For once, the idiot children at The Age appeared to have a pretty good story this week. They didn’t even have to fall back on their usual stock-standards of morons claiming victimhood in pursuit of compensation or various lefties taking offence. This yarn stood up on its own.

It read:

Victoria’s maritime safety regulator is investigating a potentially disastrous near miss in which two large commercial ships came within 50 seconds of colliding in Port Phillip Bay.

A 200-metre vessel laden with cars is believed to have veered off course and into the path of a 42,000-tonne container ship offshore from Rosebud in the early hours of August 12…

There was nothing, though, in the story about containers toppling — which was odd, given the way the photo used to illustrate the story clearly suggested this had been the case.

Even odder were the similarities between The Age’s photo and this shot from News.com.au from, er, the first week of June:

A photo from the first week of June — three months ago —  illustrating an entirely different story in an entirely different state, to be precise:

So… The Age knowingly and deliberately misled its readers in pursuit of clicks with a more dramatic photo

In other words, it distorted the news in pursuit of a commercial agenda.

And yet it poses as the nation’s whiter than white, purest media. It was supposed to be a national tragedy when Channel 9 bought them out, a death of quality and integrity. Fairfax is supposed to be the gold standard for journalism.

More lies – bigger lies than just playing with pictures.

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