Hello, cyber-chums! This is a public service announcement. Do you believe that stalking the personal Social Networking pages of people who you have never met; who have never courted fame... not only that, but have actively shunned fame and been legally protected from being publicised until the 18th Birthdays they have just reached; who have committed no crime; whose private lives have absolutely zero impact on the public's wellbeing; who are just normal, everyday teenagers as far as they're concerned - and then publishing out-of-context quotes and hyperbolic descriptions of images on those sites, coupled with reams of commentary about how the way they live is a disgrace in a national newspaper in order to publicly humiliate and discredit them, and continue a campaign of media intolerance towards children and young adults counts as Worthwhile Investigative Journalism or Bullying? What if you questioned an authority figure on a different matter and then added her answering quote to the piece, deliberately re-contextualising it so that it looks as if that authority figure is having a personal stab at the 18 year olds that you have picked out?
What if the only reason you trawled these teenagers' webpages in the first place was because when they were 5 a heavily armed Peadophile ran into the nursery they were at, murdered their teacher and classmates in front of them, shot and horribly injured them and then killed himself as they watched in agony and terror, hiding behind the corpses of their friends? Does that make them any fairer game for a journalist to spend an afternoon with a cuppa reading through their Facebook and Bebo profiles, judging their entire existence on that alone and declaring, on the front page of her newspaper, that their lives are a 'Disgrace' to their dead friends, implying, perhaps, that it might have been better for the legally armed, kiddie-fancying psychopath to have dragged them out and unloaded a few rounds into their sobbing, 5 year old faces before blowing his own brains out?
In other words, do you think
this is worthy journalism? Or an incredibly tasteless, bullying, hypocritical piece of shrill, misplaced moralising? Do you think it's no more moral than tearing an embarrassing page from an orphan's diary, photocopying it a thousand times and stapling it up around a city?
If you agree with me that it's the latter, you can complain to the Press Complaints Committe
here or directly to the Express
here, if you can keep yourself from giggling at their claim to be the World's Greatest Newspaper for more than 5 seconds. And yes, I know it was 8 days ago now, but if it's good enough for the Sachsgate whingers, it's good enough for us!
Think about it, chaps. What Would Lynda Do?
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