tim's experiment

Reading the SCMPost every day is like watching the last hour of Titanic. The ship is still recognisable and still more of less on an even keel, but every now and then another row of portholes disappears beneath the waves. We all understand why the China coverage is a bit, shall we say constipated. The paper’s preferences in local matters are not concealed and the sports space devoted to our local horse casino remains scandalous. But the foreign coverage used to be quite reliable. And so it should be; the news agencies do most of the work.

And so to yesterday’s paper, featuring on page A14 a cracking story headlined “Siege man, 107, shot by police”. This story came to us from Arkansas, in the USA, where a 107-year-old had been shot dead by a SWAT squad. He was firing at them at the time. Clearly in the US, where the right to a pistol in your pocket is taken very seriously, age is no bar to gunmanship. Only problem with this story was that I had seen it before.

I had in fact seen it on Page 13 of Monday’s Standard, where it was called “Gunman, 107, killed by cops in shootout”. Unless there were two senile shooters aged 107 and called Monroe Isadore we must conclude that this was the same story. According to the Post’s version, in fact, the reported events happened on Saturday. As there is a 12-hour time difference and we are ahead I presume that means it happened on Sunday our time, or thereabouts, and was on the wires that afternoon.

So what, one wonders, was it doing in the Post on Tuesday? In this world of broadcast news and instant web updates a story this old is hardly worth using at all. Maybe they’re just not trying hard enough. The old slogan “One of the world’s great newspapers” could hardly now be advanced with a straight face. Are we preparing for a new one: Yesterday’s news tomorrow?