{"id":191,"date":"2013-01-14T15:01:45","date_gmt":"2013-01-14T15:01:45","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/jacothenorth.net\/blog\/?p=191"},"modified":"2014-01-22T14:35:01","modified_gmt":"2014-01-22T14:35:01","slug":"191","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/jacothenorth.net\/blog\/191\/","title":{"rendered":"Western Mail: Terminal Decline?"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>We all like to have a go at the <em>Wasting Mule;<\/em> we ridicule its falling circulation, its Cardiff-centricity, its anti-Welsh position on most issues, but in addition to these and other conscious faults the problems may also be due to the simple and fundamental fact that it&#8217;s a poorly produced newspaper. This thought was brought home to me with a few pieces in today&#8217;s issue.<\/p>\n<p>I&#8217;ll gloss over the fact that <a href=\"http:\/\/www.walesonline.co.uk\/news\/wales-news\/2013\/01\/14\/uk-government-s-benefit-changes-are-a-social-atrocity-minister-91466-32591459\/\">Huw Lewis<\/a>, the Welsh Management&#8217;s &#8216;Housing Minister&#8217;, was given the front page and two inside pages for blatant party political propaganda. Or that columnist <a href=\"http:\/\/www.walesonline.co.uk\/news\/need-to-read\/2013\/01\/14\/carolyn-hitt-my-verdict-on-nick-clegg-and-his-onesie-91466-32591383\/\">Caroline Hitt<\/a> tried to get serious with a whole page of politics . . . well, not really, more, sort of, <em>about politicians<\/em>. (Though nothing Welsh, of course). Instead I&#8217;ll focus on two items that bear out what a bloody awful paper the <em>Mule<\/em> has become.<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>First piece of evidence for the prosecution is the story on page 14, where one <a href=\"http:\/\/www.walesonline.co.uk\/news\/wales-news\/2013\/01\/14\/flooding-restore-wales-peat-bogs-to-prevent-floods-call-91466-32589961\/\">Graham Henry<\/a>, billed as the &#8216;Senedd Correspondent&#8217;, wondered whether the decline in water-retaining upland peat bogs might not have contributed to the recent flooding. Amazingly, this half-page piece managed to deal with the decline in upland peat bogs &#8211; even mentioning the villages north of Aberystwyth so badly affected by flooding last year &#8211; without touching on wind turbines, each of which needs a concrete base the size of a football pitch, plus access roads to each turbine, often at the expense of peat bog. Which makes pretending to deal with upland peat bog <a href=\"http:\/\/jacothenorth.net\/blog\/?attachment_id=\" rel=\"attachment wp-att-207\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"alignright size-medium wp-image-207\" alt=\"\" src=\"http:\/\/jacothenorth.net\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2013\/01\/wasting-mule-1-300x243.jpg\" width=\"300\" height=\"243\" \/><\/a>loss and the resultant flooding, yet without mentioning wind turbines, a bit like discussing the Titanic without mentioning the iceberg!<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<ul>\n<li>Turning to the sports pages, our old friend <a href=\"http:\/\/www.walesonline.co.uk\/footballnation\/football-news\/2013\/01\/14\/real-madrid-fans-keen-on-swansea-city-boss-laudrup-to-replace-mourinho-91466-32591638\/\">Paul Abbandonato<\/a> came up trumps again. This time in a curious, rambling piece about Real Madrid fans making Swans&#8217; boss Michael Laudrup their third favourite to replace manager Jose Mourinho, when &#8216;The Special One&#8217; leaves the Bernabeu in the summer. After commending the Dane on the job he&#8217;s doing at the Liberty Stadium Abbo went in with studs showing and, &#8220;Every week you sense the Swans are going to blow up . . .&#8221;. Er, no, I don&#8217;t. Nor do thousands of other Swans fans; a host being boosted weekly by neutrals who think the Swans are a fairly good side. As a Cardiff fan, possibly jealous of the Swans&#8217; success, <strong><em>you<\/em><\/strong> may be <strong><em>hoping<\/em><\/strong> the Swans &#8216;blow up&#8217;, but that&#8217;s entirely different. Can&#8217;t the <em>Mule<\/em> find a Swans&#8217; fan, or a neutral, to write about the club, rather than this man who obviously finds it difficult to be positive or fair about the biggest rival to the club he supports? (Unfortunately the &#8220;blow up&#8221; part of the article does not appear in the online version.)<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>After all that, the obvious question &#8211; and I hear it rise from a thousand devices! &#8211; &#8216;Why buy the bloody rag, then?&#8217; Good question. I regularly ask it of myself. But as I have explained before, if I want my daily fix of Welsh football and rugby, with a dose of Welsh news &#8211; however prejudiced and badly written &#8211; then there is no alternative. I suspect that most <em>Mule<\/em> readers are like me: patriotically Welsh, interested in sport, therefore a captive audience. Which might make the <em>Mule<\/em> unique, in being a &#8216;paper that knowingly takes a different political line to the one shared by most of its readers.<\/p>\n<p>Which in turn should be a recipe for a publication&#8217;s demise. But the <em>Wasting Mule<\/em> gets away with antagonising its diminishing readership because of the generous payments received from serving as the Welsh Mangement&#8217;s in-house publication, not just for &#8216;news&#8217; but also for public notices and advertisements. Though with the Mule&#8217;s falling circulation and ageing readership, how much longer can Carwyn&#8217;s gang justify this generosity?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>We all like to have a go at the Wasting Mule; we ridicule its falling circulation, its Cardiff-centricity, its anti-Welsh position on most issues, but in addition to these and other conscious faults the problems may also be due to the simple and fundamental fact that it&#8217;s a poorly produced newspaper. This thought was brought &hellip; <\/p>\n<p><a href=\"https:\/\/jacothenorth.net\/blog\/191\/\" class=\"more-link\">Continue reading <span class=\"screen-reader-text\">Western Mail: Terminal Decline?<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":124,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"give_campaign_id":0,"advanced_seo_description":"","jetpack_seo_html_title":"","jetpack_seo_noindex":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[209],"tags":[7,11,12,10,1740,8],"class_list":["post-191","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-welsh-media-2","tag-caroline-hitt","tag-graham-henry","tag-huw-lewis","tag-paul-abbondonato","tag-welsh-labour","tag-western-mail"],"acf":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/s3gS9T-191","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/jacothenorth.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/191","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/jacothenorth.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/jacothenorth.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jacothenorth.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/124"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jacothenorth.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=191"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/jacothenorth.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/191\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/jacothenorth.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=191"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jacothenorth.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=191"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jacothenorth.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=191"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}