Is the independent news “revolution” over yet? For the past four or five years I’ve been plaintively asking this question in the same tone as a toddler in the back seat. Now it seems that every time I head to the newsagent or Internet I’m confronted by a row of hand-whittled newspapers. My pleas are becoming more desperate.
Independent news is easy to hate. Most of it is badly written. Media snobs are phenomenally irritating, often even worse than the narky farmers’ market set or the paleo herd.
But the worst part is that independent news is un-Australian. We have a fairly specific kind of news consuming culture, and it’s ill at ease with the kind of overly balanced news favoured by the indy set.
When I go to the pub I want to talk to my friends about their lives, our jobs, politics, funny things we saw on public transport that day. I don’t want to read stupid rants about craft beer culture, I want to have a conversation with my mates.
Pull out a Daily Telegraph or a Herald Sun around one of these independent news snobs (or worse, buy them one) and expect them to read it, and you’re at a high risk of having the entire discussion become a media education session. Since it’s become more socially acceptable read independent news, the incidence of these hostile conversational takeovers has increased exponentially. If media snobbery were perceived as a bit weird, like cheese enthusiasm or wine appreciation, we wouldn’t have this problem. Everyone reading $1.50 broadsheets of classless drivel would be free to talk about other things, all of them far more interesting.
Independent news culture must die, or at least stop taking over all the newsagents and parts of the Internet where I like to go. If it were contained to its own small social media platforms where I never go, it’d just be another niche subculture, where it belongs. Instead, it’s being relentlessly click-baited down our throats. Give me biased media, or give me ignorance.
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