The winner takes it all Today The New York Times reported something we’d perhaps all intuitively suspected — Rupert Murdoch is the only guy who could make you wish you were still married to Mick Jagger. It seems he and Jerry Hall are splitting after six years of marriage. It would be his fourth divorce. Obviously this is no time to make petty swipes — it’s a personal matter and we believe the media should approach it with the same level of dignity and restraint that Murdoch’s media empire showed in the following examples:
- The obsessive coverage on Fox News and the New York Post of US President Joe Biden’s son Hunter and his alleged conduct with a sex worker — including the extremely necessary detail of him placing confectionary on his “aroused genitals” as part of a “sex game”
- The time The Daily Telegraph put a picture of Silverchair frontman Daniel Johns on its front page which it claimed depicted him swaggering “out of a notorious bondage dungeon after a two-week bender”. It had to issue an apology so grovelling it went beyond merely retracting the initial story and started just listing how many hits and ARIAs Johns has notched up in his career
- The time the Sunday Telegraph published pictures supposedly of a naked young Pauline Hanson in 2009. Once again, a grovelling apology was issued — not for the odious choice to pay someone for something of that nature in the first place, but for the fact they were fakes.
Our visual satirist Tom Red had a few thoughts on how the Murdoch empire might cover the divorce if it happened to a different media mogul. Look out for how the news is actually covered in Murdoch land.
Just won’t cut it The Australian Financial Review is going very hard at the moment on the need for Australian workers to cop a massive real wage cut. Economics editor John Kehoe has repeatedly demanded that workers allow their real wages to fall even further behind than they have over the past decade, and the AFR editorial has backed him, today thundering “to help shield Australia from a potential global recession, the Albanese government must more clearly back Reserve Bank governor Philip Lowe’s call to employers and unions to put a 3.5% lid on wages growth in order to prevent a wage price spiral that would simply force interest rates higher”.
It’s par for the course for a newspaper that despises workers, but more than a little hypocritical. Is the AFR practising what it preaches when it comes to restraint? A few months ago it raised its cover price by 50 cents — or 12.5%. Restraint is only for the great unwashed, apparently.
Taking out the trash The Victorian government has confirmed it is delaying the decriminalisation of public drunkenness. You could have been forgiven for missing it, as it was buried in the last paragraph of its press release yesterday about legislation regarding the outlawing of “grossly offensive public conduct”, stemming from the utter horrors of the Eastern Freeway tragedy. The press release refers to the deferral as an “unrelated item” in the bill being introduced.
The push to decriminalise public drunkenness was recommended back in 1991 by the Royal Commission into Aboriginal Deaths in Custody. In the past few years, the campaign has been particularly led by the family of Yorta Yorta woman Tanya Day, who died in custody in 2017 after being arrested while drunk on a train. A coronial report after her death recommended the offence be abolished, which, following a long campaign by Day’s family, the Andrews government committed to do.
In April it backtracked, and this bill is the confirmation of that. We’d argue that quietly walking back a commitment to abolish an offence which disproportionately affects Indigenous people (as well as the homeless and mentally ill and other vulnerable groups) is particularly bad during the putative healing of treaty negotiations.
