Not the
freshest meat
 |
| Another deception / lie. Billboard outside Tomohon market |
My sister-in-law
once worked for an Indonesian store erasing use-by date stamps to fool consumers
into thinking the products fresh.
Her skills could
be employed at The Australian where EXCLUSIVE
gets mightily over-exposed. On 29 April the
News Ltd daily used it to promote a page one story: Bats bit crazy: wet, wild world on our doorstep by Amanda Hodge
‘Southeast Asia Correspondent’.
Some hack
has a different definition of the noun from Merriam-Webster: ‘A news story at first
released to or reported by only one source’ because
the yarn appeared on 1 April here: https://johnmenadue.com/bat-viruses-in-indonesia-by-duncan-graham/ It was filed on location.
 |
| Bats for lunch? |
Maybe the
label wasn’t Hodge’s doing. She’s
produced much excellent copy from this region, though along with other
Jakarta-based correspondents like the ABC’s Anne Barker has apparently done a
bunk and may now be quarantined in Oz.
I asked Hodge
her whereabouts. She
declined to reply. Which is her right.
Just as it’s
mine to say: Followers flatter, but don’t fool readers and palm off stale
stories as fresh. That’s unpalatable.
First published in Pearls & Irritations 1 May 2020: https://johnmenadue.com/duncan-graham-not-the-freshest-meat-in-the-australian/
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