Cruelty to trees

Readers of a certain age will know that Saturday morning urge, the fancy that it would be nice to settle down with the day’s newspapers and soak up the world’s events over toast and tea. There is precious little time of a weekday to read yesterday’s news on today’s forest products, so Monday-to-Friday circulations have declined precipitously. The Age, for example, now sells a scant 100,000 copies on any typical working day, but Saturday sales remain somewhat stronger – so much so that the prevailing theory amongst media watchers has long been that weekend editions will survive the inevitable culling of their weekday counterparts.

On the strength of today’s doorstep offering, the dominant wisdom is clearly wrong. It is not that The Age is a dreadfully subbed and proof-read travesty of a news organ, which it is, of course. Rather, if today’s edition can be taken as representing the norm – which it can, of course – a quite deliberate and ongoing effort has been undertaken to render the paper as boringly predictable as a claque of twentysomething youngsters can make it under the guidance of an editor who should know better but evidently does not.

Consider today’s Age and the topics that attract its monocular attention.

First, there is the teaser whose headline seems to suggest that Andrew Denton, the ABC-supported personality who retreated three years ago from the limelight, is confronting the premature end of his days. Fortunately, that is not the case, as the yarn actually details his concern for a nurse seeking the right to die, as they say, “with dignity”. Had Denton’s own days been numbered, the probate process might have been interesting. To whom would he leave his RolOdex with the contact details for the ABC types who bought all his shows?

Only the other night on one of the ABC’s many channels, an episode of the ill-fated Denton series Randlings had been hauled out of the closet and re-aired. Clearly, Denton knew his customer’s tastes and preferences. There was David Marr being even more supercilious than is his wont when gracing Barrie Cassidy’s Insiders couch, his presence an affirmation that if the national broadcaster commissions a series, mates will always be first in line for appearance fees and exposure.

Another panellist was Book Club’s Jennifer Byrne, who just happens to be Mrs Denton. Jobs for mates and family! How could the national broadcaster resist that Denton pitch? They didn’t, although viewers most certainly did, as the series perished for a deficit of merriment amongst all but its self-satisfied guests and compere.

Moving right along, The Age treats readers to Australia’s most limited columnist, Danny Katz, who writes only of himself. Today’s exercise in egomaniacal exposition details his trip to the supermarket.

In the faint hope that Katz is capable of expanding the narrow range of his interests, he might take a leaf from fellow columnist Martin Flanagan, who can, every so often, put his name to a column that does not hail the magical connectedness to Country that is alleged to make Aborigines such fine footballers. Today, Flanagan takes his dogs for a walk and meets an accomplished cat. Scintillating stuff indeed, with nary a patronising mention of Sherrin-kicking, bipedal black fauna.

The toast was cold by this stage, but still less dry and hard to swallow than The Age’s obligatory Saturday sermon. Today’s gospel is delivered by Race Discrimination Commissioner Tim Soutphommasane, the Labor historian and party hack who was slotted into the comfort of his current gig during the dying gasps of the Rudd/Gillard/Rudd years. Multiculturalism is just wonderful, according to Soutphommasane, but threatened by the sort of people who booed Adam Goodes, an Aborigine. Sooking for free kicks and throwing imaginary spears at the opposition’s supporters have nothing to do with the reaction Goodes inspired, apparently. It is all because of Goodes’ melanin content, nothing whatsoever to do with the content of his character.

In his next discourse on Australians’ moral shortcomings and our nation’s endemic intolerance, expect Soutphommasane to denounce shallow stereotypes.

By this stage, the teapot empty and a sense of pointless, wasted effort overflowing, The Age simply had to be set aside. No need to ferret into the magazine section, where the usual suspects are allowed by the section editor to slag books newly published by people they do not like and of whose opinions they disapprove.

Not to worry. The Age will be gone soon, its current incarnation no longer able to diminish the reputation of the publication that existed when the editors of old understood that, if a tree was worth turning into newsprint, its sacrifice should produce something lively and interesting. 

Readers who wish to observe The Age‘s boring pointlessness firsthand can follow the link below to the paper’s home page. But why would you do that?

— roger franklin

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