Culture wars

A bizarre year in journalism ends with our dominant media company’s flagship newspaper, an outlet that long ago gave up any pretence of objectivity, declaring war on the press gallery, the blogosphere, the twitterverse and just about anyone that wasn’t a Murdoch lackey sitting in front of a terminal in Holt Street.

The Australian is becoming a case-study in wagon-circling institutional paranoia, knee-jerk hyper-sensitivity, stupefying arrogance and an unending Orwellian capacity for declaring that black is white. Christopher Joye puts its increasingly unhinged behaviour down to insecurity, noting that the paper spends “more time defending its own actions in pushing specific agendas and ideological narratives than any other serious media forum on earth”. (more…)