Media

REIGN OF ERROR: Royce Millar’s shoddy writing unmasked

The Age’s beat-up story today repeating the excited fantasies of a chubby state Greens MP about former Treasury official Godwin Grech lying for the Western Bulldogs Football Club about the detail of a multi-million dollar hand-out they should never have received contained an unexpected delight.

In the country edition of The Aged, Royce Millar’s article was printed “unsubbed” or in other words without benefit of a sub-editor cleaning up his many errors.

FROM SLOP TO SLOPPY
While fair-minded journo insiders say it revealed no more than the standard level of muck bowled up by lazy Age brethren on deadline, VEXNEWS can reveal the unsubbed version shows many errors including missing caps (one even at the start of a sentence), extra full stops, other incorrect punctuation, words running together due to Roycey neglecting to successfully connect with the space bar and other shameful mistakes that would – if it was some other person exercising an office of public trust – surely have Millar demanding a Royal Commission.

The most obvious errors were the words “Headline” and “Caption” where the actual headline and caption were meant to be added in. Possibilities at the Age for the missing headline and caption might have included:

Lying Tory dog spy caught once more by heroic Greens anti-pokies crusader

and for the caption:

Malcolm Turnbull’s stooge in Treasury, Godwin Grech lied about pokies

Age insiders have been complaining bitterly about the brutal Rural Press style cut-backs on sub-editors and see this as one of the many manifestations of the slash and burn approach taken by “bean-counter fascists” intent on keeping the left-wing newspaper profitable despite the tough advertising market and a structural and permanent shift away from its “river of gold” revenue stream in classifieds.

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