How to make a non story a story

1

The Age seizes on a supposed gaffe by immigration minster Peter Dutton to generate a whole website and several pages of print for its increasingly turgid and unwanted (and unprofitable) copy. It probably gets a laugh in North Fitzroy, but the average worker, and voter, is left asking themselves WFT?

True to its readership, the amateurish and simple types who produce copy for the Age these days assume social media, Age Independentand especially their Twitter feed, is a true and genuine gauge of popular and public sentiment. In fact the punters don’t tweet and don’t give a stuff. But the Age is not for the honest types churning out a living on the production line in a Dandenong factory – it’s for the lycra wearing inner city lawyers and academics resting on the weekend over their soy lattes and bean curd sides with wholegrain toast at inner city cafes.

Both they, and the unfortunate hacks who write for the Age, generally regard the vast majority of their fellow citizens as racist bogans to be laughed and sneered at. At least the fantasists who write for Melbourne’s Age have a fighting chance of being understood – unlike the impenetrable wall of words generate by Elizabeth Farrelly for the unfortunates stupid enough to pay money to read her learned columns in the Syndey Morning Herald in that city.

We expect the Immigration Minister will have the last laugh in this matter.