Classist overtones in the reporting of bulk-billed IVF treatment

Today’s ABC article about the new Primary IVF clinic, open in Melbourne from today, is a little problematic.

Not the broad subject of the article itself: Primary IVF has been operating in Sydney since 2014, has opened from today in Melbourne. It bulk bills and, personally, I think that’s great.

But the tone of the first part of the article, referring to concerns that women might not get the best treatment – with the inference that only those who can pay full freight for private treatment – smells a little off to me.

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Do you see what I see?

The SMH is at it again.

This is what I’m getting at:SMH front page clip showing an article about eliminating bingo wings (for women) in the Life & Style section

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I wonder what they’re comparing it to?

This article in the SMH says that the Inner West Busway – which duplicates a bridge in Sydney’s inner west – has decreased travel time for buses and increased travel time for other motorists. (The new lanes opened last week.)

The article quotes two motorists:

Carla Heineken travels along Victoria Road four days a week on her way to Annandale. ”It takes me an extra eight minutes in the morning and at night it takes me an extra four minutes since that stupid bridge to nowhere opened,” Ms Heineken said.

Helen Hanfling, who drives from Drummoyne to work at Banksmeadow, said traffic had thickened in the past week on Victoria Road towards Anzac Bridge. Ms Hanfling said her journey time had grown from 45 minutes to an hour.

Someone who knows the traffic in that area may set me straight here, but I do wonder: have they taken into account the fact that traffic always gets suddenly worse in the first week after the school holidays?

It happens every single year. And every single year, it’s easy to forget that yes, it really was this bad before the summer kicked in (partly because the wind down of traffic before school holidays is more gradual).

Tip to the RTA: make any road changes at the beginning of the school holidays, and people might talk about how much of a positive difference it has made!

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I buy hardware supplies…

… and it looks like Selleys doesn’t want my business.

I saw this ad on television this evening:

Transcript:

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Compare the pair

Guardian headline: “Student becomes new police chief in Mexican town”

SMH headline: “Just 20, young mother becomes Mexican top cop”

The articles themselves are fairly comparable. The Guardian article leads with “She is a petite 20-year-old college student who paints her nails pink, has an infant son and believes in non-violence” – as if those are what matters to the appointment! It then mentions (in the third para) that she is a criminology student (ie something that suggests some relevant qualification), and the fifth para is this:

The town’s mayor, Jose Luis Guerrero, said she was the most qualified of a handful of applicants for a job, which in many parts of Mexico is considered tantamount to a death sentence.
[my emphasis]

I’m not terribly happy about the article’s treatment of this issue:

The appointment has upset some traditionalists – bloggers have asked if there are no men in the state of Chihuahua

I would have been happier had they made it clear that traditionalist clearly equals misogynist, since the suggestion seems to be that any man could do a better job than this specific woman. But look, I agree that appointing a 20 year old student (even if she is a criminology student) does raise some questions, and overall, the Guardian article appears to be a fairly objective treatment of the story.

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And that’s relevant because …

Actual headline in the SMH: “Security breached as former prostitute pilfers Einfeld police transcript”.

Actual story: a woman who “worked as a typist at APT Transcriptions, a company with lucrative contracts with the police and justice departments and the Independent Commission Against Corruption” found and accessed transcripts of police interviews which had been typed by the company before she was hired by them.

Actual relevance of the woman’s history as a sex worker: nil.

And I thought broadsheets didn’t go in for sensationalism? /sarcasm

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Don’t whinge to me about your complicity

If you follow the UK media at all, you will no doubt have seen a number of articles recently about the News of the World/Andy Coulson phone hacking scandal. In fact, it was an article in the New York Times which kicked off recent interest. The Guardian then started to pick it up (the linked article gives a bit of a round-up, and you can jump to related stories from there).

Apparently, The Guardian is running out of angles. Or something. Today, they have an article about an investigator who was convicted in 2005 of passing information on to newspapers. This is only related to the News of the World/Coulson scandal because it’s the same sort of thing – and, perhaps, because it provides some idea of the context in which this sort of illicit data-mining goes on.

This is what I’m interested in:

He said it seemed unfair that newspaper executives and journalists who commissioned him had not been convicted of any wrongdoing. “It would appear unfair,” he told the programme. “It would appear they should have stood and be counted but quite frankly I wasn’t expecting any support from them.

“[Journalists] actually asked me to do it on their behalf. I suppose you could view it as my Oliver Twist to the press’s Fagin. Something along those lines. Requests were asked of me by people who I viewed as really being above reproach. They were huge corporations. I assumed they knew what they were asking for.”

Shorter: Oh, how was I meant to know it was wrong when huge corporations asked me to do it!

Is it just me, or is anyone else having trouble being sympathetic?

(I may agree with him that it’s not fair that others also didn’t get hit with any penalties, but that’s no excuse for him!)

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What’s wrong with this sentence?

The summary of this article (TW on link for home invasion and violence) was as follows:

People urged to lock doors after teenage girl’s terrifying attack by a stranger who walked into her Sydney home.

Yeah. Whose attack was it?

Further reading here and here.

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