Appealing coverage

Unedited and off the top of my head, but here goes... <rant> I'm sure the Australian commercial media breathed a collective sigh of relief at the guilty verdict of Ms Corby was handed down. This guarantees them another six months of coverage of her situation while the appeal is lodged, considered and ultimately decided. The whole story has been like a big long-life Christmas ham for the tabloids. It has fed them for ages and now there are plenty of leftovers to keep them going. It's a perfect story for populist journalism. Why? Well, the main reason is that it lets racist Australians remain racist. On the weight of the evidence, Corby's case probably wouldn't have made it far in an Australian court: no fingerprints were taken from the bag, it wasn't weighed properly at either end of the trip, and it was left unlocked. Anyone could have put the drugs in the bag and there's too much reasonable doubt that she did it for the case to have gone far here. The presumption of innocence is something we take for granted. When we see foreigners not affording an Australian, a good looking Australian, this same consideration, it gives people a chance to claim the foreigners are being racist towards us. The media gave a lot of weight to the hope that she may be found innocent: getting our hopes up so that we could tune in to the current affairs shows after the opposite verdict was handed down and be outraged. The media, by implication, thus maligns the justice system of the foreign country. People sit down to watch Ray and yell "That's not justice". Well, it is. It's just not the type of justice we're brought up with and led to believe is 'natural'. It's a different culture there and we're encouraged not to like cultures that do things differently from the way we do them. People shouldn't forget that even within our own legal system, judges can have reputations for being lenient or harsh. It's the luck of who you get presiding over your case. In this case, it was a judge from a different culture in a different legal system with different rules and procedures. How many people fail a driving test because they claim they "got the examiner on a bad day"? I don't mean to over-simplify the thing but we should all be bright enough to realise that any notion of justice, far from being black and white, is on a continuum with a fucking huge grey area in the middle. Corby's judgment may be at the darker end of this but it's still grey. Nothing is all right and nothing is all wrong. Good and evil are theoritical notions; they rarely exist in practice. It's too easy to point out that probably every media outlet has reported at least once on "the media circus" surrounding the case, while never admitting that they are a part of it: a part of the problem. Even the ABC website has a photo gallery of Corby throughout the trial. They make it easy to forget there are real people involved in this. I'm not commenting on her guilt or innocence. As I said, it's a grey area, and if it were me judging I'd be inclined to give her the benefit of the doubt. But that's just on the weight of the evidence I've seen in... yeah, the media. </rant>