Reportedly

On the front page of today's SMH online, there's a link to story in the Beauty section (which I never read, and I'll certainly not read the article in question). The teaser on the front page of the SMH says 'Victoria Beckham is reportedly fighting gravity with essential oils and "natural Botox"'. Now this is just plain awful on a number of levels. What Mrs Beckham does with her time and money is her own business, and you can't help but noticing that celebrities seem to be especially gullible about a lot of things - I assume this is because they have so much money that they don't have to care , so long as it fills half an hour in their lives and gives them a sense of purpose they'll do it (I'm thinking for some reason of Ms Paltrow and the cupping thing - it's positively medieval).

But what's it with the SMH? Notice the teaser doesn't say " Victoria Beckham is fighting gravity with essential oils and "natural Botox". It's worse. It says she's reportedly using this natural botox. So to get this straight, the SMH isn't telling us that Mrs Beckham is using some 'natural botox' snakeoil; all they're doing is passing on to us the fact that someone somewhere says she is. I can understand this, up to a point. It would have been on the newswires (why? why on earth?) and whoever makes these decisions at the SMH - a poorly-trained chimpanzee, I expect - decided to put it in, but recognised at the same time that it wasn't something worth wasting any resources on fact-checking. How about this one? "SMH journalists reportedly too lazy to write stories".