Good News and Happy Times

As you all should bloody well know, we have two newspapers in Dobby because Dobby is a world class city that believes in open competition, and two can compete better than one.

Ladies and gentlemen,


Allow me to present the two marvels of press freedom, editorial independence, and integrity of news reporting in the Gelf... the Good News and the Happy Times!


In keeping with Dobby's vision of having only the world's largest, biggest, tallest, longest, and other superlative things, the Good News is the World's Thickest Newspaper. It is rumoured that many unexplained deaths in Dobby are the result of unhappy, overworked housewives swatting their husbands with the morning's Good News to "wake them up"and then going "oops!"


Happy Times on the other hand, appears to be taking its weight problems seriously. On most days, Happy Times knows it has little to contribute to the discussion and goes off to a corner and slunks (but Happily). Also, since it is a newspaper, and has to actually say something to justify its existence, it paraphrases everything that Good News has to say, and tries to say it better.


The word of the year seems to be "subprime," right? Well, not so in Dobby!


In Dobby, everything's hunky-dory and tick-tock because..., guess what? We have a new crown prince! And a sub-crown prince (or some such). And what makes things even better is they were personally chosen for their new jobs by Big Chief himself! What a pleasant surprise! And so the Twin Typeset-Tragedies would have us rejoice in the knowledge. The two newspapers don't just compete, they bait each other and seek to draw blood every morning... and they pretty much compete on just one thing: who can praise Big Chief better.


So, if Good News says something on the lines of, "Big Chief Rocks!", Happy Times will follow that with "Go Big Chief!"... And then each paper will throw in half a dozen photos of various Chiefs and their sons and their brother and their cousins and so forth in various stages of Rocking in different situations. If they can't find any recent evidence of Rocking, they will get some musty old file photos of period Rocking and plaster them all over with inane headlines like, "Big Chief Rocked back then too" or "Big Chief has been rocking ever since".

Big Chief actually got a little irritated once, and said something on the lines of "The Dobby press is free. It is not freedom that they lack. They are just timid." Well said, Big Chief. As you all can easily predict, Big Chief's comments were plastered on the front pages of both papers. And then, well, they just sort of moved on.

What is singularly irritating is the way the Dobby papers expect everyone to have a short attention span. A case in point being how they refer to Big Chief, or any of the other Chiefs. Big Chief is never just Big Chief in the Dobby papers; he is "His Highness Vice-President and Prime Minister of the Federation and Ruler of Dobby"... I think he is also the Supreme Commander of the Federal Armed Forces or some such, and that is something that doesn't escape the papers' attention. I mean, come on! Everyone in Dobby and Aboo know exactly who all the Chiefs are, how they're related to each other and what titles they all carry. Why waste newsprint space repeating their FULL titles every time?? Don't ask.

There is a theory that the reason for the full title business is, every article is written by a "journalist" of a different nationality, and there is no common editorial policy that requires them to ocordinate their writing styles, so they want to save their skinny a**ses thorugh the use of superlative honorifics.

The one thing that Dobby papers are good for, though, is the fact that they reproduce news from every part of the world. Sincee the majority of the people in Dobby are from one of three nationalities, Good News has rights to reprint ENTIRE newspapers from those three countries as part of itself. Ergo, World's Thickest Newspaper.

As for balanced reporting, well, it's not as bad as one might imagine. Except for the Chiefly families, and their friends, and the government machinery (which takes away a majority of the stuff that newspapers elsewhere like to bitch about), everyone else is fair game. For example, the Happy Times' headline on Dubya's visit to the region said, "Middle East on Bush Alert" followed by his itinerary.

Crime reporting is another hilarious form of journalism here. Every suspect, accused, convict, witness, and victim is referred to by their initials and their nationalities. Nationalities!! Like their being Philipino or Indian makes them worse human beings than say, Saudi or "Western".

The eagle-eyed among you may remember Sadie's post on job listings a while ago. "Wanted smart Western executive secretary: salary 18,000 bucks" and "Wanted Indian Sales Manager: salary 5,000 bucks" and so forth.

Nuff said! Sadie and I are sick of the newspapers here. They suck. Luckily for us, Big Chief decreed a long time ago that TV was ok, and you get TV channels from all over the world. The ones from those parts of the world where they have real editors and real people are especially good. That includes Al Jazeera, from what I hear, contrary to what Bushie might tell you.

Alright. So now we have a TV, and the daily paper shall henceforth park itself directly in the recycling pile. More on the TV when we've set it up. I'm sure the cable company won't make things any easier.

Cheers, all!