Unspeakable. Always.

The big news today is that Tony Abbott has paid $300 for a secondhand fridge, a story so compelling that it had to be reported with the full panoply of Twitter and Facebook comments. Man buys bargain appliance! Hold the front page!

Actually, it is a pity the front page wasn’t held, at least until another headline story could be adequately explored and, in a better world, re-written with an eye for balance. Atop this post is a screen grab of the way the Age promoted the yarn, its lead online item this morning. Senior cleric makes light of paedophilia! Shocking stuff, no?

Yes, shocking stuff indeed — shocking because the real story is buried deep in the text, tucked away where few will read it and even less will wonder how the Royal Commission into Child Abuse is going about its dubious business. Those who do read further should be appalled.

To summarise:

• A former altar boy testifies that the now-Cardinal George Pell joked about the infamous molester Gerald Ridsdale. The Commission allowed Pell to be named while suppressing the identity of the his accuser.
• Another former altar boy,cited as a corroborating witness and also unnamed, begs to differ. He has no recollection of such a conversation and doubts the remark could have been made, adding that, as far as he can recall, Pell and the priest with whom he is said to have shared the jest never co-presided over a funeral during the period in question.
• Nor does he remember serving at a Mass with the accuser
• Pell’s alleged interlocutor, a certain Father Madden, was not the parish priest at the time.
• The molester Risdale had not worked in the Ballarat district for almost a decade, having by that stage been re-located to Sydney.

In the name of fairness and competent reporting, all of the above points needed to be featured high and prominently in a story that should have begun with the amended first paragraph below. The missing and much-needed words are underlined:

A survivor has told a royal commission he overheard George Pell joking about paedophile priest Gerald Ridsdale “rooting boys again” more than a decade before Ridsdale was convicted of multiple counts of child sexual abuse — an accusation another witness and Pell’s lawyer dismissed as being at odds with known fact.

On its websites, Fairfax has taken to adding the word “journalist” beneath the bylines of the children who now populate its newsrooms. How would you know otherwise?

Should you wish to reward the the Age‘s latest click-bait travesty by visiting its website, the story can be read in full via the link below.

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