Pure Poison infiltrates the Battleship Australian

Pure Poison is a sub-blog of Crikey, positioning itself as a sort of textual and online counterpart to the ABC’s Media Watch. In recent times, The Australian has come under fire for going to “war” against the Greens and Pure Poison stands as one of several outlets that have objected.

The Australian’s defence to criticism of its war on Greens: stop oppressing us! stands as Pure Poison’s response to The Australian’s response to general media response to The Australian’s partisan coverage of many aspects of politics in the lead up to the election and the aftermath. That sentence may seem convoluted but so, too, do The Australian’s defences for their actions.

Author Jeremy Sear makes a great deal of the fact that The Australian has failed to delineate its reportage from its editorials. The most satisfying quote that one can pull from the article is “News Ltd has acted not as a trustworthy broker of information but as an advocate for the Coalition” – emphasizing specifically what responsible journalism is supposed to be about. If one cannot tell the difference between the editorial and news sections of a newspaper, then that newspaper has not done its job correctly according to the largely unwritten charter of professional journalism; it’s like journalism’s collective unconscious is uniformly failing to be tapped into by News Ltd.

Sear’s article is relatively brief but savage nonetheless. It pointedly mentions that The Australian wants to “destroy” the Greens and has ignored the meat of its criticism. It suggests that The Australian has undermined its own credibility in all future coverage of the Greens and the new minority government.

Pure Poison is the sort of thing that exists precisely because outlets like News Ltd and people like Andrew Bolt exist. Sear’s work will remain a sad necessity as long as news outlets like The Australian treat their readers with contempt.

Racist with an S

How do you spell racist?

Marieke Hardy describes herself as “your favourite ABC investigative reporter”. Addressing a lesser-known (that is, Victorian) political scandal, Hardy has chosen to go behind the scenes of Labor MP Don Nardella’s “spelling slur”.

Constituent Fiona Peterson wrote to Nardella, "You seem to not want to help anyone except the immagration people". Nardella’s reply read simply: "My advice to you stands from my initial email reply. Learn how to spell 'immigration' before using the word again"

The only outlets that appear to carry the story in a quick Google search are the Herald Sun and News.com.au, both owned by News Ltd. The stories are identical, and while Nardella’s quote contains the implication that this was not the extent of his correspondence with Peterson, the item itself suggests that Nardella did nothing but dismiss Peterson.

To Hardy herself: she covers the other side of the story, that of defending Nardella and identifying an endemic problem: racists can’t spell. Hardy has taken a non-story and transformed it into a comedy piece that also exposes a disturbing (and disturbed) subset of the internet. In so doing she reveals the more pressing issue: that racism and ignorance remain unremarked upon in society while politicians are the frequently cast as villains, particularly if their ideology is diametrically opposite that of the publishing outlet’s.

Hardy is guilty of this in that she presents Pauline Hanson as a punchline without comment – and this is where reader bias comes in, because I thought that was funny. By making a direct correlation between hate speech, racist ideas and diminished intellectual capacity, Hardy has informed, entertained and demystified a subset of “the other”.

No one could confuse Hardy’s investigative reportage with actual investigation and reportage, but she has produced an admirable piece of work nonetheless.