For those expecting a tirade against News Corporation, then you will not be disappointed, only this time, you might wish to turn the volume up a bit because I am seething.
I have been on the train for about the past month and a half whilst my Ka has been off the road due to being bashed in the rear end by an incompetent in a Toyota Echo (perhaps they should do a recall on the drivers as well), and as a result, I've noticed the free newspaper mX which is either given out at city train stations, or can be collected for free from special racks.
The Panorama National Survey puts the average circulation at about 100,000 copies a day (Mon-Fri), and I've also noticed on the western line, that train stations have now started putting recycle bins on their stations, presumably to alleviate the mess caused by people either leaving discarded copies on the train (of which there can be as many as two dozen per carriage) or overflowing from rubbish bins outside the station - on that note, it's kind of sad to see someone having to clean up someone else's mess; this case it's actually caused by News Corp.
Now for the ugly part:
I usually didn't bother picking up mX on the basis that I had something else interesting to read (I've just finished reading John Maynard Keynes' magnum opus, the General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money), but on this occasion I wanted to find out what had been going on in the world.
Namely that the US Congress had passed the Health Care Reform Bill and that there was a significant speech made by President Obama which I thought would be interesting.
But what was mX reporting?
The death of the smallest man in the world, and pictures of footballers girlfriends. Is this what passes for news? I mean seriously. I have blown my nose and opened the contents of a tissue to find more interesting things. When I opened mX yesterday, I find pretty well much the same sort of content.
Just what the heck sort of newspaper is this?
If you do a wikipedia search on the subject you read the following:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MX_%28newspaper%29
Central themes of most articles include US celebrity gossip, new product lines, controversial events, rumours, celebrity trivia, and readers' gripes, amongst other attention-grabbing stories. Large photographs often appear without any related story, only a caption describing their contents; conversely news stories are rarely accompanied by photographs. Small, large and full page advertisements are also a major contributor to the paper's overall make-up.
Even more intriguing is the links at the bottom of the page; one of which is for "Junk Food News":
Junk food news is a sardonic term for news stories that deliver "sensationalized, personalized, and homogenized inconsequential trivia", especially when such stories appear at the expense of serious investigative journalism. It implies a criticism of the mass media for disseminating news that, while not very nourishing, is "cheap to produce and profitable for media proprietors."
I'd say that this is bang on the money for mX. It's a newspaper (of sorts) which actually panders to the lowest common denominator; and when I later found out that it's owned by News Corporation, it pretty well much explains everything.
News Corporation - a worldwide scum company which exists by producing toxicly crap media.
This is the same company which owns Britain's Sun newspaper, who in 1989 ran a campaign blaming Liverpool fans of atrocities following the wake of the Hillsborough Stadium Disaster:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hillsborough_disaster#The_Sun_newspaper_controversy
... and which, since 1970 has put a topless model on page 3 of the newspaper, just to reinforce what the corporation thinks of its readership.
This is the same company who by virtue of owning the rights to the English Premier League and the A-League, denies me the right because I don't have Pay TV, of watching football. This is the same company who in 1997 nearly destroyed Rubgy League in Australia. This is the same company who via the Fox News network, has managed to convince many Americans that the idea of "socialised medicine" is evil.
It seems to me that mX falls exactly into line and character as a News Corporation publication. It is of little substance but there is one thing about it that is absolutely correct - the price. mX is free. I suppose that is their concession that the content isn't worth purchasing and quite literally they have to give it away.
However, with a circulation of half a million copies a week, it makes me wonder what it's actually doing to public opinion. What I can't tell is if it's read by people who wouldn't usually buy the newspaper anyway, or what percentage of people read it in addition to their primary news source, or even worse, for what percentage of people it actually IS their primary news source.
I can't decide if mX is a reflection of, or a contributor to the erosion of public morals and the increase of the stupidity of society. I concede that there is both a right to free speech and freedom of the press, but does it have to be so remorselessly puerile?
I also admit at this point, that because this rant has more than twelve words in it, most mX readers will have given up well before this... good. Society is better off without you and without mX.
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