Not to go on about Fairfax, but it’s hard not to if you are
an adult. Here is a company that used to be of the left but was still relatively
sane and semi-reliable in the retailing of information. Yes, they had Alan
Ramsey doddering away and A Dill Horin very lightly paraphrasing the latest
plea for cash, understanding, and more cash on behalf of ASSWIPE (Australian
Society of Social Workers Inventing Problems Everywhere). And of course there
was Margo, whose tenure at the original Web Diary probably marked the point
where Fairfax abandoned any pretense that sanity was a prerequisite of
employment.
Poor Margo is long gone but the madness continues, albeit
with a greater grasp of the apostrophe, and it can be observed at Daily Life.
Now it is not a bad idea having a website for women, who like to read about
shoes and celebrities, salads and what the stars have in store for them. Daily
Life has all that, and you can only imagine such material attracts its fair
share of readers. But being Fairfax, leaving it at that would have been too sensible, so the company installed
an editor who gussied up the standard offerings with a bevy of prolix harpies, all given free rein to go
on at great length about the things modern women need to know. “Your
Vagina Is Not a Car”, for instance. One of the site’s more memorable scoops,
such news must have come as a gross disappointment to a certain small subset of
DL visitors who imagined they would no longer need to hail cabs.
How anyone could publish such piffle would be a great
mystery but for the suspicion that DL’s editrix, the ardent Sarah Oakes, is even
more unhinged than the writers she hires.
Take her yesterday offering as an example, “Is Penny WongThe New Ryan Gosling?” Not unless
he is a hypocrite, which may well be the case, and a lesbian to boot, a
somewhat less probable attribute. Ms
Oakes vapours through several paragraphs that explore and expand her theme
before climaxing with the name of Tony Abbott on her lips (emphasis added):
While Penny Wong has the credentials to be a new Australian gay-feminist superhero we're not sure she'll gain the international traction of your-boyfriend-Ryan-Gosling. However she's definitely a candidate more worthy of a Hey Girl Tumblr than say, Tony Abbott, who's parody version is kind of a misfire. It's a sad fact that it would probably be a lot more funny if it wasn't so completely true.
As per a Fairfax
editrix, here is a sampling of “so completely true” stuff about Abbott, who is apparently a sex-mad lecher and, placing him entirely beyond redemption, a Catholic
Now remember, all of the above -- and scores of other, equally slanderous slurs -- are "completely true", at least as seen from the sheltered workshop for half-wit propagandists that Fairfax has willed itself to become.
Roger Corbett, Fairfax's chairman, once ran a large supermarket chain. How long long do you think one of his store managers would have stayed on the payroll if he or she had decided to stock the freezer cabinets with dog dirt and soiled toilet paper?
