Poison Pens Five: HOLD THE FRONT PAGE!!!!

'Journalist asks question at press conference shocker!'

Seriously, I'm not making this up. About four national newspapers have all covered this non-story.

A journalist went to a press conference, plucked up the courage to ask a question, got an answer, then left.

I mean, OMG!!! All those scary old dudes there, asking about, like football and stuff. No wonder plucky Lisa has her hand totally to her chest in shock at what she's done (while posing for a photo, natch.) She, like, TOTALLY asked a question at a press conference?

I know! Like, who knew journalists did that? She should get a medal or something. Probably Fianna Fail are already tapping her up to run in the next general election.

Let's remind ourselves - this chick went to university. She trained as a journalist. Her daddy was a journalist before her. So she's seen her dad do this, she's educated and trained to do it. Why is it so shocking that she went as a journalist to a press conference and asked a question? It's her JOB to do that!

What so-fucking-what yawnathon will the Irish media treat us to next? 'Man rose early and drove electric cart to deliver milk'? 'Sun expected to rise in the East tomorrow morning'? 'Moon disappointingly not made of cream cheese'?

The media rightly get it in the neck sometimes for their sense of whats worthy of reporting and what isn't. People see endless tabloid headlines about Jade Goody, or Jordan, or David Beckham, and despair.

But this article is a spectacular classic of an even more debased genre - journalists puffing themselves and each other.

People do their jobs everyday without expectation of public acknowledgement, and many people do a damn sight more important work than asking Cristiano Ronaldo about his shorts.

Where are their articles?

People who perform surgery, fly airplanes, teach children or cure cancer, take note. Here's what a REALLY difficult job is like:

"It was mortifying from my point of view," said Lisa Cannon, "but at the end of the day that's what I was sent there to do."

Well done for spotting that, love. Yes, you went to a press conference and did your job. Congrats. Do we have to read about it in the paper everytime you do your job properly?

"It was a pretty difficult interview because I couldn't ask him any of the questions I really wanted to but I'm glad I did it," she continued.

Oh, hold on a minute. She didn't ask any of the questions she wanted to? Why not? Isn't asking some questions the sum total of her task? What stopped her? Did someone overpower her and clamp a chloroform cloth over her mouth before she could get the words out?

Perhaps she didn't do her job so well after all, if she couldn't ask questions at a press conference when your job is to do exactly that.

I don't mean to knock the girl - she's probably very nice and might well be generally excellent at her job, which I understand involves talking about clothes and make-up a lot on TV3. And it wasn't her decision to put this tripe into the national press.

My only questions remain for the national press themselves:

Why should the public give a fuck about this?

What is it doing in a newspaper?

How many 'Journalist did their job' stories do you reckon you could print before gangs of brain surgeons, airline pilots, firemen, nurses, teachers and other actually relevant people storm your newsroom and gag the lot of you with chloroform cloths?

Poison Pens 3: Speaking with forked tongues

So, you're an Irish tabloid editor and Grainne Seoige has finally managed to have that fella removed from her nice RTE couch and replaced with her own sister.

You run the only evening national paper in the country, so you're guaranteed to have the first review of their new show.

But if it's bad, and you slam it, you'll never get access to either of the photogenic, units-selling sisters again. And if it's bad and you don't slam it, then the readers will see through your vapid puffing of poo.

So, like the RTE producers who gambled on the sister act, you hope and pray it works.

Then it doesn't. It's a car crash, unwatchably bad. How do you review it?

Well, if you're the Evening Herald, you pan it and puff it all at the same time! Genius!

Front page today bills their TV critic Pat Stacey's review inside on page three. And Pat pulls no punches - "one great, big, private joke", "the Seoige sisters absolutely drip with smugness", "like being smothered with a pink blanket at a pyjama party", "a ramshackle mess", "catastrophically bad."

Well, that's the end of the Evening Herald running any 'exclusives' about the Seoige sisters for the next century or so, right?

Wrong. Because thirty pages in is where the Evening Herald destroys its own (admittedly greatly diminished) integrity by hedging the bet.

Their 'columnist' Sinead Ryan is one you can always rely on for vapid girly frothiness. There's not a subject on Earth she can't trivialise with her shallow insights.

And of course, she's got an opinion on the Seoiges that she just has to share with us - "super, sassy and sexy", "a winner", "fab combination", deserving of a "prime time Friday or Saturday night slot."

So, what is the casual reader, who missed the Seoige show, to make of the Evening Herald's reviews?

Is the show catastrophically bad or a fab combination? Is it like being smothered with a pink blanket or deserving a prime time slot? Is it somehow both, in the self-contradictory world of the Evening Herald?

And is the Evening Herald a newspaper with opinions and reviews that can be trusted, or is it a self-contradictory bag of shite?

The power of positive thinking

Ten days sampling the Aussie media has left me pondering the power of positive thinking.

I recall how some years ago, ITN news presenter Martyn Lewis was laughed at for suggesting that British news was too negative and could benefit from being lightened up with positive stories. Images of front pages about cats saved from trees filled the heads of his cynical colleagues and they chuckled.

I did too.

But it is true that the British media environment is a profoundly negative and mean-spirited one. The Irish media climate is little different.

I've noticed this especially here in Australia, where they are prepared to put a story about a medical discovery or a community initiative on the front page without apology.

In some other places I've been, the positive news can seem seriously parochial. Israeli papers see little beyond their own siege mentality, as if everything on the planet related to the Middle East or Jewish affairs, even when the story is something light-hearted or positive, for example.

But Australia is a heavyweight country with a large, cosmopolitan, travelled, multicultural society. And if they can make positive news work, both on the airwaves and in print, then why couldn't we?

I'm slightly dreading returning to the land of scandal as substance and negativity news, now. I fear the face of Ireland I'll see in our media will seem scowling and mean in comparison to the optimism - tempered by reality and proper coverage of current events and affairs, of course - that is expressed in Australian media.

And without wanting to seem simplistic, I wonder if the media mentalities of both nations can perhaps be mapped onto the nature of the peoples who read them?

Are Australians outward-looking and positive can-do people inherently and that is expressed through their media? Or does the media perhaps encourage such an outlook in those who view and read it?

And by contrast, what does our own sour, negatively troped news say about us?

Press the freedom button

Some people are surprised at how little television I watch. I'm a bit like my local boozer, which has a telly in the corner, but it has a little sign underneath it that reads 'News and Sport Only.'

Basically, down the pub, the box goes on if there's a big game on, or for the Six-One news. All other times, it rests in blissful silence. I've adopted a similar policy.

This doesn't mean that no telly gets watched in our house. My other half is still an addict, and after a hard day's graft, like so many people, she likes to sprawl on the sofa and zone out in front of the goggle box.

I've long since learnt to either leave the room or ignore the prattle of the box in a zen-like fashion when she's watching.

This is not to say that there aren't things I might like to watch. But generally, those are few and far between. They tend to be documentaries about nature or history, or movies I haven't seen.

But the annoyance of having a programme broken up by hard-sell advertising, or on at an odd hour, simply doesn't suit me. So if I want to see those documentaries or movies, I simply go and rent them from the video store or download them (in an entirely legal manner, when available, of course!)

My objection to television is a scientific one - research has linked TV watching to everything from childhood obesity to attention deficit disorder and autism among kids. Leaving your child in front of the boobtube is not the easy alternative to childminding you might have thought it was.

And for adults, the effects of television are just as baleful. Television watching causes insomnia, stress, indolence, obesity, and it doesn't educate, despite what its makers might tell you.

So dangerous is television to health that doctors are now being advised to monitor their patients' viewing habits as part of a general health check-up.

Television is anti-social, ruins public gathering places and the art of conversation, and erodes children's ability to create their own playtimes. It is the ideal tool for advertisers, short of beaming ads onto the inside of your eyelids, as the audience will mindlessly sit in front of their sales pitches for hours upon hours without moving.

It's time to turn off the demon in the corner of the room. Time to reclaim your leisure time and do something useful with it.

When I was a nipper, there was a TV programme on BBC during school holidays called 'Why Don't You...?' It was aimed at encouraging slothful kids out of the couch and outside to do something with their time that was useful. That impulse seems to be too ironic and subversive for contemporary TV producers. The programme was dropped years ago.

There is an organisation aimed at encouraging more people to free themselves from TV slavery. They are called White Dot. Ironically enough, I came across them on the television. They once used the media format they abhor to broadcast a documentary about the evils of television watching.

One of the exercises they suggested to the viewing public was so potent it has stuck with me, affecting my own viewing patterns and indeed my life as a whole. I urge you to try it yourself.

Get a shaving or make-up mirror and position it on top of your television so that when you sit in your favourite chair or couch, you can see your own reflection.

Then turn on the telly and start watching.

Wait for a moment of high drama, the sort of screaming match in the pub that soap operas love to portray, and look up suddenly from the screen to the mirror. See what you're doing while these imaginary people are living life in top gear.

Or turn over to a nice holiday show. When Kathryn Thomas is skiiing down the alps or scuba-diving in the Seychelles, look up from the box to the mirror and take note of what you're up to.

After a day or two with the mirror on the TV, you'll soon realise that a small cohort of actors and presenters are living a wonderful life which your indolence is paying for. By sitting in front of the box immobile, you facilitate the adverts and the funding that pays for their fantastic careers and existence.

While you, meanwhile, are doing nothing more than vegetating on your couch as life passes you by.

When that sinks in fully, you'll start watching less television, becoming truly discerning about your viewing, and eventually you'll be only turning it on to catch up with the news.

And many hours of your day will open up to you suddenly. In this time-precious world, you'll have freed up more hours in the day than you know what to do with.

So use your life. Write a novel, dig the garden, go for a walk, meet some friends for a pint, take up a hobby, or go to evening classes and learn a new skill or language.

Just as no one yet said on their deathbed, "I wish I'd done more overtime at work", no one is recorded to have said "I wish I'd watched more telly" either.

Join White Dot. Press the freedom button to turn the goggle box off, and reclaim your life today.