Does the Dominion Post have an editor readers might reasonably ask? It’s a fair question given some of the mind-blowing tosh it sometimes serves up as news.
Recently it devoted a half page no less to about as much a non-story as one could imagine. This recounted how a Waikato residential landlord had recently auctioned her rental property, achieving a price of $365,000 which was probably largely land value.
Accompanying the account of this everyday event was a large photo of the property, a dilapidated crumbling small shack, and before it a grave-faced middle-aged women, a Maryanne Macdonald, who it transpired had been the tenant in recent years.
And the “story”? Despite it being none of her damned business Mrs Macdonald objected to the property being accurately advertised pre-auction by the vendor as “cheap and nasty” and to the auctioneer’s opening pre-auction remarks, “You won’t find anything much cheaper than this or any worse”.
So while conceding the property was a mess, Mrs Macdonald rang the Waikato Times to complain at these descriptions, her utterly irrelevant grounds being she’d brought up a son in the house. Mindboggling they ran this as “news”, as did their associated paper, the ‘Dom.
We all object to all manner of trivia. Might we expect future half page ‘Dom accounts of say, a photo of a grave-faced Bill Bloggs amidst the milling Lambton Quay throngs in which can be seen some fat girls (they won’t wait long for that backdrop) and an accompanying story recounting Mr Bloggs’s deep distaste at the sight of them? If not why not?
