One of the certainties in life, as well as death and taxes, is that the Sun will always manage to sink to a new depth, just when you thought it would be impossible. And today, they’ve done it again, in the worst possible taste. The offensive headline is “Michael Buble’s son discharged from hospital in Christmas miracle” and it’s offensive because it isn’t true.
As a minor blogger, I am loathe to even mention the subject given Buble’s heartfelt plea for privacy when son Noah was diagnosed with liver cancer. The Sun clearly had no such qualms running their “story’ because to them it was justified. It would certainly be justified to their owner, the odious Rupert Murdoch, whose reporters routinely hacked into people’s telephones, including one that belonged to a dead schoolgirl. And so came the story about the “Christmas miracle”.
The truth is that Buble’s son has completed his first sessions of chemotherapy. This was no miracle, Christmas or otherwise. Of course, we all want the boy to make a full recovery, so what possesses a journalist to tell an outright lie?
Clearly, nothing is sacred in the eyes of the Dirty Digger and his henchmen. Any story is justified, regardless of whether or not it is true. In the post truth world, where presidents win elections on the basis of lying to the electorate and where referendums are won and lost on the basis of lying, why should journalism be any different? I just think it should be.
Whilst I have opinions on a myriad of different subjects, I do not knowingly write things which are know are not true. People can work out a political slant to many articles, but not black or white lies. I didn’t go to journalism school and it’s hard to imagine making up lies is part of the curriculum. Does the editor simply tell journalists to make stuff up?
I can’t believe a intelligent journalist could ever confuse treatment with cure. Treatment might merely be palliative. We all know what cure means. That’s why we have to fear the worst kind of cynicism possible with the Sun. They have wilfully misled readers on an already sad story.
