The Heretic

EITHER very brave or very stupid, Daniel Fitton has a go at the Greens today, making some very sensible points. This, mind you, in the Phage, which looks to Bob Brown's admirers for the overwhelming bulk of its readers and circulation.

Well the comments are a treat, what with a legion of sprout suckers -- aka typical Age readers --  turning out to denounce capitalism and declare their fealty to trees. A professional writer like Fitton can probably cope with that, but how will he handle his colleagues' ire? Only the other day, warmist stenographers Adam Morton and Tom Arup were exchanging tweets about how the volume of world-ends-tomorrow stories they pump out had been underestimated by a survey of climate-change coverage.

Fitton had better watch out where he sits. He is likely to find a drawing pin on the chair.

Sinking Ever Lower

AT THE moment on the Age website, news that perhaps several hundred people have gone to their deaths aboard a vessel heading for Christmas Island is being given surprisingly little attention. It is there, but at the very bottom of a list of, presumably, more important matters -- stories detailing, for example, that a man has been bitten by a snake, word that it will be hot on Christmas Day and the news that four people less famous than Ian Meldrum also fell off ladders  over the weekend. Go right to the bottom of those and other reports and you find a link to the latest lethal consequence of the Gillard government's arrogant intransigence and incompetence.

Funny that. When another boatload of so-called asylum seekrs went down in 2002, the Age could not get enough of it, filling its pages with lunatic smears like this and this and this. Indeed, on the strength of nothing more than a failed diplomat's rancid speculations, the entire Fairfax press went quite beserk about conspiracies and sabotage and RAN vessels that came across pods of floating refugees and then sailed into the night, leaving them to drown.

And it was all John Howard's doing. Of course it was.

Today, though, a nip from a tiger snake is deemed more newsworthy.

What could possibly have changed between 2002 and now?

UPDATE: Just as the Professor was about to grab a screen image of the Age site, mention of the latest tragedy vanished altogether from the roster of most important stories, which still includes that snake under the doormat.

Again, what could possibly have changed since 2002 and now?

Spencer Street's Whitened Sepulchre

POOR RUPERT MURDOCH has copped a lot of grief of late for his reporters' poking and probing in areas where the Caesar's wives of modern media say they should not have gone. And probably they are right, as it was a shocking and terrible thing to shatter the public's faith in cricket by having reporters go undercover to expose the corruption that characterised the Pakistani team. If the News of the World had hued to the same standards of quality journalism that make, say, the Fairfax and News Ltd press such titans in the trust business, that story would have been tossed into the discard bin with all the other things to which the the public has no need to alerted. All the Pakistanis need to have said is that they had explained everything in the past and would be making no further comment, which worked very nicely for our PM. And if reporters had persisted, well the now-disappeared Glenn Milne from News Limited and Mike Smith from Fairfax radio would have been waiting to extend a warm welcome when the latest crop of banned scribes was delivered to modern media's leprosarium.

Still, you have to give Rupert some credit. When the News of the World's good name became irredeemably fouled, he shut down the joint, which places him a few degrees to the plus side of probity against The Age, now mired in its own hacking scandal. Forget the delicious irony of a paper that serves as the house organ for the left finding itself beset by woes stemming from its spying on the left, which is but an amusing sideshow. The key thing to remember as this comedy unfolds is what happejned inside the Age office.

According to reports -- and it requires a bit of reading between the lines -- the investigative reporters were given the logons to Victorian Labor's voter database by an insider, so it could be reasonably argued that they did nothing wrong. If you are invited into someone's house, even by the resident delinquent child, you can hardly be charged with trespass.

What happened after that, or appears to have have happened, is somewhat more problematic. Again reading between the lines, it appears that, having logged on to the database, the reporters may well have allowed third parties in the newsroom to have a bit of fun by letting them look up the profiles of well known citizens, like 3AW's Neil Mitchell. Well that might be a lot harder to defend, a lot harder indeed -- just as it might prove equally challenging to ignore or explain away the anger of a young woman who tells today's Australian that Age sleuth Royce Millar violated her privacy, "kept trying to put words in my mouth" and how he struck her as "dodgy". With this in mind, it is worth re-visiting the Age's editorial of July 15, 2011, Why Media Ethics Really Matter.

...Quality journalism cannot exist without an ethical compass. The journalists and staff of this newspaper are bound by a comprehensive code of conduct that has long been available for the world to see. Not every situation can be foreseen, but the Fairfax code of conduct poses a dozen questions that would have ruled out the unethical and illegal behaviour that has been exposed in Britain. These include: ''Would I be proud of what I have done? Is it legal? Is it consistent with Fairfax's values, principles and policies? Do I think it's the right thing to do?'' and critically, in the context of information obtained by phone hacking, ''Are my actions transparent?''. In other words, was the means of obtaining the information disclosed?

The Age expects to be subjected to scrutiny just as it scrutinises others. We cannot help noticing, though, that News Limited has chosen this time to devote attention to The Age's legitimate reporting of political parties' use of databases of private information about voters. The false accusation of hacking reeks of a diversionary tactic. The Age's journalists acquired the information through a whistleblower with access to the Labor Party database. The articles were transparent in informing readers about these circumstances.

It is no longer just News Ltd raising questions about The Age's behaviour. Now it is the Victoria Electoral Commission demanding answers (and the police demanding computers) and one of the quoted "victims" of the ALP's data-gathering complaining of a reporter's alleged attempt to verbal her.

So please, Mr Hywood, give serious thought to following Murdoch's example: Close the Age or, better yet, fire the editor, his senior cohort and re-launch the paper, preferably with an apology for having allowed a venerable Melbourne institution to be debased by bias and commentary masquerading as reporting. 

Melbourne could do with a good newspaper. What a pity we do not have one.

Amended Forecasts

WE HAD a bit of rain in Melbourne last night, quite a bit. Around midnight, the show outside was too good to miss, so the port, glasses and ashtray all moved to the front verandah, where the Rufous Bird, who roosted overnight at the Billabong, soon fluttered out from the kitchen with little bits of cheese on sticks, some multicultural dip and dry biscuits, snappy celery and a fresh jar of Vegemite. It is one of the many great things about women, that compulsion to mark even the most mundane occasion by putting nibbles on plates, but this display of nature’s fury was particularly well catered. By the time the evening’s second wave of storms had rolled in from the Bay, setting barrages of thunder to rattle windows and driving a procession of soggy ringtails into the shelter of the garage ceiling, a fresh bottle of champagne to toast the tempest’s fury had joined the front-porch provisions.

This morning, with nary a touch of thick-headedness because champagne is such a wonderful tipple, the news on the radio is that some parts of the city on the Yarra copped more than 40mm in less than eight hours. The only complainant was the cat, which streaked over the side fence at the height of the storm, soaked to the skin and quite clearly taking the weather as a personal insult. Before the creature realised there was food in the offing and switched from aggrieved irritation to plaintive mewing, the Professor had been twice bitten, scratched and gouged for the offence of offering a consoling pat, at which point the Rufous Bird demonstrated that other staple of feminine behaviour and observed with a sniff that the mauling was entirely warranted. If only women would deliver those adjudications on sensible behaviour before the event, the world would be a much safer place, but they never do. Perhaps they are too busy anticipating the next opportunity to cube little bits of cheese.

It is always very difficult to intuit what others might be thinking, and not just cats and women but Age reporters as well. Melissa Fyfe, for example, might been contemplating last night’s storm and wondering if she should balance her previous advocacy of the need to prepare for endless drought with a fresh report that, on second thought, would concede her catastropharian informants might have been just a tad alarmist. But probably not, as her more recent discovery that the Premier’s wife has a sister who is married to a man who owns cattle, was quite probably still at the fore of an investigative mind.

And what of her colleague Adam Morton? Have the recent rains inspired thoughts of revisiting one of his source’s dire warning that the drought-now-broken could mean a Victoria bereft of birdlife? “Clearly it shows when we have sustained change in rainfall and sustained change in climate it is having a marked effect,'' Deakin University’s Andrew Bennett told him three years ago. It is lucky the Billabong’s moggy does not read the Age, as predictions like that could only inspire an even more vicious state of mind. Not that she harbours any affection for birds, mind you, just that she would prefer to kill them all herself. As it happens, the birds are doing quite nicely these days – it was only last week that the Professor spotted a sacred kingfisher on a Royal Park power line -- which is more than can said for the Age’s shareholders and laid off sub-editors.

A female sacred kingfisher (not known to cube cheese)

And so is Melbourne, just by the way. The online weather map confirms the finger of sunshine which just jabbed through the study’s window is a harbinger of a lovely afternoon, so Doctor Yowie and the golf club beckon. It is the natural order of things -- just like droughts and rain and nonsense in the Age.