(With fixed link!)

When you work at a newspaper, you don’t need to hear what your readers say. I mean, it could be healthy and informative, but most of the time all of us know what we did or didn’t do that made the newspaper not as good as it could have been. We know even before it goes to press.

I don’t know many journalists, especially on the print side, who love-love-love everything they do. It is an inexact business that strives for perfection, a goal we never hit.

But then you see what some of our competitors are up to … and you feel a lot better about the product we produce.

Take, for instance, a local news website.

It is called “Emirates 24/7” and declares itself “the preferred news website” for the UAE. In English. They wish.

Turns out, these guys are sleaze mongers of the most primitive sort.

Take, for example, their coverage of a rape case in Dubai.

It is remarkable for the “illustration” the editors there snatched off the wire and put atop the news story. About an attempted rape.

Who knows what this photo originally was meant to illustrate. Might have been an advertisement. Quite surely, it wasn’t meant to show how an attempted rape might have happened.

When somebody does something this awful, this bogus, sometimes you try to give them the benefit of a doubt. So I dutifully went through the news story looking to see if the alleged victim claimed to have been tossed in the trunk. Could have happened. Maybe.

But no. Nothing about being in a trunk. So the photo is misleading as well as misguided.

This is the same site that ran a series of beefcake photos on the AC Milan soccer team, which is training in Dubai. So, basically, this is a sleaze machine.

Another example? A news story about two kids dying in a motorcycle accident … “illustrated” with what looks like a posed photo of someone/something under a bike. Might even be a mannequin. Then you play the video and realize they have … nothing. The video stops a few times on a stain on the street which, in this country, could be anything. And is far more likely to be spilled paint or some dropped vindaloo than blood.

Anyway, things like that … make you feel better about what we did at the paper, however imperfect it might have been.