This week the biggest headline of all is that of convicted drug smuggler Schapelle Corby being released from prison in Indonesia.  Schapelle has to stay in Indonesia as she is effectively on parole, for a further 3 years I think.  During this time she will apparently stay with family based there.  Fine.  I think a 3 minute news story would have been sufficient for that.  Oh nooooo.  Let’s have a reporter from every network effectively camped at the front of the prison to see her come out.  Let’s have a cameraman waiting at the Parole Office where she needs to sign her parole documentation.  And don’t forget to stake out her family member’s surf shop or whatever it is.  And we must report on the bidding war for the first interview as well.  Reportedly $3M is what she may get for that interview.  And it is with the Seven network as she wanted to snub the Nine network for showing a movie based on her story.  My apologies for the next line to Schapelle and her family and friends but seriously, who the hell cares?  Why should the reporting about this be at saturation point?  Note the earlier bolded bit – convicted.  Not alleged, convicted.  So is the news so dull at the moment that we need saturation coverage of the parole of an Australian prisoner in another country?  Perhaps it is.

But.  And to me it is a big but.  There was a great hoo-haa when David Hicks was released from Guantanamo Bay about how he could not sell his story as he was a convicted terrorist.  Now my point of view here pretty much coincides with that of his father Terry in that only thing he should have been convicted of was stupidity in being where he was, when he was.  One day I’ll read the book he wrote and see his side of the story, but the extensive amount I read during his trial added up to being convicted of wandering around and talking to bad people.  Ridiculous.  But now that I have derailed myself yet again, let me make my main point.  He was not allowed to sell his story like Schapelle Corby was.  He gets locked up in GB for years with no recourse to anything, is allegedly tortured, sent to trial (ha!) and convicted in what I would call legal absentia (meaning “look guys I’ll admit to anything if I can go home“).  Surely he has a hell of a story to tell.  Schapelle gets caught at an airport with a bag loaded with drugs, goes through a media circus where her every move outside her cell is documented by the media frenzy, including the trial, appeals and the whole lot.  We’ve seen and heard all of it other than her time in a cell.  And her story is worth $3M to a TV network and David is told to shut up?

Say what?

We’ve all heard about media bias and countless conspiracy theories that have been spread through the media about politicians, actors, musicians, sportspeople, bikies and many more.  It just rams home to me why I watch the small amount of news that I do, and why I graze the news sites that I do so I can avoid the fluff that poses as news today.  Bieber, Miley Cyrus, reality TV shows, how wonderful the current [insert relevant sport] team is now.  It drives me bonkers.  Honestly.  I sit back and read the Science literature I have available to me.  I listen to podcasts that interest me on Space Science, Physics and the like.  I play computer games.  And I take less and less interest in what actually goes on around me.  I used to be a voracious news watcher and reader.  Used to read 2 newspapers, cover-to-cover, every weekday in my early teens,  Used to watch the news every night with my parents as a kid at school.  And then watch a Current Affair, which wasn’t about dodgy tradies and which shampoo works the best then.  It was actually, wait for it, journalism.  But that is almost dead now.  Well it certainly is if you only watch commercial free-to-air TV.  And it is a shame.

The media killed my interest in the media.  Almost poetic isn’t it.