At the Crikey office we dream of the Wankley-free week. Alas, we’re not sure if it exists.

This week, coverage of stories from the truly serious to the ridiculous pinged our Wank-o-meters. No winners this week. Just a round-up of Wankley-worthy efforts.

Covering the lethal peepshow: leave it to the imagination

How should journalists cover tragedy? In light of the recent Austrian and Burmese stories, Mark Lawson writes in this week’s Guardian about covering the “lethal peepshow”.

The point of journalism, he says, is “not just to show, but to tell: to explain what is going on”. And yet “by no imaginable checklist, other than gruesome prurience, is there any need for us to know so many details of what happened in Herr Fritzl’s underground dungeon.”

Equally, by no imaginable checklist did Australians need to see footage of the distraught and grieving son who’d just lost his parents in a boating explosion in Melbourne on Saturday afternoon. And yet, they did, swearing and crying as he tried to bat the media away before being restrained.

The facts of the story — that three generations of a family were seriously affected by a boat explosion that killed an elderly couple — were brutal enough for viewers to imagine the emotional devastation. We didn’t need to see it.

Many news programs were guilty of using the gratuitous footage. Channel Ten was one of the culprits, using a freeze frame of the grieving son’s face to head up the story, before airing the footage dispassionately.

For least sensitive treatment, however, Monday’s Sunraysia Daily ( spotted by media mook) was up there with its headline: “‘Heads will roll’ after boat explosion”

Fat beat-up #1: Hackett hacked by hackneyed hacks

Grant Hackett is really fat. That’s the message we got early this week from, well, just about every media outlet in the nation. Following an Olympic qualifying swim in Spain on Sunday, Hackett’s obesity shock made headlines in the printed press, on television, and on radio.

But by late Wednesday, the Hackett weight crisis had been debunked by no less an authority than Hackett himself. At a training session following his return to Australia, a rippling Hackett told reporters: “I can push it out or suck it in, but I’m just standing here normally. I don’t think I’ve got anything to prove to anyone on this issue.”

Despite the echoes of a Thorpey weight gain beat-up in 2006, news outlets were only too happy to feed the story.

A Current Affair couldn’t help but swim around in it (video here). “Flab over the toolshed”, was the conclusion from Dr John Tickell (who headed up Channel Nine’s Celebrity Overhaul show) after looking at Hackett footage. “Yeah, yeah he’s fat.” Former swimmers Geoff Huegill and Nicole Livingstone reckoned the story was blown out of proportion.

But The Age wasn’t going to let it go.

On page three on Thursday the broadsheet probed Hackett’s “rapid transformation of beer belly to abs”, assigning two reporters who consulted two sports physicians. Celebrity doctor Peter Larkins, who appeared to take the question seriously, said the bloating could have come from taking in air and water, but he “didn’t buy (Hackett’s) explanation” of carbohydrate loading for the long distance swim.

Thankfully, Hackett had his say at the very bottom of the story in what should have been the final word on one of the most heavily reported non-stories of 2008 so far: “I think it’s a bit ridiculous, but oh well, that’s the way it is.”

Fat beat-up #2: Mischa, Mischa, Mischa

Starlet Mischa Barton had one interesting in time in Australia.

Paparazzo Jamie Fawcett snapped pics of her sunbathing — focusing on her breasts and cellulite — which predictably splashed across celebrity publications and blogs worldwide.

Not that he intended for the less artful shots to actually be used. Donning the good guy suit, he lamented the magazines’ focus:

…it is a shame that publications tend to highlight an issue that is not fair to a young girl, and I wouldn’t seek to publicly embarrass her with nudity or health issues or body image issues.

However, sometimes these are the things that sell pictures.

Still, Fawcett wasn’t the only one re-writing history. Barton went to OK! Magazine to express her dismay at the way the story had been picked up. “I come from a European family that’s always very comfortable with their bodies. You are what you are as a woman.”

To further rise above it, she noted, “I don’t really use the internet and I never buy tabloids.” Perhaps not in real life, but if it’s worth a buck in adland she does — she featured not so long ago in a campaign spruiking Australian celebrity weekly magazine, Famous. (To see the ad, click here)

That said, it’s a small glitch in an otherwise admirable come-back to a non-story.  

We hope that New Weekly‘s sales are worth the karma-killing fallout from their latest edition: