Discounted goods

Rita Skeeter and the decline of trust in journalism

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  • Published 20190507
  • ISBN: 9781925773620
  • Extent: 264pp
  • Paperback (234 x 153mm), eBook

WALK THROUGH THE doors of a suburban op shop and you’ll find the residue of household (de)composition that was once catalogued in rhyming newspaper-speak as hatches, matches and despatches. Along half-a-dozen shelves, tucked behind the racks of second-hand clothes and used cutlery, you’ll even find relics of that twentieth-century mass distribution platform we call ‘books’. There’s something a bit meta about them, just like journalism: the first of capitalism’s disruptors, now themselves disrupted. Almost ­insultingly, like journalists, they’re obliged to tell their own tale.

So, here in my local Vinnies, I’ve come to search – not quite at random – for a handful of books to use as the donkey to carry us through the unwinding of ‘that great black art’, as Rudyard Kipling called the daily press.

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