Feelers
For many years, people wondered how tabloid journos got their scoops. In the end, it turned they used 'feelers' - each faer a kiwi-sized snoop that can stick to a person and relay information back to its handler. This news proved something of a shock, if only because people couldn't work out why they hadn't guessed something so gross sooner.
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| Feeler by Zuza Gruzlwska |
Following the revelation, the government outlawed the use of feelers. Using them was already illegal, of course, but in the political world you sometimes need an extra reminder (the key example being when politicians got caught spending their expenses on soapy massages, moat dredging, and soapy moat socials).
Another benefit of regulating an industry is that breaking a regulation incurs a significantly lesser penalty than breaking a law. The latter is seen as a 'crime' whereas the former is more of a 'whoopsie'. This is why journalists carry on using feelers to this day. The other reason is that not doing so would entail journalism, and they didn't get into the tabloid game for that.
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Feeler Facts
- Once a feeler attaches itself to a person they can shift their colour to blend in with their surroundings.
- As magickal beings, feelers can't be killed. They are one of the faer types that will feign being destroyed, however. This makes feeler placement crucial. More than one journo has put their feeler on a target only for said feeler to get sat on.
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Creation Notes
The feelers reference the phrase:
"Putting feelers out."
Beyond that they're a nod to stuff like the UK phone hacking scandal. If you're unfamiliar with that sordid affair, it's when tabloid journalists hacked into people's voicemails to extract information. The victims of the UK media included "murdered schoolgirl Milly Dowler, relatives of deceased British soldiers, and victims of the 7 July 2005 London bombings".
Because successive governments failed to sort this out, the tabloids quickly went back to calling anyone they disagreed with 'traitors' and 'terrorist sympathisers'. These same journos who - lest we forget - hacked the phones of:
- THE FAMILIES OF DEAD VETERANS.
- THE VICTIMS OF TERROR.
- A SLAIN CHILD.
The UK - and by the 'UK' I largely mean ' England' - is an absolute garbage country.
A counter-argument to phone hacking, by the way, is that you'd sometimes want journalists to dig into stuff using means that push up against what's legal - say like when they exposed that America and Britain were using mass-surveillance against their own citizens.. What you don't want is a situation in which the media class is spying on ordinary people, and it's doing so to make people in power look better.
Contrary to some of the banter above, working out were to draw the line on that would be more of a regulatory thing than a legal one. So yeah - sorry if I did the satire wrong.
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