I have to apologise to regular readers here. When I first joined this blogging community I started off with light hearted fluff. But recently I have been getting more serious in the posts and the subject matter that they cover. Sadly with my blood boiling once more I feel the need to rant about what is on my mind.
After reading “In response to Irish Mail on Sunday” I was disgusted. I’ve chatted with Melanie Schregardus on twitter, and I read her posts. I can tell you the way Luke Byrne (@Lukezo on Twitter) has portrayed her in his hatchet job that sparked Melanie’s post (the link above) is the complete polar opposite to how she really is.
So often the journalistic profession beats the drum about how amateurish bloggers are. That they don’t check facts, they are written badly, etc etc blah blah blah.
Yet here we have yet another example of how the “professional” journalist really works. Ok how Mr Bryne works anyway. I really don’t want to start smearing a whole profession because of one or two bad eggs.
It’s funny really because since his story went to print and out to the public in todays paper Mr Bryne has locked his Twitter account. Why would he feel the need to do that? Maybe he knows that a shit storm is coming his way. He must realise that by quoting stuff totally out of context, false reporting, and basically assassinating an innocents good name, it will all come back to haunt him.
Yes there is the whole fair use thing for the quoting from the blog post. But I’m sure that doesn’t cover distorting what was actually said and meant and using it totally out of context.
It’s probably why he has locked his twitter account. He doesn’t want folks to quote him out of context and distorting his words, and doing a similar job on him as he has tried doing to Melanie.
There is a saying that goes something like “what goes around, comes around” (I hope I got that the right way round, I usually never do). Some religions believe in karma. Another saying is that “payback is a bitch”. I just hope that justice is swift in this case. That Mr Bryne gets what is coming to him.
I fail to see how he can remain employed when it is known that his journalistic integrity is none existent. But then MP’s are still in a job after being caught with their hands in the cookie jar. So I’m not holding my breath over this one.
Sadly I know that usually when a paper has to print a retraction or apology they do it in as small a font as they can get away with, and bury it on some page near the back of the paper. It is a shame that they can’t be forced to print the apology etc in an equally prominent way.
Luckily in this day and age with the bloggersphere and other outlets the record can be set straight quickly online. It just means that for the justice bit we have to rely on the old system. Here’s hoping that they do the right thing and slap Mr Byrne down.
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