Okay you guys, the jig is up. I'm finally a fully qualified trainee reporter at the Journalism Course at Polytech with a licence to distort, so when I noticed the article entitled "How the Real Journo's do it" I immediately gagged on my genuine 400 year old Big Ben pie and whipped my patented "Supercool" mirrored sunglasses off my face (slashing my check open in the process). Wiping up the blood, I looked more closely at the article.

A copy of a Dominion story about the Education Fightback march was printed above an Evening Post article on the same event. Some paragraphs of the Post article were almost word for word the same as the Dominion's. The caption that Salient put with the two articles read something like "Compare the two articles and see what you think of the Evening Post's journalistic integrity". The inference (yes, they teach us big words like that at Polytech) was clearly that the Evening Post somehow lacked ethics in taking phrases word for word from the Dominion.

Now you university-academic-ivory-tower types may not know much about the way a daily newspaper functions, so I shall enlighten you as to the probable circumstances surrounding the appearance of the Post article. Some poor, put upon reporter would have been rudely awoken by his Editor hurling a piece of paper at him that came from the desk of Simon Wilson. It would have had phrases in it like "Cuts", "Protest", and "Mass demonstration", all words clearly beyond the intellectual capacity of your normal journalist. The reporter would have shut the window to avoid being distracted by the noise of some unruly students marching in the street and sat down at his typewriter to knock out a story.

Not being able to decipher the typing, he would have looked at the Dominion to see if they had said anything on the matter. Mercifully it had printed a full report of the march and so our reporter would have happily set to and spliced the Dominion copy in with the Press Association reports of events in other centres. Then he would have tossed the completed story in the general direction of a copy box and gone back to sleep. The entire process might have taken about ten minutes at the most. The use of the material from another paper is called "recovery" in the trade, and is standard journalistic practice. You can't expect a busy reporter (busy sleeping that is) to spend precious minutes rewriting the same story that another paper has printed and that says all that needs to be said with economy of language and proper journalistic style.

Anyway, those two small bits of space are all march could have expected, I mean no windows were broken, no eggs were thrown, not one violent incident — how can you expect a reporter to write an exciting story about a peaceful demonstration? If the march had turned into an ugly riot, with Simon Wilson and his pals Police, then the Fightback campaign would have received all the publicity it could have dreamed of. All you need to do for front page headlines on New Zealand papers is to spread a little blood and gore around the place. Next time you have a march, issue everyone with axe-handles and petrol bombs to guarantee worldwide coverage and space in the editorial columns of every paper in the country. It's your choice........