To compound the offence, the Age's stablemate The Canberra Times has followed up with a defence—not of Canberra, but of its journalist...
I want to write a piece deconstructing the original article line by line. But in the meantime, here is my response to the Canberra Times defence, as lodged via their Comments function:
We know out city is not perfect. Politicians make mistakes. Transport and land use planners make mistakes (boy do they make mistakes). But the strength of WBG's vision is that the city has largely withstood the worst efforts to derail (light rail pun intended) its innovative alternative to squishing everything into one choked CBD.
But what we are utterly sick of is Melbourne and Sydney journalists scoring cheap points by indulging in the usual Canberra-bashing "stacks on" that repeatedly gets churned out of tabloid and tabloid-esque media.
It's not an over-reaction. It's a reaction to the entire piece. Cherry-picking a few of the more measured phrases Megan, and a few of the more OTT reactions, does not negate the negativity being promoted by the piece as a whole. Not that it is just plain wrong.
Newspapers once controlled the feedback via their iron grip on the Letters pages. But no longer. We now have social media and we have blogs with surprisingly large readerships. We can now fire back when we've had enough of being dumped on by some fly-by-night visitor who didn't venture outside the Inner South. We have had enough. And we expect a better defence from our own newspaper.Update: Decided not to bother with the critique of the original article. The author was obviously milking the backlash for all the exposure he could by teasing it along on Twitter (blatant click-baiting), so easier to let it die...
Especially in our centenary year! What's more, I find the reaction to the reaction (from MMM on Twitter) appallingly infantile. He presents faux outrage and resorts to sexist and condescending comments, rather then trying to actually defend his article in a professional way. Then to find our own city's paper defending him was the last straw.
ReplyDeleteLastly, since when is a dissection of the functioning of the public service relevant, in any way, to living life in the city of Canberra? It's not. It's manufactured irrelevance. Click bait at worst, lazy journalism at best.
Hear hear Alan.
ReplyDeleteThis is not just 'light-hearted' or even informed criticism in the main (by people trained in journalism and laughingly referring to themselves as such), it is trash-talking of the National Capital.
Yes, we Canberran's do get offended by outsiders running down our city, but we also hold very little regard for those who do not respect this city as the Nation's Capital. In my experience (50 odd years living here), local Canberrans highly value the city as their home (they also recognise its shortcomings - more so than outsiders), but more importantly however, we respect the city as Australia's Capital City. It's a shame others - especially those with the capacity to influence, can't do the same.
They need to grow up and develop some national pride - we already do.