CLANCY OVERELL | Editor | CONTACT
The Costello Newspapers of the Sydney Morning Herald and The Age are this week taking extreme measures to keep their reporters on track, and not letting them get distracted by what’s actually happening in the world.
It is not certain if the editorial staff are aware that this self-defeatist approach to narrative control appears to be accelerating the irrelevance of traditional news, or if this was the plan from their bosses all along.
Just months after the nation witnessed a disastrous national referendum that saw civilised debate spoiled by a lack of details and the disruption of misinformation, Australia’s legacy media mastheads are facing an existential crisis.
In rapidly shrinking newsrooms right around the country, editors are asking themselves “How do we get in front of the people that used to be our readers?”
Unfortunately, the Costello newspaper’s habit of covering ‘too little, too late’ does not appear to be helping them combat the growing media desert that has emerged in this country ever since the introduction of a 4G network gave everyday Australians access to social media algorithms that replaced hard news with TikTok dance trends and interesting facts about immunisations.
With a political class that has convinced themselves that our nation’s erratic and unpredictable voting patterns are a result of an American-style Rural/City divide, very little is being said about the media’s growing detachment from Australia’s metropolitan suburbs.
This can be exemplified by the fact that the 50,000 people that are routinely marching through Sydney’s CBD to call for a ceasefire on the Gaza strip simply do not exist in the eyes of the city’s most esteemed newspaper, who are far more interested in covering staff changes at prestigious GPS schools.
In fact, the concerns of these silly westies are being treated as a distraction from real news – despite the fact that their desperate pleas appear to be directly in step with the national public sentiment.
With staff petitions being flat out ignored, and official warnings being issued to anyone who wants to cover the very real domestic reactions to this ‘complicated issue’ – the Age and SMH newspapers have gone as far as installing blackout curtains in their newsrooms – to stop their reporters seeing what is happening on the street.
The Betoota Advocate has reached out to the Sydney Morning Herald editorial staff for comment on this issue, but were instead sent a Domain listicle of the The Ten Monster Property Deals Of 2023 From $33 million To $76 million.
