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Millions of years ago, a dinosaur died, fell over and was duly covered and compressed by the accumulating remains of fellow organisms adding their deceased bulk to what would become the coalfields of Victoria’s LaTrobe Valley. Not much happened for quite some time, until Sir John Monash ordered those fossilised relics dug up and burned in the generators he was building to power the Garden State’s future. Yesterday, an ancient circle finally was closed when that first dinosaur was converted to electricity and piped down the wires for presentation on paper and in pixels by another fossil poised on the threshhold of its own extinction, Melbourne’s Age newspaper.
The creatures of eons past had no idea how to cope with the changing world that ordained their imminent demise. Likewise today The Age, which has found itself stranded in the withering environment of a harsh, cruel world no longer irrigated and enriched by those famous “rivers of gold” that once flowed from its classified pages. The original dinosaurs’ panic as life turned cold and nasty can only be imagined. The confusion borne of desperate fear is much easier to observe in The Age, which today beneath the byline of sandbox reporter reporter Nicole Hasham manifests a perfect example of what happens when editorial standards are re-defined by mindless panic. Drawn from a selective browsing in the rich forests of fact, Ms Hasham’s shock-horror expose of Senator George Abetz’s purported racism testifies that, like the original dinosaurs, those running Fairfax Media have very small brains indeed. How tiny? We’ll get to that in a tick.
Hasham’s scoop relates that Abetz uttered the word “negro” when speaking of the US Supreme Court’s Clarence Thomas. It begins thus:
Demoted former cabinet minister Eric Abetz has used the offensive word “negro” while defending his opposition to same-sex marriage during a radio interview.
Hasham insists that Abetz’s utterance of an unfashionable term “considered offensive to black people” amounts to a full-blown “racial slur”. The US Army only last year “was reportedly forced to apologise”, she explains, for using that designation in personnel records. As the clincher for her prosecution’s case she cites the Oxford Dictionary as advising “the word ‘negro’ is an offensive term.” Nowhere does she suggest Abetz keeps a pointy white hood in his closet beside a ready-for-burning cross. But there may be a follow-up story, so stay tuned.
Meanwhile, consider what the Oxford Dictionary actually says. It is nowhere near so cut and dried as Hasham’s reading of it:
Negro has dropped out of favor and now seems out of date or even offensive in both US and British English. The 2010 US Census questionnaire was criticized when it retained the racial designation Negro as an option (along with Black and African Am.). The Census Bureau defended its decision, citing the 2000 Census forms, on which more than 56,000 individuals handwrote “Negro” (even though it was already on the form). Apparently, Negro continues to be the identity strongly preferred by some Americans.
And that reference to the US Army? Let this New York Daily News headline from last November set the record straight:
That same Daily News story, just by the way, quotes a Pentagonian as speculating, “Negro might still be included [as a race descriptor] for blacks who wished to identify themselves that way.”
If the US Army is somewhat perplexed by the word “negro”, as the Daily News report attests, the brass should perhaps take their cues from that bastion of America’s lockstep, leftoid media The Los Angeles Times, which finds nothing wrong with the term at all. Indeed, when Barack Obama was first running for the White House, opinion-page columnist David Ehrenstein described him as “the magic negro”:
He’s there to assuage white “guilt” (i.e., the minimal discomfort they feel) over the role of slavery and racial segregation in American history, while replacing stereotypes of a dangerous, highly sexualized black man with a benign figure for whom interracial sexual congress holds no interest.
So why would The Age, along with the Sydney Morning Herald, be so breathlessly determined to paint Abetz as the Bull Connor of Tasmania? Like the various theories advanced to explain why modern man has no need to compete for parking spots with brontosaurs and triceratops, The Age‘s helter-skelter retreat over recent years from serious, reality-based reporting is open to conjecture, although one line of speculation seems particularly persuasive: By presenting the news in the voice and tone its few remaining readers prefer, Fairfax is attempting to make the moron demographic its own. As facts, balance and fairness matter not to the Twitter shriekers and unemployed Arts graduates that constitute the Fairfax Media audience, why bother with senior subs and editors, the sort who once told young and inexperienced reporters that their copy was at odds with fact and accuracy and would have to be spiked?
Those sorts are long gone and their spikes with them. So, too, what intelligence the company once boasted. If a mis-reported story can pull a few online clicks, be acclaimed by the Twitter congregation and smear a conservative as a racist in the process, up it goes for all the world to see. As the screen grab atop this post reveals, the Abetz confection was the second most-read article on the site.
That’s modern journalism, folks: The quick-to-convict led by the none-too-bright. If Fairfax’s board and managers imagine there is a future in serving falsehoods to fools, then circulation, profits and stock price would beg to differ. The original dinosaurs didn’t spread slanders before sinking into the swamps of a changed climate’s adversity. But, like The Age and SMH, they can still be burned and should be.
Readers who enjoyed the LA Times column linked above may also enjoy a happy little song it inspired, available via the link below.
— roger franklin
