Stuff Nation posted a story on a man not employing married women, and saying that they should be home raising their children instead, gained a bit of notoriety and generated discussion on talkback shows a few days ago. Soon after, David Farrar posted about it and another opinion post, complaining that about these sorts of opinion type posts from Stuff Nation mascarding as news items devalue the work of the Stuff journalists.
As for not employing married women because they should be home raising their children, I think that an employer that acts this way should also be paying all his married male employees a generous enough salary so that they can support a wife and children on their paycheck alone. It's incredibly hypocritical to be telling a woman that she needs to be home looking after her children if you are contributing to ensuring that women need to be working to support their families because their husbands aren't being paid enough in order to do so themselves.
But here’s an example of what I was complaining about. I follow NZ Stuff Politics on Twitter. My expectation is that tweets from that account will be linking to stories written by journalists on politics. One tweet this afternoon was:I agree with him, as that "story" appeared on my Google News feed as a supposedly genuine news item. Stuff is not the only site that does this sort of thing, however, but it is annoying when you have your news contaminated with reader's opinions.
Call for new Education MinisterI clicked through on this, thinking it was a significant story. That a lobby group or school or union or MP had called for a new Education Minister.
Instead the link was to this Stuff Nation story. It was basically a letter to the editor, or a short piece by a reader called Peter Condon that he thinks Parata should go.
This shouldn’t be tweeted as a political news story by the Stuff NZ Politics twitter account. It isn’t a story. I’m not saying don’t have the opinion on the website somewhere, but this treating of a Stuff Nation opinion as no different to a news story is I think bad.
As for not employing married women because they should be home raising their children, I think that an employer that acts this way should also be paying all his married male employees a generous enough salary so that they can support a wife and children on their paycheck alone. It's incredibly hypocritical to be telling a woman that she needs to be home looking after her children if you are contributing to ensuring that women need to be working to support their families because their husbands aren't being paid enough in order to do so themselves.
Well yeah but you can just see the pain in the arse liberal Farrar getting all hot and bothered over the content of the post couldn't you?
ReplyDeleteI'm sorry but why is that any more or less "genuine" than an opinion column by Tracy Watkins?
ReplyDeleteThere is a lot of trash on Stuff, also the NZ herald, BBC, Guardian it all ends up in feeds. So what
The good thing about the internet is that anybody can put stuff out there, you have to use your discrimination in picking the worthwhile stuff out in all the babble.
I find whining about that just being elitist. Stuff website is what it is
I think that when a paid journalist puts their opinion out there under the banner of a Media organisation, that Media organisation can theoretically be called to account for editorial bias. When they push letter to the editor content masquerading as random opinions, they are, at face value implying more than they actually are.
ReplyDeleteWhilst I agree that the media is increasingly full of opinion over news (which generates bias over balanced reporting), that is a separate issue to how they identify and promote opinion pieces.
Andrei,
ReplyDeleteI agree, there is a lot of useless opinion on feeds. However, I'm more interested in journalist's opinions than I am in Joe Bloggs' opinions when I'm looking at newsfeeds. For Joe Bloggs, I read the comments in blogs and I listen to talkback. I'd be also a little annoyed if on the radio, rather than newsheadlines, I got random callers giving their opinions. Each have a place, but mixing them up is not a good idea.