Sunday, January 24, 2010

Words fail me.

Now, I've not done a serious blog post in a couple of months but after seeing a couple of status' on twitter today, and reading the subsequent posts written by people I felt compelled to put this together.

An article appeared in today's Mail On Sunday under the headline of "The male chauvinist pigs of Irish air traffic control" which can be found here.

The piece is written by journalist Luke Byrne, albeit, I use the term journalist very lightly. Byrne has wrote his piece on Melanie Schregardus, who is a air traffic controller at Shannon Airport and had no idea this piece was to appear in today's paper.

Ms. Schregardus world was turned upside down as she wrote on her blog:

"I was minding my own business when I got a call from a good friend of mine sympathising with me about the Mail on Sunday article.
“What Mail on Sunday Article?”

“The one about you! I had no idea – I though you were happy in your job?”

“I am happy in my job – what are you talking about?”

“You told the Mail on Sunday that your workmates were sexist and treated you really badly – there’s a picture of you and everything”

And, just like that, my day fell apart. I don’t really know what to do. I didn’t know that this happened, or could happen, to people like me.


Journalism has changed over the year, and with the advances in technology, especially in social networking sites such as Facebook and Twitter nothing that is posted on the internet is safe from prying eyes.

What I can't comprehend is how a journalist could just read a person’s blog, a person he has never met or talked to and used it as a full article in a national newspaper, it's beyond belief.

In a lot of newspapers you have these little sub-stories which are apologies to people, and I've noticed that the number of these have been increasing over the years. It certainly seems that journalists nowadays write their story and ask questions later, and this is the case here, or be it ask no questions at all and just go ahead with a disgusting, untrue piece of crap and get paid for it.

I am appalled, there is no more I can say.

Just please show your support and follow Mel on twitter - @mrs_schregardus

1 comment:

  1. Thank you so much for your support. It has been a very hard day but I have been blown away with the great support from Twitter. Luckily my colleagues all seem to realise what rubbish this is, but this 'journalist' could easily have made my life in work complete hell.

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