Being a journalist is hard. It requires long hours, research, interviews and a way with words. There's deadlines to meet, facts to check and editors to deal with. Yet surprisingly a lot of people want to do it. Maybe they consider it glamourous. or maybe they juts feel like they have a voice that needs to be heard. Whatever the reasons, to be a good journalist takes a lot of hard work. However, if you feel it's the career for you but you couldn't be bothered with any of that unpleasantness there is an alternate route. In this section, which I hope to turn into a recurring topic, I'll show you just how to be a low life scumbag and make it in the seedy underbelly of scummy journalism. So check your integrity at the door as I teach you how to be a bottom feeding waste of air.
Last year, 5 year old April Jones was abducted, abused and murdered by Mark Bridger. A heinous tragedy, that left a community shocked. Fast forward to last week and we have Judith Woods of The Telegraph (http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/crime/10091643/April-Joness-mother-must-not-blame-herself-online-porn-is-the-evil-here.html) saying that the real cause of this type of crime is internet porn. Her proof? Well, Bridger and fellow child molester Stuart Hazell both regularly watched child pornography. In a move we rational people call "getting it ass backwards" Woods seems to propose that child porn leads to pedophilia, rather than maybe pedophiles having a certain predilection for child pornography to begin with. Now, nobody worth paying attention to is going to defend child porn but to assume it's child porn that creates child molesters is ignoring the fact that it is in fact almost certainly the exact opposite that is true.
According to Woods:
"Hazell trawled the web for child porn on his mobile phone, using the google search engine. When police raided Bridger's home they found revolting, exploitative images of children on his computer.
Could any right minded person deny a link?"
Indeed no right minded person could deny a link. The idea that a child molester might look at child porn seems like common sense. But for the exact opposite reason Woods seems to think. But that's not the contentious part of the article. No one is going to bemoan the representation of child porn in the media, people having a knee jerk reaction to be disgusted by and despise such material isn't really a problem.
The issue here comes with conflating pornography with child pornography. From here on out Woods goes on a tangent, citing shocking but meaningless statistics. Apparently "children as young as 11 are becoming addicted to obscene online material" (no I don't know how many exactly, she doesn't say, she doesn't cite sources or provide any links, I'm guessing it comes from the research out of Plymouth University). along with a host of other statistics showing that too many children have access to online porn (that may even be true, I guess we'll never know) and that it can be damaging to a young person's development. She then goes on to call for restrictions to online pornography. The "opt in" system that's being thrown around. Essentially porn will be filtered out by default, you have to clear it with your ISP to access all your favourite smut.
Now many of you may be wondering what that second part has to do with the first and that's where we get to the first trick of what Richard Herring and Stewart Lee would call Lazy Journalist Scum. Just grab any tragedy that shares a key word with what ever it is that burns your biscuits and use it to fuel your outrage machine. Hate videogames? Just wait until some troubled, deeply disturbed kid goes on a rampage (this also works for heavy metal and horror films). But the key trick here is to learn how to not feel empathy. Obviously anyone who sees the tragic death of a child or children would vomit up their own soul before they could ever get around to twisting it to fit their agenda so you're going to have to spend some time trying to become less than human. I'd suggest listening to Joe Duffy as a form of aversion therapy. As soon as you can handle that odds are you have no integrity left. It works with almost anything, socialism, videogames, porn, television, the gay agenda, immigrants, atheists. Honestly just wait until some tragedy crops up, see if any of those words apply to the perpetrator and you too can get the ball rolling on your very own hate machine.
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