Good for the gander So according to The Guardian News Corp journalists have had their email accounts hacked in what the company thinks is an espionage operation linked to China. Our first thought was to remember the years of industrial-scale phone hacking by News Corp journalists and the now defunct News of the World. Employees of the News of the World were accused of (and found to have carried out) phone hacking and bribing police in the pursuit of stories.
It was initially thought to be limited to 2005-07, aimed only at celebrities, politicians and royals. But in July 2011 it was revealed that the phones of murdered schoolgirl Milly Dowler, relatives of dead British soldiers, and victims of the 7/7 London bombing had also been hacked.
In July 2013 Channel 4 News revealed the contents of a secret tape in which Murdoch dismissively claims that the investigators had acted over “next to nothing” and excuses his papers’ actions as “part of the culture of Fleet Street”. So it’s all part of the game, we guess?
Carr-ping on Last week the government was assailed with group chat drama, with texts between a mystery minister and former NSW premier Gladys Berejiklian describing Prime Minister Scott Morrison as a “psycho”, a “fraud” and a “horrible, horrible person” revealed during the PM’s press club address. Then texts from Barnaby Joyce were released calling Morrison a “liar”. (Deliciously, this was just before a column was published in which his partner, Vikki Campion, called on the “cowardly text leaker” in the “psycho” matter to resign.)
And just as we thought the fire was dying down, former foreign affairs minister Bob Carr chucked petrol on the embers by declaring unequivocally that Defence Minister Peter Dutton had been responsible for the “psycho” texts as part of a renewed push to take over the top job.
The text bomb raises a few question. First, can we imagine a less likely candidate for “Gladys Berejiklian’s confidante” than Dutton? And second, given this is, according to Dutton, “baseless” and is unarguably defamatory, will he sue if it is not retracted? Or does he only like to sue refugee advocates? Carr has opted to post through it, arguing the “only way” Dutton could win a defamation case is to identify the minister who is actually responsible.
Nine times blue The Nine papers have had to deal with the imminent-ish departure of political editor Chris Uhlmann. It’s not a huge surprise — if his Twitter presence and columns are anything to go by, Uhlmann appears to have come to truly despise the job of journalism, and anyone who practises it, in the past year or two.
But what next? Our first guesses are the priesthood, forming a think tank for the defence of Western civilisation, or perhaps candidate for the Democratic Labour Party on a platform of rooting out the communist influence on the shoppies’ union and eradicating ambiguous toilet doors by 2030. But is he perhaps going into PR? Footage has emerged this morning of the organisers of the anti-lockdown/anti-vax protesters in Canberra claiming that Uhlmann has been advising them on how to make their protests more palatable to the public.
Jonesing for a new show After its much-hyped debut in mid-December, it has been pointed out to us that Alan Jones hasn’t done a second episode of his online show Direct to the People. The debut was riddled with technical issues, and subject to some slightly differing takes on how many people had tuned in. Perhaps the Parrot has realised this online publishing lark isn’t as easy as it looks.
