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Last updated on July 27th, 2017 at 12:13 pm
Greg Sheridan on the Margofication of mainstream media:
On Tuesday, November 1, senior cabinet ministers convened for a hastily called meeting of the national security committee of cabinet. Most there did not know what the meeting was for and heard for the first time the disturbing intelligence on terrorist plans in Australia. It was a deliberately restricted meeting, with fewer officials than normal in attendance. Senior ministers were shocked and startled by what they were told. The NSC discussed the proposed legal amendments with the relevant legal experts. The next steps almost dictated themselves: brief Opposition leader Kim Beazley and the relevant premiers, some of whom already knew some of the information from their own police.
What happened next was incredible. Half the media, especially the ABC, and a good portion of the intellectual class, as well as the minor parties, immediately decided that John Howard had concocted the whole thing as a stunt to distract attention from the industrial relations legislation. This is almost too insane to admit to the mainstream of discussion but it was almost the orthodoxy last week.
And these people wonder why they lose elections.
- Its the the heat and the drums – enough to make a Mango crazy!Posted by rog on 11/13 at 03:48 PM • permalink
- As a masochistically regular watcher of SBS news and listener of Radio National’s Breakfast show, I can assure Greg Sheridan that the rot goes much further than a tendency to entertain insane conspiracy theories.
SBS News has pretty much become the “Free David Hicks” and “Torture at Abu Ghraib Show”. In a way though their bias has become so predictable that one can often divine the truth simply by extrapolating the spin backwards, so when, for example, the rioters in France are blithely referred to as immigrants and disaffected youths one can accurately divine their real identity simply by looking for the lacuna in the reports made by the Communards.
SBS plumbed a new depth on Saturday night, when in a report on the anniversery of Arafats death the voice over blithely reported that “although Arafat signed the Oslo accords he was shunned for years by America and Israel”. I would like to say I was astonished, but I no longer am. this was of course only a day after the same correspondent referred to the Israeli pullout form southern Lebanon as “Hezbollah’s successful Guerilla campaign”.
- It’s a federal system here; each state has an independent Sovereign existence separate to and predating the Federation and the Commonwealth government. For instance the Governor of each state is nominated from that state and approved by QEII without the Feds involved.
The Premiere as head of Government of the State also has Police.Posted by missinglink on 11/13 at 05:42 PM • permalink
- Before federation, each Australian state had its own navy, or at least those that wanted one did. The fleets were a couple of old gunboats and maybe a 14-knot torpedo boat or two per province, but if the Polynesian hordes or the Imperial Greater-Siam aggressors had showed up New South Wales would have been ready.
After federation, of course, Oz built itself quite a respectable little navy, with a battlecruiser and modern light craft. Sadly, the battlecruiser HMAS Australia had to be disposed of under the terms of the Washington Navel Arms Limitation Treaties. The RAN gave excellent service in both war and peace from its establishment until now.
Posted by Michael Lonie on 11/13 at 07:19 PM • permalink
- “It drives them mad that people would choose not to receive their “wisdom”.”
True. And it drives them even madder to realise in their hearts that they are wrong on so many points. These are the idiots who scoffed at a terrorist act being carried out in Australia – Howard and ASIO were ‘scaremongering’ etc. – and we had nothing to worry about in regard to the Muslim community. Now we learn what anyone with half a brain worked out at the beginning – that ‘terrorists’ live like us and pretend to be ordinary human beings. That large Muslim communities give terrorists more room to hide. But even a few months ago, anyone who said this was pilloried as either a ‘racist’ or a victim of Evil John’s propaganda.
One of the reasons Howard haters are screaming so loudly is that they know in their hearts that if this terrorist attack had not been stopped, they and their families may have been on the list of dead and injured. They know it, but they will never have the guts or the honesty to admit it.
- The Australia was a good ship for its day, and her crew was certainly willing to get stuck in… against the Kaiser or their own officers, whichever were closest…Posted by richard mcenroe on 11/14 at 12:33 AM • permalink
- The media, the leftist politicians and the intellectuals. There, in a nutshell is our problem
This is of course i believe the result of the seventies anti vietnam intelligentsia that graduated from universities fueled with anti americanism and marxist ideology.
They proceeded to infect our media, universities and our politics.
that is the sad legacy of the vietnam war. And it even worse in the UK.
The gandhian ideas that nothing is worth fighting for and victory can be achieved in conflicts by passive resistance.
Of course this will not work against totalitarianism, but of course it worked for Gandhi with the British and for Martin Luther King in the States.
Why? because they were democracies where human decency mostly prevails.
The other point that really disgusts me with those imbeciles is the total lack of knowledge of Islamic history, they display.
How can they claim to be “educated elites” with such hugely important gaps in their knowledge. Or do they believe that their perfect utopian left wing cultures are immune to the ravages that Islam has committed on so many civilisations in the past 1400 years?
- #2 – The union name says it all: The Media, Entertainment & Arts Alliance. Until the communes at ABC and SBS are reformed to operate as genuine and balanced news organisations (instead of sheltered workshops for the intellectually creepy) we will be regaled with crap such that at their Site.
- Things like this, along with the complete irrationality of the “Bush lied” mantra currently being overplayed in the US media has me wondering if the Avian Flu has, indeed, gone pandemic, but has manifested itself as a form of senility.Posted by mamapajamas on 11/15 at 07:15 PM • permalink
- PMIF… I forgot one point that was pertinent to my Avian Flu wisecrack… the part about the Media parrots…Posted by mamapajamas on 11/15 at 08:20 PM • permalink
- Did you know that Queensland tried to take over New Guinea before Federation? They had to be forced to back down by London. That’s part of the reason I love the place. Queensland I mean.
#10 and #15
I managed to get into a stoush over at Margo’s place a while back over whether Israel was a “mistake”. None of the intellectual elite there seemed to know that about half of Israel’s population is made up of Jewish refugees from Arab countries and descendants. My call at the time was that this was not wilful. It was genuine ignorance.
