dominated by opinion pieces, magazine articles and gossip. As a result of what we read and see on the telly, Australia has become a radically nastier place in the past few years – a racist, mean-spirited, greedy, grasping culture.

A few weeks back I saw an elderly woman parked in a disabled space accidentally accelerate forward instead of backwards in her car. Her car crashed into a concrete barrier. Several people near me laughed. it was the mentality of the mean kid in the playground, the perpetual taunter. it seems that snidey journalism plays the same role. You find someone you can’t bear to see succeed and you taunt them. I can’t begin to guess this author’s motivations or those of any number of gossip columnists in our papers and magazines, but I suspect they demonstrate that same kind of playground viciousness and our media gives it plenty of room to play. How bloody sad.