Sunday Breakfast 08/11/09

On the show this week:

• This Week’s Bits: the Seabed & Foreshore review; Corngate: Redux; Fiji and NZ boot out each other’s diplomats and it’s 20 years since the Berlin wall was pulled down.
• The Weekly Round Up: Mikey gets cracking with Fancy New Band Big Punch; Troy talks to Animal Collective’s Avey Tare and Chris the lawyer survives a fitting farewell via explosives.
• The Sunday Breakfast School Fair Review
• Games Burnett: Borderlands and WTF have they done with pricespy.co.nz?
• News Rage with James Coe

Blogger Seen Firing Pistol At Copy Of The Herald On Sunday

As posted earlier today in the Sunday Breakfast email:

In something of an oversight James and myself forgot to talk about this little beauty from the Herald On Sunday. What a business size load of tabloid-style-news night soil.

It seems the Herald will drum up anything they can to fill their little weekend pamphlet. In the second paragraph David Fisher writes: “The former Push Push rocker, now a 95bFM morning DJ, amassed at least $20,000 in traffic fines over a number of years.” A couple of paragraphs on it’s clear that 20k figure has been more or less pulled out of his arse by quoting Mike: “He would not confirm the amount involved but, when told another offender had $70,000 wiped, said that was “three times as much as me”. And let’s be clear, Fisher, DJing in public is not the same job as hosting a breakfast radio show just like writing for the HOS is not the same as providing the country with informative news stories about issues (and here’s a few important concepts to take note of), that are pertinent and important. And while we’re at it, referring to this “revelation” as a blow to Mike after he “split up with his actress wife Claire Chitham” is shameful.

But this disappears into the ghostly fog that is the Herald’s editorial department if we compare it with the paper’s editorial. Are you shitting me? Have you just mentioned  Mikey’s parking fines and the Paul Dally case in the same piece? I must have been mistaken, hang on I’ll double check. Sweet flying Christ yes, I was right. You’ve written an editorial inviting comparisons between Mike’s fines and a rapist/murderer. A colleague described this as “confused.” I describe this as pure shite and you’re up to your elbows in it, hiding whatever point you think you were making. Particularly amusing is the call for justice to be “driven by emotion, rather than reason.” The Herald can take the moral high ground here, yet can drag Mike’s name through the mud. This is not journalism or considered opinion: this is driving sales by stoking the public ire.

Jesus wept, I need a milkshake.

(Just to be clear: I’ve worked with Mike for a number of years at bFM and even if I didn’t know the guy I’d still be writing this now.)