Saturday, June 30, 2012

Tell Him You're Indigenous, Gina

BACK in March, Martin Flanagan of The Age churned out 1,000 words or so on the prickly matter of Indigenous footballers and some of the problems – alleged involvement in axe attacks, for example – that have set a few footy club officials to quietly wondering if snatching talented kids from the back of nowhere and dropping them in front of the goal at the MCG is worth the culture shock and complications. That is what happens when you prefer to think of individuals only as members of groups – after all, who would not want Harry O’Brien in their team?

Flanagan, who is ranting today about the threat Gina Rinehart poses to his newspaper, should re-visit that March epistle and consider what he wrote then:
In my experience, when there are rising tensions between different groups, whether they be racial or religious, there is really only one remedy. Engagement. The alternative to engagement is a cycle of rumour and speculation that eventually finds expression through media types who mistake valuable opinion for saying the first thing that comes into their head, as opposed to arriving at a final judgment based on the best information available.
The is no shortage of rising tensions between Mrs Rinehart and Fairfax Chairman Dodgey Rodgey Corbett, but Flanagan is no  longer quite so sure about the efficacy of “arriving at a final judgment based on the best information available.” No pausing to consider Fairfax's dire financial straits or the palpable animosity many former readers now feel toward the newspapers they grew up with. Rather, it is his moment to become of those very same “media types who mistake valuable opinion for saying the first thing that comes into their head.”

The first thing that came into Flanagan’s today was to assert, without reference or citation, “hyperbole of this sort is on a par with saying all journalists are communists, which Gina Rinehart is said to do. (When did you last meet a communist? Seriously. I'd have to go back 30 years.)” Then he is off and defending the ABC from reform. That "engagement" he writes about, it seems to be a remarkably selective exercise.

If only Mrs Rinehart had just the slightest touch of tribal blood, Flanagan might be prepared to at least give her grievances a hearing. But no such consistency from this columnist. 

UPDATE: The source of Flanagan's claim that Mrs Rinehart believes all journalists to be communists has been revealed. He is quoting, without attribution, fellow Fairfaxista Adele Ferguson, who says on this video that unnamed people told her that is what the subject of her newly published biography believes.


There's your quality journalism right there, folks. No wonder they don't want adults running the company.




16 comments:

  1. Prof:
    You evidently don't live or circulate in inner Sydney Glebe. We have a Communist Party candidate at every election. A Party member at nearly every polling booth.

    Admittedly they are ageing and their inheritances don't stretch quite as far as they used to in the golden age of the seventies.

    Last Federal election a 70+ Czech migrant woman went off when she saw the red star on their election material at Glebe Primary. The crowd in the queue almost burst into applause.

    Plus: Grammar attack on your headline!

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    1. All the Czechs I met in the Republic were very anti-communist, always wanting to talk about the expropriations, talking about 'during the communist dictatorship' etc. They even have their museum of communism. They had it very rough: sophisticated and industrious they got stabbed in the back by Britain and France ('a country of which we know little about' was the French put-down at Munich) and then dictatorship under communists.

      M Ryutin Sydney

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  2. Do 'em slowly - to paraphrase Keating!

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  3. There's something seriously amiss with the man who writes about himself. This week Flanagan's got only 5 references to himself. Last week "I" or "me" appeared 18 times

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  4. Elizabeth (Lizzie) B.June 30, 2012 at 3:04 PM

    There are plenty of communisits alive and well and poking their heads up all over the place in Western European nations right now.

    Could easily happen here if the Greens got a real chance to ruin the economy to the best European standards, in cahoots with Labor, by getting another run from a hung election outcome again next year while China drops out. As we became flung into the abyss after the decline, real life Commos would spring up crying 'down with capitalism' like little moles from the ground in backyards everywhere, just as they have in Greece, Italy and Spain. Communism never dies, it just fades away for a while until the hardcore can mobilise to organise another shot at it. Occupists and similar socialist witterers are easily led to outright communism.

    Gina Rinehart may overstate the case now with regard to journalists, but early clarions are sometimes usefully called. Some professors of journalism are known to have been card-carrying communists or fellow-travellers of the Party, which could be a warning, especially with regard to Pinky Finky's capacity for letting these particular hounds off the democratic chain.

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    1. "Gina Rinehart may overstate the case now with regard to journalists."

      I'm shocked, how does Gina even slightly "overstate the case"?

      I'da thought she hasn't seen the bottom of the Fairfax journo / editorial cesspit by a many fathoms just yet.

      Even Crikey is confessing to ownership editorial "conversations" before they're sprung.

      We're both hoping Gina will get terminally p*ssed off with minor boardroom poseurs like Corbett and make the takeover offer unconditional.......aren't we Liz.

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    2. Elizabeth (Lizzie) B.June 30, 2012 at 6:06 PM

      Surely we are. We are with her, we want them gone. They're not all communists though, that's all I was saying. But quite a few of them are the sort who would be most sympathetic and could sign up to communist coalitions in a situation of extremis. Danger lurks there. However, I am heartened to hear of the people who cheered the Czech lady who trashed the red star on election day in Glebe. There are still lots of good Aussies around (even in Glebe).

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    3. Totally agree re your concerns of the ever present commos, Lizzie B. I've met quite a few in Oz in recent years. Pity John Howard didn't take an axe to the public service so that more people knew about real world business, cash flow etc. Missed opportunity there. At least Campbell Newman is showing the way.

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  5. The Old and Unimproved DaveJune 30, 2012 at 3:08 PM

    Here's a prediction....two years from now, Flanagan will not be writing in a major Australian newspaper.

    Smart Fairfax journos would be applying to Crikey NOW before the final exodus becomes a stampede.

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  6. Gina is indeed indigenous - an indigenous person is one who lives in the country they were born in.

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  7. Poor old Marty. He's always had a pinko benefactor in Fairfax to print whatever leftwing fantasy he writes - and pay him. Now it all may be about to end. Scary. Pity he doessn't have a real job to fall back on.

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  8. Communists are all over the place, they fill the EU... then we have the greens, most of them are, although some might not realise it.. They aren't too smart either... Then we have Gillard - Ok.. maybe she's a socialist. But according to the North Koreans, Socialism is just the road to communism.

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    1. "Communists are all over the place"
      Yep - make sure you check under your bed....

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  9. Is Martin Flanagan, when he suggests that he’s not met a communist in thirty years, denying that he ever met the Maoist imbecile, Wendy Bacon, the Leninist loon, Adam Bandt, or the Stalinist hag, Lee Rhiannon?

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  10. I met a commie 28 years ago.

    He's now a multi-millionaire property developer.

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    1. So, THAT's where the branch membership fees went to......

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