Age a Failure
Not published Friday, April 16, 2004
I am disappointed with your level of bias.
Everyone understands that The Age is a Labor paper, and that is okay. But the extreme nature of your selection, suppression and chronic spin on news is way below the standard of balance required of a mainstream intelligent daily. It is no wonder that your circulation is so low relative to your competition and other states.
If someone read only The Age, they would not expect Howard to score even 10% of the vote - let alone hold office for 3 terms. And how Age-only readers mentally adjusted to Kennett's second election win given that everybody in the Age world hated him, I cannot imagine.
I have wanted to say these things to you for some years. You have consistently suppressed letters that challenge the Left faction. Now finally, the last straw for me is your suppression of my short, to-the-point letter in response to your long and loose Tim Ferguson article "Masculinity is redundant" (9/10 April) Yes, you like to run post-modernist, feminist, socialist rallying speeches.
But it is pathetic that you could not bring yourself to print even my tiny rejoinder. I knew you wouldn't run anything even a quarter as long as the original diatribe. So I kept it short. I simply pointed out that masculinity is hard-wired and cannot be renounced. And further that the male brain contributes 50% to the solutions of our problems. That it is the gender mix that enriches and empowers us.
It is not as if you have run anything else countering the voluntary castration article. For young men reading your paper, there is only one, hopeless view on their masculinity. This is not only grossly one-eyed: it is downright irresponsible.
You published in your paper last year a big announcement that you aimed to be balanced and fair. You invited people to contact you if they felt there was a problem. But since you published those avowals, the paper has only got worse.
Your writers seem to wallow in self-indulgent, highly partisan propaganda, publishing only their own world-view. This is a poor standard of service to Victoria. Where is the leadership of the paper?
Philip O'Carroll