Smooch news reporting, a/k/a "It was all a dream"

Except that he didn't.

Perhaps you can recall being a child. Specifically, a child at school. There's a portion of most days called "creative writing" where you open your IB4 and are forced to write a story using the part of your pre-pubescent brain that's usually devoted to wondering who would win a fight between your two favourite toys, or what would happen if the school suddenly exploded and you all had to go to school at Willy Wonka's chocolate factory...

Or something. Anyway, sometimes when it's writing time, it's easy. You have an idea, or something actually happened on the weekend that you can turn into six or seven sentences of barely coherant scrawling. Other times, you've got nothing. Not one fragment of a story. You sit there blankly staring at the page, willing words to appear on it. You draw a picture encompassing as much of the page as you can get away with. You feign illness. You even consider copying from the person next to you, except the person next to you is the weird kid who smells of urine, you can't even read their writing, and their story is about gnomes who live in a "special garden" where they take their clothes off. So you have to find a gimmick. Then five words enter your head: It. Was. All. A. Dream. And you're saved.

Now, you can write anything, even the most boring story your grandma once told you about going to Whakatane, or even rip off the entire plot of a Saturday morning cartoon, because you have a surprise ending. A twist. An out. You can plummet to your death at the bottom of the Grand Canyon, because as the Choose Your Own Adventure paperback series taught you, "It was all a dream" is an acceptable ending. Even though when you read it in the CYOA book, it kind of made you feel disappointed and unsatisfied. Never mind, it got you through creative writing for today.

So, you're 8 years old and you've just discovered lazy writing.

Then, you skip about two decades and you're like everyone, searching the internet for some spark of interest to enliven the next few minutes. So you read news websites. And you start to get a very familiar feeling when reading every sixth or seventh story. It takes a while, but then you connect that feeling with what you're reading. A cop out ending. Something that undoes everything you've just mentally digested. It was all a dream. This is a common occurrence. It's lazy. It's smooch as fuck. It's not acceptable.

For example:

I became initially upset at reading that a "Muslim owner of a care home removed bacon sandwiches and sausages from its menu, infuriating its 40 residents - none of whom share his beliefs." How dare this man, this callous individual, deprive these citizens in the twilight of their lives the simple pleasure of savouring their favourite porcine-derived foods?


Sources were even quoted [A relative of one resident said: "This is a disgrace. The old people who are in the home and in their final years and deserve better.

"They are paying customers who are making profits for this man. The least he can do is give them their favourite food."]

Then I got to the end of the report. Where I found something that made this "disgrace" nonexistent. It made the story a non-story. Non-newsworthy.

"Dr Khan, who has owned the home since 1994, said: "There has been one delivery of halal meat and people have misunderstood the concept.

"As soon as I realised this I held a senior staff meeting and I made it abundantly clear that residents could have any meat product or food they wished.

"I agree it would be quite wrong for someone to impose their religious or cultural beliefs on others, but this is not the case." "

So....there's been a moment of confusion in an old folks home. There is nothing for me here. But the people at the Telegraph would have us take in something only to render it pointless minutes afterward. Lazy. Cheap. A cop out. Call it what you will. There's a quest for content on the internet, to the point where people will conjure sensation out of pure lies, pure fiction. For what? A website "hit"? A real piece of interesting journalism would do ten times the job, and not leave people feeling dissatisfied* afterward.

The Telegraph aren't the only offenders - they just happened to be the ones who triggered this rant.

I promise you, we'll be back to joviality here in the very near future.

Cheerio.



[* speaking of dissatisfaction, this made me shake my head and chuckle.]