In the early 1970s, local newspapers changed their publishing strategies. They stopped thinking of readers as interested parties keen to learn the latest news from objective sources. Instead, they thought of them as clients who consumed news to suit their lifestyles and, consequently, their unwavering ideologies. Censoring and slanting facts soon degraded into outright fabrication and readers became conditioned to see only information that pandered to and confirmed their negative biases, so much so that newspapers such as the Scarfolk Mail realised that they no longer needed to provide actual content: Readers only saw what they wanted to see and comprehended what they wanted to comprehend. Consequently, in 1972, the Scarfolk Mail started publishing editions with little or no content. Instead, it provided sheets of rub-on-transfers should the reader want to fill in the columns with their own jaundiced content. The Scarfolk Mail went on to win a prize for best reportage of the year, as voted by readers.
