It’s tough for Fairfax’s Paul McGeough, even harder in many ways than for the competent journalists and sub-editors who have been shown the door as their industry collapsed about them. McGeough and his gig as a US-based foreign correspondent have survived, for now at any rate, while the bureaux that once operated in New York, Washington, London and elsewhere have been shuttered. So there he is, sending back copy to the clickbait kiddies who run the Age and SMH websites, with no adults left on the premises to save the poor man from himself.
Take today, for example, which sees the SMH homepage giving pride of place to his latest dispatch. Atop this item is a screen grab reproducing how it was bannered. Click on the link and you get this story purporting to be an accurate account of Donald Trump’s latest address. In the old days, when newsroom children compiled the shipping notices, fetched their elders’ take-away meals and wrote colour stories, if they were lucky, about dogs that wear trousers and other human-interest wotnots, the processing of such a report would have passed through an institution know as the “back bench”. This where seasoned hands, men and women who knew a thing or two about life and the world and, yes, journalism too, would pick through the submitted words, spot the errors and inconsistencies and fire off notes to authors asking for clarifications.
Obviously, going by today’s McGeough offering, if the SMH still has a back bench it must be sitting in the laneway out back and waiting for the next hard-rubbish collection. Forget the one-eyed perspctive, we’ll get to that in a tick. Meanwhile, just look at the headline and blurb reproduced above.
To “wipe the floor” is generally accepted to mean a crushing and undisputed, all-points victory. Yet the lines beneath assert that same alleged victory was nothing but “wild unsubstantiated allegations”. Apparently, along with the back bench, the sort-of-editors who remain at Fairfax are interested in dictionaries only for their potential to be re-cycled into carbon-fighting organic mulch.
As to the story itself, one can only imagine the barrage of questions and queries that would, in better days, have been flying back across the Pacific. Such a note would have gone something like this:
