The Australian has gotten very lazy indeed. In their opinion section they now have a feature they call “Cut & Paste” where all they do is quote disjointed segments from op-ed articles originally published elsewhere – I wonder whether they pay the journalists whose writings they use this way? Or are they going for a “fair use” justification for paying them nothing by only quoting snippets of their columns?
Still, without this feature from the Oz I probably would not have come across Rod Liddle’s piece for London’s Sunday Times, where he reels in horror from the apparently repulsive young women of Britain. It’s astonishing that there are still journalists who not only could write the following in the first place but then allow it to go to print unrevised, contrasting and weighing these two behaviours in the following way:
WHAT shall we do with our young women, do you suppose? Two surveys out last week suggest they are increasingly prone to acts of criminal violence and, worse, have become among the fattest girls in Europe.
Right, because bashing people is only a minor offence compared to the unforgivable crime of not being eye-candy for Ron.
The Oz at least spared us from the title given to Liddle’s column – For the good of the nation, tell the fat girl she’s an ugly porker – and the gratuitous swipes at the sexual habits of young women plus the appallingly insensitive claim that at least Austrian girls locked up in cellars with limited food can be expected to be thin.
Most of you will not be surprised to learn that both the violence and the fatness are attributed to the pernicious influence of feminism. But of course.
Categories: gender & feminism, law & order, media, social justice, violence
Friday Hoyden: Gillian Triggs 
DUFC #69 
Advising women to prevent their own rapes is not brave or edgy or helpful 
An article about domestic violence in the Guardian in which it’s OK to read the comments 
Hoyden About Town 
FYI – that Cut & Paste column in The Australian isn’t new. It’s been there for at least a couple of years. And the quoting of bits of other articles isn’t unique to The Aus – the SMH and Fin Review do it too.
Thanks for the info, mish – I’d just never noticed because I only read online, and this is the first time it’s popped up in one of my news alerts.
It’s still lazy journalism if the SMH and Fin Review do it, too. A collection of pullquotes, with no indication of where they’ve snipped intervening text, and not even willing to take an editorial stance on the material itself? If they want to respond to someone else’s column, at least have the intellectual honesty to present their arguments contextually and actually state their own opinion of the matter.
Bah humbug.