The Angry Exile: Why main stream media is declining

The Hangman

Into our town the Hangman came,
Smelling of gold and blood and flame.
And he paced our bricks with a diffident air,
And built his frame in the courthouse square.
The scaffold stood by the courthouse side,
Only as wide as the door was wide;
A frame as tall, or little more,
Than the capping sill of the courthouse door.
And we wondered, whenever we had the time,
Who the criminal, what the crime
That the Hangman judged with the yellow twist
of knotted hemp in his busy fist.
And innocent though we were, with dread,
We passed those eyes of buckshot lead --
Till one cried: "Hangman, who is he
For whom you raised the gallows-tree?"
Then a twinkle grew in the buckshot eye,
And he gave us a riddle instead of reply:
"He who serves me best," said he,
"Shall earn the rope of the gallows-tree."
And he stepped down, and laid his hand
On a man who came from another land.
And we breathed again, for another's grief
At the Hangman's hand was our relief
And the gallows-frame on the courthouse lawn
By tomorrow's sun would be struck and gone.
So we gave him way, and no one spoke,
Out of respect for his Hangman's cloak.
The next day's sun looked mildly down
On roof and street in our quiet town,
And stark and black in the morning air
Was the gallows-tree in the courthouse square.
And the Hangman stood at his usual stand
With the yellow hemp in his busy hand;
With his buckshot eye and his jaw like a pike
And his air so knowing and business-like.
And we cried, "Hangman, have you not done
Yesterday, with the foreign one?"
Then we fell silent, and stood amazed,
"Oh, not for him was the gallows raised."
He laughed a laugh as he looked at us:
"Did you think I'd gone to all this fuss
To hang one man? That's a thing I do
To stretch a rope when the rope is new."
Then one cried "Murder!" and one cried "Shame!"
And into our midst the Hangman came
To that man's place. "Do you hold," said he,
"with him that was meant for the gallows-tree?"
And he laid his hand on that one's arm.
And we shrank back in quick alarm!
And we gave him way, and no one spoke
Out of fear of his Hangman's cloak.
That night we saw with dread surprise
The Hangman's scaffold had grown in size.
Fed by the blood beneath the chute,
The gallows-tree had taken root;
Now as wide, or a little more,
Than the steps that led to the courthouse door,
As tall as the writing, or nearly as tall,
Halfway up on the courthouse wall.
The third he took -- we had all heard tell --
Was a usurer, and an infidel.
"What," said the Hangman "have you to do
With the gallows-bound, and he a Jew?"
And we cried out, "Is this one he
Who has served you well and faithfully?"
The Hangman smiled: "It's a clever scheme
to try the strength of the gallows-beam."
The fourth man's dark, accusing song
Had scratched our comfort hard and long;
"And what concern," he gave us back.
"Have you for the doomed -- the doomed and Black?"
The fifth. The sixth. And we cried again,
"Hangman, Hangman, is this the man?"
"It's a trick," he said. "that we hangmen know
For easing the trap when the trap springs slow."
And so we ceased, and asked no more,
As the Hangman tallied his bloody score.
And sun by sun, and night by night,
The gallows grew to monstrous height.
The wings of the scaffold opened wide
Till they covered the square from side to side;
And the monster cross-beam, looking down,
Cast its shadow across the town.
Then through the town the Hangman came,
Through the empty streets, and called my name --
And I looked at the gallows soaring tall,
And thought, "There is no one left at all
For hanging, and so he calls to me
To help pull down the gallows-tree."
So I went out with right good hope
To the Hangman's tree and the Hangman's rope.
He smiled at me as I came down
To the courthouse square through the silent town.
And supple and stretched in his busy hand
Was the yellow twist of the hempen strand.
And he whistled his tune as he tried the trap,
And it sprang down with a ready snap --
And then with a smile of awful command
He laid his hand upon my hand.
"You tricked me. Hangman!," I shouted then,
"That your scaffold was built for other men...
And I no henchman of yours," I cried,
"You lied to me, Hangman. Foully lied!"
Then a twinkle grew in the buckshot eye,
"Lied to you? Tricked you?" he said. "Not I.
For I answered straight and I told you true --
The scaffold was raised for none but you.
For who has served me more faithfully
Then you with your coward's hope?" said he,
"And where are the others who might have stood
Side by your side in the common good?"
"Dead," I whispered. And amiably
"Murdered," the Hangman corrected me:
"First the foreigner, then the Jew...
I did no more than you let me do."
Beneath the beam that blocked the sky
None had stood so alone as I.
The Hangman noosed me, and no voice there
Cried "Stop!" for me in the empty square.

Maurice Ogden

Tuesday, 7 June 2011

Why main stream media is declining

The lazy bastards are padding with content ripped off from elsewhere on the internet and apparently re-written by someone who either has absolutely no knowledge of what they're writing about or is terminally clueless or both. Among the vraious Grauniad stlye tpyos* and confused misuse of similar sounding words we've had a story involving an air rifle illustrated with a picture of a shotgun and we've had a story about a bear with a picture of a wolverine, so I suppose it's no surprise that in addition to journos who know two fifths of fuck all about guns or animals there are some who know nothing about cars and wouldn't recognise a Bugatti if it parked on their foot. But end up writing something about one in a web content based filler article all the same.

Click for linky

From the still of that video clip you can probably see that the car on he left is certainly a modified Vee-Wee Beetle, but petrolheads might be looking at the car on the right and thinking that actually it doesn't look very much like a Bugatti Veyron. In actual fact it looks nothing at all like a Veyron, and this is basically because it's an American made, Lotus based, Tesla electric sports car... as several commenters as well as the fucking YouTube video this story used makes perfectly clear.

Click for biggerisation

So how did this guff about a Veyron even come into it? Because The Teletubbygraph's unnamed churnalist appears to have got this story from The Metro.

Speaking to The Metro, [designer] Olly Young, 34, said: "You can't imagine how fast it is..."

So I went and had a quick look at the original article in The Metro, and in addition to seeing the same embedded YouTube clip (rather than one that had been reloaded as the Metro equivalent of Teletubbygraph video) this is what I read:

This electric dragster, called the Black Current, would leave even the £1million Bugatti Veyron behind – the Veyron takes 2.5seconds to hit 60 – but only for a short time, as its top speed is a rather ordinary 133mph.

"Would" leave, not "did" leave a Bugatti behind, and to explain that crucial difference to the Teletubbygraph's churno we'll pay a visit to Dictionary Corner to look at one of the definitions for the word "would."

2 (expressing the conditional mood) indicating the consequence of an imagined event or situation : he would lose his job if he were identified.
• ( I would) used to give advice : I wouldn't drink that if I were you.

I would be blogging on a gold plated keyboard if I won the lottery five times in a row. He would be a porn star if he was hung like Ron Jeremy. You would have a chance of being a decent journalist if you began writing your own stories. See? So in this instance the VW would beat a Veyron if there had been one there for it to race, but there wasn't so it didn't. Full marks to Unnamed Journo for not simply copying and pasting the whole article, but since he or she either didn't bother to read the original or failed to comprehend the important detail that the Veyron beating ability has not actually been put to a real world test they avoided outright copying only to bastardise the story instead.

* With the obvious exception of 'Grauniad' I found it was actually more effort to get those words wrong.

Comments (8)

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thylacosmilus 62p · 720 weeks ago

That's possibly the worst example of 'journalism' I've ever seen. That should get someone fired. But I bet it won't...

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Jeremy · 720 weeks ago

It's pretty sad when readers have to correct the newspapers continually to get their facts straight. When the mainstream plunges and burns, I'll have no sympathy for them and it will be good riddance to the whole bloody lot.

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james higham · 720 weeks ago

I would be blogging on a gold plated keyboard if I won the lottery five times in a row. He would be a porn star if he was hung like Ron Jeremy. You would have a chance of being a decent journalist if you began writing your own stories. See?

Standards of journalism are fast sinking as the dumbed down young journos [often female] take over from the old.

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nisakiman · 720 weeks ago

Who's Ron Jeremy? Australian politician?

1 reply · active 720 weeks ago

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Angry_Exile 90p · 720 weeks ago

Nope. He's not that big a dick.

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Reinhard · 720 weeks ago

To play the Devil's advocate for a moment, it is only web content and so I would assume the quality of journalism would be lower. Now I'm done playing Devil's advocate and would just like to say that this is symptomatic of the eco Nazism era - the best of petrol is being shown up by some blokes in a shed and an electric motor. That's the headline he wanted to show. Unfortunately for him the truth is nothing like it. Quite apart from not, as you say, actually being against a Veyron in the first place the record it beat wasn't that of the Veyron either - as http://www.caradvice.com.au/122400/electric-volks... makes clear, the record is for quarter mile drag of street bodied electric cars. The record for a similar petrol-powered feat is under 8s. In any case anyone with even a rudimentary grasp of engineering and physics knows that it's much easier to make an electric car accelerate than a petrol one. The main disadvantage electric cars have is cost and range, and for a mass market good that needs to get people places, those are things that will have to change before people switch to the switch.

1 reply · active 720 weeks ago

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Angry_Exile 90p · 720 weeks ago

It does have a feel of one of the kids being told to find something, anything, to make a quick 100ish word article for the motoring section by lunch time, and while that may excuse a briefly credited reworking of another paper's article and a bit of video off the web it doesn't excuse managing to get the facts arse about face. The eco-Nazi angle hadn't occurred to me but it's a good point.

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