Media

Former Courier Mail journalist Tony Koch, winner of five Walkleys and scores of other honours, posted the above tweet a day or two ago, prompting a long thread of comments about why the News Corp comic might indeed be circling the drain. As has been the case since Elon Musk bought Twitter, renamed it ‘X’ and opened it to all opinions — left, right, fair, foul and flat-out loony — the posters’ observations reflected the billionaire new landlord’s guiding principle that all speech, other than direct incitement to violence, is good speech. The leftoids, smarting from their lost ability under the old regime to have opposing views banned, went all Pavlov’s dog and drooled in full Murdoch Derangement mode at the prospect of a filthy, fascist, right-wing rag getting exactly what it deserves. Interestingly, those few posting from the right more or less agreed, but for different reasons. In their view, the Courier Mail has drifted into woke impotence and its demise would be no great loss. Those inclined to bitchiness delighted in noting that a much-garlanded journalist doesn’t know the difference between ‘sew’ and ‘sow’ while others prophesied the newspaper would survive but days longer than its nonagenarian proprietor.

A minor ruckus on one Twitter thread amongst millions, the posters’ extended exchanges are perhaps worth a bit more consideration than that conveyed by a stream of acerbic pixels. For all it’s faults, the Courier Mail still tries to honour the obligation to cover both sides, albeit with a decided leaning to starboard on its editorial and opinion pages. The same might equally be said of the AFR and The Australian, where the cant is to port. But what of Nine’s Age and Sydney Morning Herald? In the still-daily wreckage of what were once the cornerstones of the vanished Fairfax empire, even the most cursory scan reveals editorial and corporate policies intent on preaching only to the choir. This is, of course, an approach pursued to an even greater degree at The Guardian, whose monocular perspective on, well, everything is at least mitigated by the proud honesty of wearing all the current  lockstep leftist passions on its sleeve. The Nine mastheads, still burdened by the legacy reputations of a more honourable past, have yet to pay readers the courtesy of admitting they are not “Independent. Always.”  but stewards and propagators of the Left’s whatever passion du jour.

SITTING here at a desk in a Tennessee motel, the planned arrival in Des Moines for the Iowa caucuses foiled by an ice-patch skid and midnight encounter with a rock that tore out my van’s sump and will present quite the bill when the repairs are done, this lament for the sad state of the SMH and Age is prompted by a quick scan of the news from back home. The Australian Open … more tobacco store arsons … our Mary of Denmark … China’s latest threats against Taiwan’s democracy … and then there was this: (non-subscribers will have trouble negotiating the paywall)

The author is former BBC correspondent in Washington Nick Bryant, who professes to be an expert on America, its recent leaders and current election-year politics. By way of background, Bryant is the sort who will note in passing that “slaves built the White House” and finds congenial the company of Tim Soutphommasane, the former Race Discrimination Commissioner who played no small part in the hounding of the great Bill Leak during those final years of taxpayer-funded harassment and lynch-mob vilification. You can watch the pair getting along famously in this YouTube clip from Sydney University, where Soutphommasane now roosts and Bryant is a senior fellow at the Sydney Policy Lab. It must be nice to have friends and favoured sinecures in the New Establishment. If that isn’t enough to plot Bryant’s place against the X and Y axiis of liberal and conservative, then this observation from 12 months ago should do the trick: “If Trump doesn’t get prosecuted, then you really haven’t got a country that’s based on the rule of law anymore.”

There is more, much more of the dribble of rhetoric amd omissions that dribble down the The Age