Thieves target Christmas shoppers!

Thus trumpeted news.com in today’s morning lead story on the Perthnow site (the online presence of Perth’s trashy Sunday Times newspaper). Here’s the pic that accompanied the story:

Sooo, the thief is
a) black and
b) wearing an Italia baseball cap.

Well, whaddayaexpect? Wouldn’t be One Of Us perpetrating this low act during the season of goodwill…but hang on.

When you read the text that links to the pic of the lightfingered dark foreign kid ripping off One Of Us, you find it’s nothing about Christmas-specific thievery. The report cites “police records” of “more than 3000 incidents reported in WA from July 1 last year to June 30 this year.” Oh. So this news is 6 months old, then. BUT, a police spokesman is reported as warning Us “to be extra vigilant during post-Christmas sales.” Uh huh. Especially of black foreign kids, yes?

Well, no. Acting Inspector of Police Neville Beard is quoted as attributing “a significant number of these thefts” to “organised individuals or groups”. Of course, there is the possibility that he’s referring to black foreign kids hunting in well-organised packs…

More likely, though, that Perthnow had zilch in sensational reports to jag early morning browsers with and resorted to fabricating a bullshit story out of old “news”. But how to really grab ’em…that is the question.

And the answer is to engage the WASP majority by depicting One Of Us – a burdened WASP Dad-type doing his last-minute Xmas shopping – as the hapless victim of The Other. Can’t make the little shit blatantly aboriginal (bah humbug to fucking PC restraints), but dark’ll do. And a fez woulda been better than that cap, but “Italia” does the job – signifies foreign, the alien within. Good enough. And we get to retain that sense of journalistic responsibility. Bit crass, resorting to Muslim-kickin’ comin’ inta Christmas. Plenty of opportunity fer more of that in the New Year!

Time for a coffee.