Age readers riot

You won't read about this in the Age, allowing that you actually read the Age, rather than look to it as the distilled essence of feral opinion and the latest trends in groupthink, but the East-West Tunnel isn't anywhere near so unpopular as the newspaper's writers insist. While the paper has been filled with screeds underscored by the foundation belief that public transport is morally uplifting and should therefore be obligatory, genuine public meetings with real residents and bona fide officials have been taking place throughout Fitzroy, Collingwood and Kensington. For some reason the Age chooses not to report these gatherings, prefering as it does today, to focus on the ferals for whom the tunnel project must serve as a catalyst for mayhem until the next G20 confab or Right to Life rally. It might cost Age editors dinner party invitations were they to mention that those public meetings have generally accepted the view that property values and quality of life will each be improved if vehicular traffic moves beneath the inner city rather than through it.

Just up on the Age website is this report and picture, one of several from today's protest. Unmentioned is that the the "injured" woman, Kat Gallea,is a professional ratbag and mainstay of the Socialist Party, specialising in movie reviews and Marxist critiques of Fifty Shades of Grey.

No mention of the protesters' associations and sympathies figures in the Age report, which is hardly a surprise. After all, why would the paper wish to insult the soap-free demographic, the last market segment in which it exerts any influence whatsoever.

Several weeks Fairfax closed its slick consumer monthlies, Sydney and Melbourne magazines, which formerly paid the rent by carrying ads for flash watches, four-figure handbags and ridiculously expensive ladies shoes. Is it it any wonder those mags folded? Would anyone but an Age executive want anything to do with these dingleberries? If they entered your shop the first call would be to turn out the store detectives.

UPDATE: How ridiculous is the Age these days? This ridiculous.

Not quite Woodward and Bernstein

Evidently aware that this morning's ACTU-dixctated expose of sexist discrimination in the workplace was but more of the ho-hum whining feminist same, the Fairfax press has decided to add a new element to the coverage by arranging catchy combinations of bylines.

Today's scoop is the work of Marnie Banger and Griff Tapper

Death's dowry

Archeologists must have a term for the accumulation of bright and shiny things intended to equip the departed with all the luxuries and necessities required for a comfortable afterlife. They are know as grave goods when dug up, but what they are called when the future star of Time Team's excavations still had flesh on his or her bones is anyone's guess. Death's dowry, perhaps.

Whatever the official term, The Age has added another adornment to its imminent epitaph, having just won 2013's Newspaper of The Year, which it announced on this morning's front page beneath a headline proclaiming that is Number One. In addition to being unable to report the news without bias, it seems The Age is also innumerate, as the steaming pile of its daily offerings much more closely resembles number two. 

Here is how the folks at the Pacific Area Newspaper Publishers Association explained their logic (plus some incidental observations).

Fairfax Media newspaper The Age has been crowned the 90,000+ circulation Newspaper of the Year, concluding the 2013 Future Forum.

It is still selling more than 90,000! At the current rate of shrinkage, the Age   will be ineligible for this category by the end 2015. Allowing that it survives that long, of course.

The award topped off an impressive year for The Age, where it thrived under a tough climate for newspapers around the world.

The PANPA people must have been thoroughly intoxicated when that release was drafted, or have the Macquarie Dictionary people redefined "thrived" to mean the 27,000 fewer daily copies sold this year than last.

“Difficult commercial decisions were embraced with confidence by the editorial team,” judges said.

The Professor once "embraced with confidence" a firm and apparently eager woman, only to be knocked silly by her boyfriend. For the Age, substitute "reality" for the wiggly young thing's beau.

“Impressive results showed the success of always placing journalism first and foremost.

Yep, they really were on the squirt.

“The executives and all the teams at The Age deserve this to be their year.”

And it will be their year, too! Nothing boosts annual earnings so much as a big, fat, juicy redundancy cheque.

The awards ceremony topped off the 2013 Future Forum, a gathering of some of the most brilliant minds across the newspaper industry, after two days of interactive workshops, lectures and presentations.

"Brilliant minds", eh? Let's see how brilliantly those minds shine when Abbott PM ends all Federal Government advertising in Old Media rags, which will serve them right.

Centuries from now, when the Age's barrow is excavated, the PANPA trophy will suggest it went to its grave respected and beloved. As long as the undertakers don't include Fairfax's latest numbers amongst the grave goods, that is

Let's hail ALL Vietnam vets who beat their wives

Alcohol, perhaps too much of it, if that is possible, figured somewhat in Saturday night’s early recreations, which took on a foggier complexion when Young Master Bunyip arrived at the Billabong with some companions to reclaim from the attic sundry items of furniture and clothing. When one member of the party proved incapable of walking a wide desk through a narrow door – not that difficult if you go about it the right way and aren't prone to fits of giggles – the suspicion that marijuana might be to blame came to the fore, as did a subsequent offer to share what young people call “a number”. The Professor was warned not to draw too deeply, as those inexperienced in these things can “flip out” and make fools of themselves. Like, for example, not being able to fit a desk through a door.

When today dawned clean and Sunday sober, it seemed at first that an evening of drug and alcohol abuse had bequeathed no lingering ill effects. The world certainly seemed normal. The latest edition of The Age, for example, was a representatively wretched example of what arrogant morons can produce if given free rein, and on Insiders it was more of the same. Was Ol’ Scrotumface  just a tad down in the mouth? He certainly seemed that way, as did David Marr, whose customary lament that the rest of humanity is not so smart as he seemed freighted with a poignant resignation. Perhaps it was word of the latest polls, poor fellow.

But then came coffee and a closer look at The Age, and with it the suspicion that there might just be a little, lingering bit of that reefer madness clouding perceptions. This story about an Aboriginal who served in Vietnam and has suffered more for the experience than his paler comrades is a real head-scratcher. The point seems to be that former Lance-Corporal David Cook was hard done by, something the headline asserted: “War does not discriminate, nor should we”. Yet there was no evidence in the article that Cook has suffered, or did suffer, while serving under the emblem of the Rising Sun or later as a direct consequence of that period in his life. Indeed, the author, academic Noah Riseman, actually says khaki was the only colour which mattered during Cook’s two tours, skin tones being irrelevant to the business of keeping himself and his mates alive. Yet somehow the impression is left that Aborigines who served in Vietnam have been denied their special recognition.

Baffled by the story as published, a bit of Googling turned up some quite interesting information on Cook’s activities subsequent to his honourable discharge. Like the Age article it also was written by Riseman, and its details paint a rather different picture.

First, it turns out Cook won’t talk about his early life or memories of having been “stolen”, quite possibly because he finds it unpleasant to recall childhood neglect. And then things get even more interesting.

An admitted wife-beater who acknowledges his truculent attitude toward police brought grief upon his head, the further details of Cook's life, as summarised by Riseman, include his subject’s former propensity to whack people with iron bars. This habit earned him six years in jail. It appears that Cook is now a reformed citizen and doing good works protecting Cambodians from land mines, for which he should be praised. A column describing how a troubled man straightened himself might have had a point to it, albeit with less opportunity to pluck those ever-reliable victim strings.

The pastiche of inference Riseman assembles to suggest the Army was somehow to blame for Cook’s troubles can only be viewed as deeply, and perhaps intentionally, misleading. Cook was, by his own admission, a nasty piece of work, yet Sunday Age editors appear not to have been up for the due diligence of checking facts against comfortable and comforting preconceptions.

The Professor knows what he was smoking last night but whatever they hand out at The Age must stronger by an order of magnitude. Don’t bogart that joint, comrades. Save some for the receivers.

  

Curiouser and curiouser

There was a time when The Age published brain teasers on its comics page, but as the paper has fired Bristow, who would have made a superior editor, the riddles now sometimes appear on the front page, as is the case today.

The paper has wrapped itself in an extra sheet with headlines at the top, as you might expect. Below that, however, is the facsimile of a diagonal tear and the words "Always Curious", the paper's promotional slogan. (Truth in advertising indeed; there are few enterprises more curious than The Age)

Curiousity certainly seemed warranted, as there was no way of knowing what journalistic heroism was contained inside. Less open to question, perhaps, is an assertion emailed some months ago to the Billabong by a professional journalist who, at that point, had yet to be tapped on the shoulder, handed a cheque and told to get lost.

"The word I hear is that [CEO Greg] Hywood gets a $3 million bonus if Fairfax is sold," the correspondent whispered.

No credence was invested in that tip at the time, but after seeing this morning's rag, well, you just have to wonder.

Poll Axed

YOU have to feel sorry for the poor dears at Fairfax. There they are, adrift on their sinking ships, yet content enough in their own simple way at the thought that they have driven off all those nasty conservatives who used to buy their papers. At The Age, where not even one conservative columnist is allowed to sully the newly shrunk pages, the big effort appears to be invested in making sure bad news appears less so .... before being made to vanish altogether.

Take this morning's poll showing that Gillard's dills now enjoy the support of only 29% of the voting population. Fairfax paid for the poll, so you might imagine it would wish to give it much prominence. And so it did, for a while.

What follows is a frame-by-frame record of the incredible shrinking poll story:

At 9am we saw this on the Age homepage:
 

A bit after 10.30, the headline had been softened somewhat and pushed down the page:

And finally, at around lunchtime, Peter Hartcher weighed in with an analysis -- correct, as it happens -- that rather neatly deep-sixed the actual, shocking polls numbers:

There are some polls, however, that do get a prominent display, with no fudging of headlines or hack columnists' attempts to cushion the bad news with a dribble of interpretative insight. On the same home page where word of that dreadful poll was made to vanish, we also find this:

The Age will be dead soon, done in by its own left hand. It will be no great loss.

Wally's Cultural Critique

IT IS almost worth the cost and inconvenience of coping with illegal aliens to see how much their treatment -- "bureaucratic violence" no less -- has encouraged Waleed Aly to unleash the inner dill. As Radio National listeners will know, Wally can talk the leg off an iron pot, keep it up for hours and never say anything entirely coherent, which isn't part of his job description anyway. He's just there to be Wally, the ABC's non-explosive Muslim, the fellow who can always be counted upon to tut-tut at the latest demonstration of his co-religionists' irritability before putting everything into the correct context. This always seems to be that Muslims would not be angry if the rest of Australia (and the world) did not annoy them so much. As Wally explained after the recent Sydney riot:

...when Gallup polled 35 Muslim majority countries, it found that of all the gripes the Muslim world has against the West, among the most pervasive is the West's ''disrespect for Islam''.

And it is this disrespect that is the overarching grievance that subsumes others. Everything, global and local, can be thrown into this vortex: Swiss minaret bans, French niqab bans, military invasions, drone strikes, racist stereotyping, anti-immigrant politics, and yes, even films so ridiculously bad that, left to their own devices, they would simply lampoon themselves.

This is what gives Innocence of Muslims meaning: not its content, but its context. It's a symbol of contempt, which is why protests against it so quickly turn into an orgy of anti-Americanism. So, ''Obama, Obama, we love Osama'' they scream, mainly because it's the most offensive rhyme they can muster. Osama, too, is a symbol; the most repugnant one in their arsenal. How better to prove you exist than to say something outrageous?

That's Wally's standard apologia whenever the Beard Brigade get boisterous, and trouper that he is, he can normally be counted upon to recite those polished rationalisations without a flub. Today, with the spirit very much upon him, Wally lets slip the veil and uses his latest Age column to give Australia a real whacking. Here he is, working himself toward a frothing climax:

Reflecting on the infamous Abu Ghraib prison scandal, Stanford University psychologist Philip Zimbardo observed that such things become possible when the perpetrators feel anonymous, when they don't have a sense of personal responsibility for their actions, and have tacit approval from authority figures. And the obvious differences between Nauru and Abu Ghraib aside, isn't that what's happening here?

Nauru and Abu Ghraib? Yep, same thing except totally different. Then, with the blood rushing to his head or somewhere, Wally really unloads:

This is a culture of belligerence, trickling down from the political leadership. Again, just like White Australia. It's a culture that sees the sneaky denial of rights as a virtue. A culture that sheds tears for those who die at sea trying to get here, but barely blinks when people are killed after being sent home. A culture that watches a detainee attempt suicide, and dozens of people give up on the idea of asylum, and then chalks it up as a win.

Pretty rotten culture we have here, apparently. Not to worry. Leave it to Wally and his mates. They are working hard to make Australia a whole lot less annoying

Braver than a Frenchman

WHEN Voltaire was dying he is famously said to have rejected a priest's invitation to renounce Satan on the quite reasonable grounds that, given his circumstances, he did not need additional enemies. At the corner of Collins and Spencer streets, where Fairfax Media's Melbourne outpost's pallor remains no less an indicator of terminal health than a French writer's soiled sheets, Mark Baker is making his employer's peace with truth. Through a succession of its recent editors The Age has found it expedient to look the other way when stories that jarred its sympathies arose. Now, in almost the hour of its death, Baker is redeeming Fairfax with journalism of the sort that, had it been pursued earlier and in many other areas, might have done much to preserve the southern franchise's reputation and, perhaps, even its bottom line.

What makes this renunciation of past form so brave is that, as The Age reports and advances what the blogosphere has been covering for years, there are many quiet mutterings in Canberra that Age-style journalism needs to be supported by the public purse. Pointing out that our PM is a liar, a crook's mole moll and the happy beneficiary of a vital file's inexplicable disappearance is unlikely to impress the corruptocrats who now hold the purse strings.

As Baker has now peered into Gillard's wormy can, let us hope Fairfax survives long enough to see these further leads pursued:

1/ The S&G files on the Kerr Street property  and other AWU-related matters were transferred to Maurice Blackburn, where Nicola Roxon took charge of them, when the union yanked its business in disgust from Gillard's old firm.

Does Roxon have the missing files? Does Blackburn's have them? What light can be shed by Bill Shorten, also at Blackburn's and Roxon's then-lover, on the scandal at the AWU, where he went on to become the hero of the Beaconsfield Mine drama.

2/ Are the property-transfer records for 36 St Philip Street, Abbotsford, up to snuff? This was Gillard's address and is now owned by her former housemate. Was any attempt made to avoid stamp duty when the property was transferred to its current owner?

3/ Was Kerr Street purchased in Ralph Blewitt's name in order to hide property from Wilson's soon-to-be ex wife, who might have claimed it in a division of property. She should be relatively easy to find and her views might make for interesting reading.

5/ Was Town Mode, recipient of $17,500 in "slush fund" cheques, owned by a union associate of Bruce Wilson, whose mates allegedly kept doing unauthorised renovations to Gillard's digs.

And there is a final scandal, one which may represent the greatest and most damning example of cynical Gillardian ambition:

4/ How did Gillard come to barrack for the Western Bulldogs?

Consider, a Welsh girl raised in Adelaide moves as a 21-year-old to Melbourne, where her passion is endorsing Socialist Forum motions denouncing marriage as no better than prostitution and scheming with former CPA members, who represented almost half of Socialist Forum's members, to bring on the revolution.

Then she starts at Slater & Gordon, where Peter Gordon is a Bulldog supporter, as are numerous other of the firm's execs, including her supervisor there, Brendan Murphy, recently elevated by his former protege. Suddenly, Gillard becomes a Bulldog supporter.

Oh, and one other peculiarity of timing: Peter Gordon left his law firm not long after Gillard was shown the door. So did Murphy (to Blackburn's). Shortly after that, Gordon's marriage came publicly to pieces. Make of that what you will.

Meanwhile, Gillard remains the Bulldogs' Number 1 ticketholder. The Dogs had a terrible year. A fresh start to the 2013 season would be to revoke the Prime Minister's membership and send her to St Kilda, where it is well known that criminals are valued and appreciated.

The Age of Opportunity

THERE is much to like about Keith Dunstan, despite several grave deficiencies of character. Those who lived in Melbourne during the Seventies, when the city still had large, wide, multi-lane roadways, may recall the many columns he penned for the Sun News Pictorial about the joy to be experienced upon a bicycle and how nice it would be if the Queen of the Yarra were to be carved up by bike paths. His wish came to pass and while he is probably too old these days to pump the pedals, his heirs now oblige motorists to observe their Lycra’d bottoms on roads reduced to perpetual one-lane traffic jams. Moreover, as cyclists are slow and prone to falls, their presence on our roads has been one of the many thin excuses for covering the landscape thickly with the revenue cameras that are said to secure their safety. Dunstan also displayed an open disdain for the footy, Melbourne’s great game and, unless someone in Jolimont cures cancer, quite likely to remain the Southern City’s greatest contribution to the sum of human achievement.

 Keith Dunstan massages the prostate.

That said,  Dunstan retains the power to make the gentle, salient point , which he has done this morning with a lament that so many people are announcing the apparent passing of newspapers. He maintains the Age will survive, also the hope at the Billabong, where one of the interesting things about Dunstan’s column is that it does not appear in his old paper, now called the Herald Sun.

Some years ago, for reasons best known to itself, the Herald Sun decided its future was in celebrity gossip, sport and pictures of adorable animals and babies.  Dumbing down the paper appears to have been a conscious and quite deliberate policy, as that is the only thing to explain why even the formerly robust finance section is worth reading only for Terry McCrann. So Dunstan has migrated his occasional pieces to the Age, where the dominant inanity is, for the moment, of a different variety.

But still, it should give hope to those who believe a city of 4 million people deserves at least one, semi-decent newspaper. The Herald Sun underwent a transformation – for the worse, but that is beside the point – and so can the Age, perhaps for the better, with Mrs Rinehart at the helm. Indeed, a board not half so infected with Roger Corbett’s fatalism might even see Melbourne as an opportunity. As a commenter at Mumbrella observed, the city still buys 600,000 papers every day. Even allowing that a reformed Age will not attract too many young and thoroughly wired readers, it does not require too much optimism to see it taking away 100,000 sales from the Herald Sun on the strength of a more convenient format and improved content, especially the latter.

It would seem that, at this stage, all Fairfax’s announced plans for transforming itself are moot. Within weeks, Mrs Rinehart will be in control and, one way or another, in a position to determine how the corporate and editorial re-sculpting is implemented.  With any luck she will be aided by a spate of aggrieved resignations, as embarrassments like Ross “I’m no plagiarist” Gittins and David Marr decamp to academia and the solace of Mark Scott’s comfy lap. Without wishing to tell her how to run a business, the very first thing she should do is speed up the Age’s move to tabloid format. The current management has announced that the Great Shrinking will not take place until March next year, which demonstrates, if further proof be needed, that imbecility is the prime qualification for a seat on the current Fairfax board. How many businesses not only alert competitors to their next strategic moves but also grant them nine months’ grace to prepare countermeasures?

Of course, if the current crew of hacks regurgitating Earth Hour press releases remains intact, it won’t matter what size the Age comes in. To paraphrase Gough Whitlam, it’s what it puts in its guts that’s stuffed it. So, new editors, a new shape and an old-fashioned return to covering the city where its erstwhile readers reside.

Why, Gina could have a winner!

FOOTNOTE: On page 26 of Wednesday’s Herald Sun the following caption appeared beneath a picture of some sheep. “Theft: Sheep, similar to those that were stolen.”

Herald Sun editors apparently believe their readers need to be told what sheep look like. If that doesn’t encourage Mrs Rinehart to start a newspaper war and have a red-hot go, nothing can.      

Compare And Contrast

THE AUSTRALIAN and The Age both report on carbon pricing. The Age's story is here and the Australian's here.

As a field test, read both and decide which is stenography and which is reporting.

The Big Sweat On Spencer Street

THAT Andrew Bolt, he’s such a tease!

Twice in one of his most recent posts he has tantalised with the dropped hint that he is talking with the Age. He is going there tomorrow, he tells us, and in the next breath speaks of discussing with a lofty Fairfax sort the wan performance of apparatchik academic Matthew Ricketson as that newspaper’s former media writer. Could his journey to Spencer Street be to discuss joining Fairfax, perhaps becoming part of a Rinehart-led attempt to revive a publication that, quite frankly, is so far gone it would tax the alleged Messiah’s best efforts to raise it from the slab?

It is nice to dream, to wonder how some fresh blood and fresh perspectives might revitalise an institution which has betrayed and abandoned the city it claims to serve. There is almost no local news in the Age these days -- no coverage of councils or planning decisions, for instance, that is not distilled from the acid lactations of Labor spinners intent on eroding the reputation of Planning Minister Matthew Guy.

Nor is curiosity to be observed in any measurable quantity. There was a race riot recently in Canberra, and the person who appears to have been at the centre of it, former prime ministerial glad-hander Tony Hodges, has gone missing. He could not be that difficult to find, yet no reporter has the made effort.

In that big building on Spring Street there are mutinous mutterings about the near-uselessness of Victoria’s current premier and of what private polling suggests would be his government’s rapid eviction in the event of an election. Barely a word of that discontent has made it into print. While it would undoubtedly suit the paper’s leanings to showcase discord in Liberal ranks, the effort required to tap out a few words apparently trumps the inclination to do so.

Good writing? Hah!

Objectivity? Read anything by the infantile Adam Morton, environment editor, and despair.

Insight? Other than covering Canberra as radio announcers do the footy, the only thing Michelle Grattan looks into is her handbag.

Fodder for the mind? With the likes of Overland luvvie Jeff Sparrow serving as a regular book reviewer, it is chaff, not oats, which the editor of that section sees fit to dump weekly in his readers’ nosebag.

So what, if Andrew were to join Fairfax, could he reasonably hope to achieve? There would be strikes and leaks and rallies, not to mention drawing pins and dog dirt left on his seat and blotter. If he doubts that, Silly refugee Miranda Devine could tell him of the bile to which she was subjected by her leftist colleagues, as remains the case for Paul Sheehan. Can anyone imagine Andrew discussing editorial policy and direction with Sunday editrix Gay Alcorn, who is Margo Kingston’s half-sister and draws heavily on the common gene pool?

And the thing is, lovely as it would be to see an adult directing operations, a high-profile hire may not even be needed. The emerging proof of that is the Financial Review, which has made encouraging progress in recent months toward reclaiming its reputation as a lively, serious newspaper. One assumes that is the doing of its new editor, who actually appears prepared to lead.

An Age insider recently dropped a line to the Billabong in which he ranted at some length about his employer’s decline. The evidence is everywhere on Media House's second floor, he said, from the wiping of the paper’s institutional memory when all the sub-editors were fired to the profusion of what he termed “student newspaper activists” in positions of influence and trust. He was particularly scathing of some colleagues’ Twitter utterances, which he disparaged as updates on the action at Smith Street bars and rock venues.

But as he noted, they are mere symptoms, not the cause of the contagion, which he saw as a plague of paralysing self-interest at the top. The correspondent asked not to be quoted, but his view could be expressed thus: The Age’s editorial hierarchy is replete with people making big money. While they recognise their newspaper’s deficiencies, doing something about them would jeopardise those incomes. So they count the days to retirement, make no waves and hope the paper does not die in the meantime. And, most culpable of all, they studiously dodge the responsibility to lead that goes with large pay cheques.

It would be terrific to see Andrew’s columns in the Age. But what the paper needs most of all are some adults prepared to be disliked -- the sort who would wear that disdain as a badge of honour. As a marquee name, Andrew fits that bill. But if the confidential correspondent’s analysis is correct, the columnist’s recruitment would count for little without a cadre of belligerents in less prominent, more work-a-day posts. As the informant says, he does not believe any editor in recent memory has ever taken a reporter to task for submitting a sloppy, inaccurate or nakedly biased report.

Maybe Rinehart can fix that. Maybe she can’t. But somebody needs to before Melbourne is left with only the daily edition of New Idea, otherwise known as the Herald Sun.

A NOTE OF ADVICE: News business insiders' insights are always welcome, but they should never be sent from employers' computers. Ever. Not if you value your own weekly cheques.

Pyongyang On The Yarra

THERE is a very interesting article in the Age by Melbourne barrister Michael Challinger (and yes, it really is by Michael Challinger) describing his and others’ abject compliance with the dictates of North Korea’s tourism authorities. On cue and as instructed his tour party laid flowers and wore solemn faces at the monument to Kim Il-sung. They accepted without protest their mobile incarceration in a bus hermetically sealed to eliminate contact with any but chaperones. They stayed in their hotel, did always as told and gave no trouble whatsoever. Challinger admits to a little guilt at his willingness to “toe the line” and suggests his experience needs to be borne in mind as news footage from Pyongyang continues to show Kim Jong-il’s mourners dabbing at tears and balling their little, grief-stricken fists. You go along to get along is what he is saying, further hinting that North Koreans’ true feelings might be other than they have been presented.

It is a heartening article, most especially because it appears in The Age, which is Melbourne’s very own Hermit Kingdom. It is not, mind you, that the city on the Yarra would set itself adrift on a sea of tears if editor Paul Ramadge were to turn a peculiar shade of puce, clutch his chest and tumble lifeless into the rubbish bin, where Gerard Henderson’s banished columns serve as a liner. Rather, the interest would be in a captive newsroom’s reaction.

Would the inmates engage in acts of conspicuous prostration before the Age’s altar to George Galloway, praying for Ramadge’s apotheosis to the immortal ranks of Journalism’s Dear Leaders? Probably.

Would they ease each other’s grief with public speeches of their newspaper as a brave light in a world of darkness? Almost certainly (although not, for obvious reasons, during Earth Hour week)

Would a women’s group convene to chant of Tony Abbott’s sexism and to invoke, rather like the first scene of Macbeth, the ancient Ann Summers' incantations of something wicked and conservative their way coming?  Without a doubt.

Today, though, Challinger’s article gives a little hope, as it must to those who would wish to see North Korea discard its generational insanity and re-join the real world. Somewhere in the Age there must be at least a few who cash their pay cheques and understand those weekly rewards are for staying quiet and toeing the line. There must be some as well whose social circles extend beyond the Greens-voting denizens of the inner city, Age inmates who have actually met Melbournians more concerned about jobs and prosperity than the emotional impact of Bay dredging on anxious molluscs. Somewhere, perhaps hiding for their safety and that of their mortgages in a broom closet, there must he someone who does not ride and love a bicycle.

Who knows what will happen in North Korea? It may be that change will come and reform will flower, that some small crack will open to unleash a flood of thought unencumbered by doctrine and dogma. One gathers that is Challinger’s faint hope. It is certainly that of those who would love to see Melbourne re-gain at least one decent newspaper.

The Age Lets Truth Slip Out

SEE a story in the Fairfax press about the coming Low Carbon Economy and experience warns to brace yourself. Here it comes, you think, another exercise in opacity by some kid crusader who will be burying the grim news in a compote of clichés, determined dissembling and incoherent writing. That has certainly been Adam Morton’s schtick in the Phage, which on Saturday allowed its environmental editor to heave a weary sigh and help his newspaper’s remaining readers see through the “smoke and mirrors” of the ecosphere’s enemies. The result in that instance was a streak of incontinent advocacy that dribbled down the page and pooled in a pair of final paragraphs astonishing for their evasions:

…each Chinese is responsible for about one-fifth of the emissions of each Australian. Australia continues to have the highest per capita emissions of any major developed nation.

For a fellow who, earlier in his column, sniggered at sceptics for not comparing “apples with apples”, such immediate recourse to the per-capita sleight of hand might strike some as rather brazen. Are a billion closely packed and mostly poor Chinese the best yardstick for judging 21 million thinly smeared and rather wealthy Australians? Morton seems to think so, or at least hopes he can persuade you to do so.

Despite this, China is acting. This week it again signalled it would pilot an emissions trading scheme, expected to expand nationally in 2015. And estimates suggest it is on track to meet its UN target of a 40-45 per cent cut in emissions intensity by 2020. At some point soon after that it is going to have to do much more, but government bureaucrats have said its 2020 target equates to Australia cutting emissions by 25 per cent by 2020, far more than either major party supports.

Catch the trick? Spot the artifice? China is “on track” to a “40-45 per cent cut”, but not in actual emissions, just “emissions intensity”. Morton neglects to explain what this might be, so take it from a Bunyip: China will be burning lots and lots more coal, much of it dug up in Australia, but its next generation of ravenous power plants will make the combustion process far more efficient. In other words, more of the wicked gas that keeps Morton tossing and turning of a night between his organic cotton sheets. That’s emissions intensity, folks, and it has no closer relationship with reducing CO2 than the Phage does with clear and honest English.

All of which means there could be angry words if Morton encounters colleague David Potts over a cup of fair trade coffee in the Phage cafeteria. For perhaps the first time in the newspaper’s coverage of the Gillard Gouge, a Fairfax journalist goes with facts and hard numbers. The whole piece is worth reading, but these quotes are its nuggets:

* It's a permit to pollute - just like getting a licence to drive - for a fee. Who calls that a tax?

* It's a funny tax where a government hands back more than it raises

* Gas and electricity utilities ''may have to bear some additional costs in the near term but longer term there should, ultimately, be full pass through [to consumers]''

* The Housing Industry Association estimates a carbon price will add an average $5500 to the cost of a house.

* [Food] prices will rise but, hey, what was that diet you were thinking about?

* Winners would have to be companies that can sell carbon credits and all this puts a new perspective on those dodgy, I mean tax-dodging, June 30 tree-plantation schemes.

* [for investors] green chip stocks  … need to be well run [companies] with strong balance sheets, a proven technology and not continually calling for more capital … Unfortunately, most green chips fall foul on at least one of these.

* the biggest problem is that the carbon price needs to [almost triple to] $60 a tonne before it is profitable for electricity generators to switch from coal to gas and renewable energy.

* The carbon price will rise by the inflation rate plus 2.5 per cent a year … Treasury's guess is $131 a tonne in today's prices.

* over time "it might slow the rate of increase" is the most the prime minister is promising.

* China and India buy most of our coal, so any pollution created is for them to fix.

* as some products and services become dearer the budget-conscious among us will switch to something cheaper.

Apart from ruining his chances of landing a job at the ABC as Fairfax goes under, Potts can expect much grief when he applies for one of those Fit & Proper Person permits which Christine Milne is so keen to introduce.

Morton’s application should sail straight through.

Red and Green and Dishonest All Over

GOOD Lord, but those facts are difficult, troublesome things. Suppose, for example, you are Greens publicity agent Melissa Fyfe, whose salary is paid by the Sunday Phage, and you really, really need to need to write an upbeat profile of Lee Rhiannon, who will shortly take her seat in the Senate. Well, there is your problem right there. How do you say nice things about a creature whose support for Islamic nut jobs, amongst other fruit loop causes, has divided the Greens and embarrassed Saint Bob?

Answer: Choose your words carefully, skate lightly over the bad stuff and, when all else fails, stretch euphemism to breaking point. The key is to sustain that flow of happy publicity without alienating Rhianon or your other pals in the party, the ones who think she is a loose cannon and will be a magnet for grief come the next election.

In today’s Phage, Fyfe demonstrates how a true Fairfax professional navigates such dilemmas. On the matter of personal politics, devote just one sentence to Rhiannon’s slavish adoration of Moscow, which she supported even after the 1968 invasion of Czechoslovakia, when she bolted with fellow lickers of jackboots to the Socialist Party of Australia.

Next, try to calm down Mr and Mrs Stringbag – you know, the sort who will be paying a lot more for everything when the Greens’ carbon tax becomes law. Do this by insisting Rhiannon “is no longer a socialist.”  Not at all! She just wants “more government regulation and a bigger role for public services such as education, health and transport, but not the overthrow of capitalism.”  Well that is OK, then. She is not a socialist, she just wants government to run everything

And when it comes to Rhiannon’s red-nappy upbringing, Fyfe demonstrates a skill that is the journalistic equivalent of a shonky home renovator’s eagerness to slap nice, clean wallpaper over some very toxic mould.

The consensus is that Rhiannon is quick to be combative, as The Sunday Age learnt while asking about her mother's frequent travels overseas for work.

For work!

When her mum, vile harridan Freda Brown, died in 2009, the Silly published an obituary that listed some of those “work” trips:

The Silly: She was elected president of the 1975 Women's International Democratic Federation congress in Berlin.

Backround: The WIDF was a Soviet front and the Congress was not held “in Berlin” unless you were using a pre-WWII map. It was held in East Berlin, where the one measure of equality was the Stasi’s habit of spying on everyone, oppressed housewives included. Typical chatter in the ladies room at at WIDF congresses: “Our children cannot be safe until American war-mongers are silenced.” The CIA’s appraisal of the WIDF and other front groups is to be found here. Yes, it is the CIA doing the appraising, but the file’s observations about the clash between gals of the Peking-line and Soviet-line stands up very nicely to history's scrutiny.

The Silly: While the women's union's sympathies were left-wing and some members were communists, most were not members of any political party and rejected the doctrinaire narrowness of communist leaders … Members dug wells for women in many low-income countries and campaigned for breastfeeding of babies.

Background: See the CIA report (linked above), which supports a vigorous scepticism about the clam that the WIDF concerned itself primarily with water tables and lactation.

Then there are Brown’s other travels, as the Silly also explained:

Coming home with US cluster bombs, she was attacked for working with the enemy. In Cuba, she ran workshops for women from across Latin America. In Moscow in 1977, she was awarded the Lenin Peace Prize.

And her voyaging continued:

“She was one of the first westerners to enter the Sabra and Shatila Palestinian refugee camps after the slaughter of 1982. She visited Cambodia shortly after Vietnam overthrew the Pol Pot regime, travelled through the Western Sahara with the Polisario Front, and worked with the African National Congress Women's League.”

To Melissa Fyfe, all of the above is just “work”, not tireless crusading for bloody tyranny. And while her astute choice of words probably means Rhiannon will continue to return Fyfe’s calls, such a flippant disregard for accuracy ill-serves Phage readers.

Freda Brown was a devoted warrior in the Soviet cause -- much, much more than one of the “useful idiots” in whom Lenin invested such hopes and joy. As for Fyfe, she fits that description very nicely indeed.

Mouth Of The Yarra

ACCUSED by a Phage reporter and fellow Fairfax employee of spreading "nonsense" about the cost of our PM's carbon tax, there could be little doubt that 3AW's Neil Mitchell would very soon be saying something rather pointed about Melbourne's "quality journalism" broadsheet. That moment has now gone to air, and it is well worth hearing.

What a remarkable company! Fairfax's two most visible assets in Australia's second-largest city, and each now chucking mud at the other.That raspy, geriatric chuckle you can hear? It's Rupert Murdoch enjoying the show.

Radio Daze

ONE of the few advantages of a bad back, in addition to providing a ready excuse for the odd fluffed drive off the tee, is the early hour at which discomfort banishes sleep. Rise sore before the sun, boil the jug, make the coffee and smile at feline hypocrisy as the toast turns brown. Minutes earlier the little ball of spite was savaging toes beneath the quilt, all mad black eyes and ears in killer mode, flat against an empty skull. Pass by the fridge, however, and the scourge of mice and sparrows becomes a symphony of purrs and plaintive squeaks, all the while cutting chicanes on the tiles and pleading for the morning’s saucer of fish-flavoured stinky stuff. Robert Heinlein called it right when he noted that women and cats do as they please; dogs and men need to get used to it.

With the cat preoccupied, that leaves only the radio for company, which mostly means Fairfax’s 3AW, far and away the highest-rated station in Melbourne. New Fairfax chief Greg Hywood has brought in KPMG to sell it off as part of a job lot that includes all the other stations in the company’s portfolio – part of his push, along with outsourcing sub-editors, to save his company from the consequences of a decade-or-more’s gross mismanagement. The chain should fetch around $300 million, which Hywood will probably use to pay down a mountain of debt and, if the analysts are right, boost the share price from the dismal to the merely bleak. Desperation’s game plan makes sense, as far as it goes, but on a weekend morning, as the magpies wait by the pond for their bacon scraps, it is hard to hear what is being said on air without suspecting  Hywood’s preferred course will prove to be a further misstep, and probably one of the last, before the receivers arrive. In the long and sorry saga of Fairfax stupidity this move may well prove to be the most culpable by a country mile.

Actually, it is not what is being said but who is saying it. Every Saturday morning, 3AW hosts an extended segment called Buy, Swap and Sell. Listeners call in to announce their garage sales, unload old bicycles, bedroom suites and bridal gowns. There are scores of sellers on any given weekend, and many come from places where Melbourne’s other Fairfax product, the Phage, must move copies only in the single digits. Taylors Lakes, Narre Warren, Reservoir, Werribee, Ferntree Gully – locales that were home to John Howard’s fabled battlers. In other words, places and people your typical Fairfaxista sees as dog dirt wrapped in brick veneer.

The Fairfax view, as haughtily expressed by Silly media writer Tim Dick, is that “the tenor of this type of talkback doesn't sit well with what people expect from broadsheet newspapers.” Therefore, because he and the likes of Jonathan Holmes don’t have much time for unfashionable plebs, the radio stations have to go. We all know about throwing out babies with bath water, but this is much worse. This is keeping the suds and chucking the best hope for the future.

Imagine if, instead of retreating to its black-clad, green-striped, latte-flecked comfort zone, Fairfax were to decide that its best hope hangs on an expanded, broader audience. Rather than sacking sub-editors, the first step would be to clean house of the precious-pie writers and editors who take pride in their apparent conviction that the Phage’s audience starts with admirers of David Hicks and ends at climate catastropharians. Perhaps, if Hywood were to poach, say, cartoonist Mark Knight from the rival Herald Sun, potential readers might see a sanity to balance Leunig’s twee fixation with ducks, curly flowers and his own wonderfulness. The key to that approach would be 3AW, whose audience shops at stores that advertise hardly ever, if at all, in the Phage. Go through the Saturday Phage and the most striking thing, other than the amount of time and money wasted on packaging the same old drek in a shiny new design, is the absence of those same ads. If not for the head-hunters’ executive employment listings there would be virtually no advertising in the main body of the paper.

So imagine, if you will, what opportunities might arise if  the Phage took some of its human furniture to the tip, keeping just enough to retain the existing readership. Imagine, too, that the paper recruits writers who are aware that the Monash Freeway extends much further than Hawthorn, that there is an entire, promising world of potential buyers and advertisers in those unfashionable  suburbs, including the sneered-at outer suburban ones. Get the new recruits behind a studio microphone at 3AW to talk about their scoops and stories and the idea might take root that the Phage actually cares about Middle Melbourne and shares this city’s concerns -- the yobbos on its train lines, the snarling traffic that daily ties up the Westgate Freeway all the way to Hoppers Crossing, the rip-off revenue cameras that mine millions of dollars from the pettiest speeding violations.  A few people who know that uninvited graffiti is vandalism, not art, also would come in handy, as would some fresh heads who understand that  ethnic teenage gangs in places like Noble Park demand stories about poor policing and the decline in public order, not windy essays about root causes and white Australian racism.

Hywood was hailed as the newsman Fairfax needed at the helm. He may be that and more, but if the Buy, Swap and Sellers cannot be persuaded to give the Phage another chance, Melbourne will soon be left with only one newspaper, a terrible one (apart from Andrew Bolt), and we will all be the poorer, starting with Fairfax stockholders. Even a retarded cat can grasp that a switch in attitude and behaviour often brings the desired result. Hywood, one would hope, is smarter than a cat.

FULL DISCLOSURE: The Professor dumped all Fairfax stock back when Fred Hilmer was backing Margo Kingston’s Web Diary as the future of the Internet, rather than buying a piece of Seek.The share price was just north of $5 at the time. As of trading's close on Friday it was $1.04.

Silence, It Isn't Golden

OVER at Jonathan Green’s little fun house, a sub-editor who worked at the Phage laments Fairfax’s decision to be rid of his former colleagues, a move he sees as the death of a noble occupation. The author, Mic Looby, is probably a lovely fellow and his dismay at finding devotion to his craft no longer quite so valued by a hard-pressed employer is entirely understandable. When Mrs Bunyip announced that there had been one too many tender tutorials with young, firm female undergraduates and that, beginning immediately, she would be residing elsewhere, the level of shock and surprise at the Billabong would have been entirely comparable.

Time’s passing brings a different perspective. In the Professor’s case the initial dismay eventually gave way to an appreciation that, in matters marital, there had indeed been wrongdoing. If those text messages had not been allowed to remain in the mobile phone’s archive … if father-fixated slips of things had been warned to stop inflaming spousal suspicion with their lovelorn lurking by the Billabong’s front gate … if only the wrong name had not been uttered in supreme passion’s sleepy aftermath …

Life is full of regret, and perhaps time will also lend Looby a more expansive view, not least that the sub-editors Fairfax is about to let go must bear at least some responsibility for their own ouster. Yes, yes – they are the grey little men and women whom readers never knew existed, but whose skills, we are being told in numerous laments, put the cut and polish on all those wonderful pieces of “quality journalism.” Here is how Looby puts it:

Touchingly, at the meeting on Tuesday, senior Fairfax sub-editors were singled out by name by their colleagues. They were declared irreplaceable fonts of knowledge, encyclopaedic authorities on everything from house style and grammatical technicalities to newsworthiness and ethical dilemmas. In today’s newsroom, the Fairfax bosses were told, great subs are priceless.

But is that really the case? Did any Fairfax sub, about to be axed or otherwise, ever raise a protest that some stories – quite a few, actually -- were unfair, biased or written with the ink of preconception? When those subs passed into print a Leunig cartoon equating Israel with Nazi Germany, did one of those champions of excellence utter the key words, “Look, this just isn’t on. We shouldn’t be publishing this.” As it happened, it was then-editor Michael Gawenda who impaled the duck botherer's nastiness on a spike, but did a decision so obvious, so needed, really have to go all the way to the top before a sense of decency and responsibility manifested itself?

When green-dyed reporters insisted that the world was melting, temperatures soaring and blamed everything from dust storms to bushfires to cyclones on global warming, did a single sub-editor ask for the hyperbole to be flattened? Indeed, when nasty cold spells obliged the adoption of “climate change” as panic’s tocsin, did a sub demand a paragraph or two by way of explanation? When an entertainment writer slipped the line “And that, some might argue, is precisely what makes [Andrew Bolt] so dangerous” into a chin-stroker on the Larissa Behrendt racial defamation action, did some adult think to cut it, thereby saving the newspaper from the embarrassment of having its innate prejudice laid bare?

They may have done, but if the Fairfax newsrooms operate along similar lines to the faculty lounge at Sydney Orr University, the chances are that protests, if any, were muted. Such silence is understandable. It is always easier to get along by going along – until, inevitably, the going stops altogether.

It is a sad thing when people lose their jobs and once-grand businesses wither, but it will not be entirely the fault of the Fairfax board when the final edition of the Phage is dropped outside the newsagents’ doors.  Those “encyclopaedic authorities” will be owed their share of blame as well, if only for the diplomatic silence of some who should have known better.