Masturbation after a mugging – The Canon Media Awards 2017

Normally I don’t care about the annual booze drenched back slapping, oh-aren’t-we-all-so-wonderful group wank that is the Canon Media Awards.

I’ve never entered any of the work we do on TDB into this corporate media orgy of  self-congratulation because it is the anathema to everything we believe in on this site. Watching blogs scramble to win an award that Cameron Slater’s Whaleoil won is as ugly as a selfie stick at Auschwitz.

The only time I’ve ever wanted to be at the Canon Awards was last year when the brilliant Rachel Stewart won and Duncan Garner was reported to have stormed off in anger at losing to her.

I. Wish. I. Had. Seen. That.

So bless them all, but I don’t care about their yearly sound of one hand clapping orchestra where they pass around their awards amongst themselves like a never-ending pass the parcel for rich people who are all related and already have all the presents.

It’s like a suburban Game of Thrones but with less violence and more incest.

But this year, the smug triumphalism from so many of these journalists on social media right after we almost had a newspaper monopoly is masturbation after a mugging.

Let me spell that out again, We. Almost. Had. A. Newspaper. Monopoly!

If Fairfax and the Herald had gotten their way,  the only country with a higher media ownership concentration  would have been North Korea. Even China, the largest communist totalitarian regime on the planet would have had less concentration of media power than we almost had.

This would have represented one of the largest strangulations of the Fourth Estate NZ had ever seen and makes the numerous self congratulatory social media humblebrags look more like selfies from the deck of the Titanic while the band plays.