Remember Nisha and Vishal Patel? They're a couple of Ipswich shopkeepers who the Courier Mail put the heat on a couple of months ago for displaying photos in their shop of suspected shopkeepers taken from their security footage.
Sure, some of the shoplifters in the photos were under 18, but public sympathy was (deservedly, I think) on the side of the Patels. Nonetheless, the Courier Mail and scummy Ipswich councillor Paul Tully went in hard, batting for the Patels to be charged with a crime for hanging the photos of juvenile offenders. The CM accompanied their articles on the Patels with an opinion piece loftily titled 'Vigilantism is not the answer'. Basically the author, Tony Keim, said the Patels should have bent over to be arse-raped by shoplifters because they should have known what they were getting into when they opened up a store in the area. Dickhead. Besides, everyone should know the Courier Mail just adores a good old bit of vigilantism- that's why they revealed the previously secret location of a paedophile who'd been released due to the low probability of him obtaining a fair trial because of the extensive media coverage his previous cases had been given. Now, frankly I'm not sure I shouldn't side with Kevin Rudd on this one, because people should have the right to know the whereabouts of someone like that. But Denis Ferguson in all likelihood would be sitting in a cell right now if it wasn't for the kind of coverage he'd been given in the Gold Coast Bulletin and the Courier Mail. They kept him out of jail, and reveled in the media feeding frenzy that keeping him out of jail resulted in.
Anyway, enough of vigilantism and back to Nisha and Vishal Patel. The very thing that the Courier Mail tried to have that couple nailed for is the very thing the paper is doing today: splashing the photographs of people who are suspected of shoplifting all over their paper. Not convicted, mind, just suspected. However, the CM isn't bleating about the 'privacy' and writing articles sympathetic to the alleged shoplifters in this case. Oh no. They appear totally blind to their own hypocrisy. Don't get me wrong, I think it's a fair tactic to use in catching criminals. But the CM beat up on a pair of small business owners for doing exactly the same thing. They are as shameless as any of the criminals they write stories on.
1 comment:
Yeah but the Patels weren't white.
So QED from the CM!
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