Nathan Hobby’s blog

Press Council upholds complaint against The West Australian - ABC News (Australian Broadcasting Corporation)

This news item is strange absent from The West Australian’s website.

The finding against The West illustrates for me that the paper will do anything for high circulation and doesn’t care much about journalistic standards. It seems to me that under Paul Armstrong’s editorship, the paper has become more like a tabloid, a daily Sunday Times. What do you think?

I also hate the way a popup ad which takes a few second to kill hits me everytime I open the site. I know I could easily change my settings, but I bet they’re relying that people are lazy like me and keep forgetting to.

http://www.thewest.com.au/default.aspx?MenuID=145&ContentID=37511 

The story has been building up for days. At first she was just missing, mysteriously, after a Bootscooting class. And then yesterday her car is found in Subiaco. And then a trail of oil into King’s Park and recently disturbed soil.

It feels, reading the paper and listening to the news, that the media has this expectation: today there will be a body.

And Perth, voyeuristically, waits. I peer into King’s Park from the bus on the way to work, but I don’t even see any police cars. Somewhere in there, a body.

King’s Park seems a place for bodies. Recently, there were weeks of stories in the local paper about a missing Nedlands man, Benjamin Roberts. His poster was up at the local supermarket. He looked familiar; maybe I met him once. And then the postscript: a tiny article in the local paper saying that police had confirmed a body found in King’s Park was that of missing Benjamin Roberts and no suspicious circumstances were involved. Between the lines: a suicide, and, hence, thankfully, not a media fanfare. I felt so sad reading about it. He was my age.

A few years ago, a homeless woman was found dead in King’s Park. She had no family.

King’s Park has taken on a sinister aspect in my mind. A place of secrets. A place of death. Like the aquifer in Tim Winton’s The turning.

It seems every time I turn on my favourite radio station - Radio National - I hear Phillip Adams’ patronising voice. I must get home at the wrong time, cook dinner at the wrong time.  

For the last seven years, I’ve tried hard to like him. I like some of his politics. I like some of his guests. But he sounds patronising and egotistical to me. It’s something about his voice. It’s like he’s always having an in-joke about himself. And as much as he’s meant to be this spokesman of the left, he doesn’t seem to have much to say.

And for some reason so much of his show is boring. It puts me off international affairs, really. I don’t know why.

And the weird thing is, despite being left-leaning, I usually enjoy the right-leaning Counterpoint. It’s unpredictable, it has a broader range of topics, and I feel like Michael Duffy has opinions in a way that isn’t full of himself. (I’ve barely heard the show for the last year, though, and I think it’s got a new co-presenter.)