Keith Windschuttle

If you only get your news from the Fairfax press, you would have missed the most damaging scandal yet to have rocked Aboriginal affairs. The story was front-page treatment on News Limited newspapers, especially the Australian, when it broke on April 14, and for the following five days. Several television and online forums canvassed its consequences. But Fairfax editors regarded it as such a threat to their worldview they imposed a nationwide ban on the story. Not a word about it appeared on the pages of the Sydney Morning Herald, the Age, the Australian Financial Review or the Sun-Herald.

The incident began after the chair of the Northern Territory’s Indigenous Affairs Advisory Council, Bess Nungarrayi Price, appearing on the ABC’s Q&A television program, spoke favourably about the Howard government’s 2007 intervention into Territory communities. “I’ve seen progress. I’ve seen women who now have voices,” Price said. “Children are being fed, and young people more or less know how to…