In this edition of our Media Glass House our teams of researchers want to focus on the standard of journalism exhibited recently by News Crap Australia.

For starters, here’s a story that ran on Thursday in the online edition of the daily turdbloid The Gold Coast Bulletin.

We won’t sully your sensibilities with its specific content. Suffice to say it involved an online professional porn star who sustained an injury that caused damage to the main – let’s admit it, the only – tool he needs to make a living.

What is the value of this story to readers?

Our MGH researchers are yet to determine an adequate answer to that question.

However, they are well are that such an item may well cause a lot of people to click on the yarn which appears to be the main reason it ran.

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Next our MGH teams draw your attention to another prime example of clickbait, this time in News Crap Australia’s supposedly upmarket national broadshit The Australian.

The story below appeared on The Australian’s website on Friday.

Clearly the intention is to suggest to readers that Karl Stefanovic has quit his overpaid job at the Nine Network’s brekkie show.

Imagine how many readers clicked on that item to read more.

Imagine how disappointed they were when they discover Karl wasn’t leaving. Indeed, where would he be employed if he did?

No, it was another lesser-known member of the Today show’s on-air cast who was pulling the pin to head overseas.

Never mind about misleading readers, it was no doubt “mission accomplished” as far as News Crap is concerned.

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Finally, News Crap Australia gave blanket coverage through its online sites on Saturday following the overnight announcement by the Princess of Wales about her cancer diagnosis and treatment.

It even went so far as to engage the services of a so-called “body language expert” to analyse and draw conclusions about her state of mind just by viewing the video she recorded to break her news. (below)

You may well be aware of body language “experts. They often make very authoritative sounding statements such as declaring a person is lying because they scratch the left side of their nose or make some other perfectly normal physical movement.

How they make such determinations just by watching a video, and why they never seem to concede that the person being analysed may well have simply had an itchy nose at that particular point in time is never really explained.

Our MGH teams tend to place such “experts” in the same basket as sideshow hucksters.

In a bit of a giveaway confirming that view, News Crap Australia’s turdbloids badged the story as “entertainment” news.

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