For purely scientific research and in the highly difficult task of shaking up news organisations in North Queensland , Japanese whalers will begin harpooning media fishheads in the Coral Sea next week .
Before they are subjected to the razor sharp flensing knives , the blubbering media catch will be asked to explain why it increasing looks like fish out of water when it comes to real news gathering.
In particular , the honourable whalers will demand to know why Magnetic Island , off Townsville , glibly called the city's Jewel in the Crown , gets such lousy media coverage , mainly about koalas and holiday time bookings and trade, when it is full of red hot stories that do not get a run . Nelly Bay's pictorially attractive expanding sand groyne , below, is one such yarn not picked up by mainland scribes.
There is an island newssheet , with delusions of being a newspaper, anti-ALP, increasingly running mainland PR releases in full, which have little if any relevance to Maggie.
Its regular, poorly written Police Watch , mentioned previously in this blog , unfortunately makes the local police look like the Keystone Cops , somehow not picked up by the Queensland Police Service, otherwise they would have rectified the situation long ago .
For example , an odd item in the Police Report just said a quantity of counterfeit American money had been found on the island ...no obvious details , no photo, no follow up , no mention in mainland media . However, a quantity of counterfeit Chinese money was found in Townsville and got a run there , without mentioning the earlier Yank pile on the island , but then disappeared without follow ups that would have been carried out by newspapers half a century ago .
Another brief island Police Report asked for information about a packet of white crystals . No details , no follow up the next week , not picked up by mainland media .
Other questions which should be asked by the filleting whalers with the help of a bilingual interpreter include why is there a cargo cult mentality in so many similar mainland media reports ; why the Townsville Bulletin ,which attacks the ALP like a white pointer in a feeding frenzy, is looking increasingly like a stranded whopper whale , running stock photographs of smiling reporters on tragic stories , not chasing up obvious angles and not asking questions that need be asked. At least the online Townsville Magpie pecks the daylights out of the Bulletin , asks many questions , raises vital local issues (more to come ).
Before being reduced to a Blubber Burger, probably ending up on the front page of the Bulletin as a hard news story , somebody from the paper could be asked to please explain why it runs so many weather reports with photos of eye candy female backpackers on The Strand when Rupert Murdoch declared long ago that P3 girls were a thing of the past.
Going on the regular appearance of an umbrella in these pix (which surely goes against the Sunshine State image ) you get the impression a Bully photographer lurks about the waterfront , even the casino, with an umbrella as a prop to create atmosphere . You also get the feeling that there are more umbrellas in Townsville than Hong Kong where the gutsy population is to be applauded .
