Departing Sunday Telegraph editor Neil Breen has blasted Fairfax for questioning his paper’s editorial standards and “stealing” his paper’s Alan Jones scoop over the weekend.
Bitter Tele rival The Sydney Morning Herald today ran an editorial calling the behaviour of Jonathan Marshall, the Tele reporter who broke the story after attending a Sydney University Liberal Club dinner, “borderline ethical, at best”.
Marshall applied to attend the $100-a-head event from his personal email and did not identify himself as a journalist on the night. The SMH also published a piece by Damien Murphy raking over Marshall’s colourful past as a journalist in New Zealand.
“I find it extraordinary that the Herald would question the ethics of the Tele when they stole our story on Saturday night for their second edition, promoted it as if they had found it out and didn’t make any mention of where the story had come from,” a furious Breen told Crikey this morning.
News Limited legal counsel Jane Summerhayes has sent Fairfax a breach of copyright letter over Heath Aston’s Sun Herald story on Jones’ controversial comments.
“The Sun Herald are repeat offenders when it comes to stealing stories,” Breen said.
Rewriting a rival’s story for a second edition is, of course, a grand newspaper tradition.
Breen, who will depart the paper in October, says Marshall had attended the event as part of an investigation into student politics rather than to catch out Alan Jones.
“It was not a private dinner. He was entitled to go to that dinner and listen to what was said and report on it,” he said.
As for his post-Tele future, Breen would only say: “It will definitely be in TV.”
Crikey has asked for comment from The Sun Herald and will add if received.
Main stream media having an argument about ethics! They must be having a laugh. Edward James
The corpse of a dead man still walking, Alan is abandoned by the neo-capitalists who he so adores. Now Harvey Norman exists stage left, unable to reconcile greed with megalomania and the Australian image being debased by … those like ourselves.
The inconvenient truth of shame in journalism.
With his indecent and even inhuman comments against Ms. Gillard, Mr. Alan Jones has proven himself to be a shame to the Australian media and his excuses and apology cannot conceal this fact.
Apart from this direct indecent attack, journalists such as Alan Jones keep on spreading myths, blatant lies and slur to conceal important facts from the Australian Tax payers and voters.
Starting from Peter Costello’s ‘debt truck’ which was organised before the election in 1996 to mislead people about Labor’s $180 billion debt to the current public debate on Carbon, Tax, Climate change and Resource Rent Tax, the falsehoods, slurs and misleading comments in the media have sky rocketed. The stunt of running a garbage truck with a digital clock showing the ticking debt figure was spectacular but it was misleading the public as well. When Mr. Howard was elected with the help from journalists such as Alan Jones the very Foreign Debt went up to $522 billion – the Costello’s debt truck digital clock would have run as three times as fast but Alan Jones never called Mr. Howard and Mr. Costello liars.
The truth about the debt truck is the figure of $180 billion of Labor’s debt then constituted of foreign debts. Appearing on ABC Lateline in 2004, John Howard justified his government’s high foreign debt by saying it is the public debt that one should be worried about not the foreign debt. John Howard was never branded a liar for this misleading comment.
When Peter Costello declared on 21st April 2006 that he has paid off $72 billion of Labor’s public debt what he did not tell then was that he had made the same amount of money by selling public assets. This was not a great achievement although the media elevated him to the status of economic super hero who saved the country from debt. He flogged public assets to pay off the debts. One does not have to be an economic genius to do this. This is why the ‘economic super hero’ did not get much international recognition from any expert economists as they would have assessed his performance and also his misleading economic policy statements.
One of the falsehoods that Peter Costello and John Howard used to maintain, is the alleged link between the interest rate and the budget deficit. They insisted that high interest rate is the consequence of budget deficits. This was loudly refuted by Glenn Hubbard the chief economic advisor to US President George W Bush. Yet the journalists such as Alan Jones never called John Howard or Peter Costello a liar.
Joe Hockey continues to quote from Peter Costello’s economic falsehood statements. The link between government borrowings and high interest rates is one of them.
In 2003 the budget deficit in USA was $400 billion but the interest rate was at the lowest in 40 years – just 1%. While the budget deficit grew from 2001-2003 the US Central Bank reduced interest rates thirteen times. USA could maintain such low interest rate while having large deficit because the deficit was not financed by domestic funds but trough the sale of US government bonds to Chinese, Korean and Taiwanese governments. It was the public savings in these Asian countries that helped USA close the financial gaps.
The facts related to Debt and Interest rate from countries with high deficits such as Japan and Germany also shows that it has in fact been the norm for countries with highest deficits to have low interest rates. Many of the Australians still believe otherwise owing to misleading statements, pure falsehood and claims by Coalition and misleading journalists such as Alan Jones.
The other lie is so widely used and some people still believe the myth about ‘low interest rate under Coalition’.
The fact is in April 1982 under Mr. Howard himself as the treasurer, the interest rate went up to 21.4% whereas the highest interest rate under Labor during the Hawke government was 19%. Yet the media went on harping about the lowest interest rates under Coalition.
The Howard Government was the highest taxing government in the history of Australia. Thanks to the falsehoods from the Coalition and their journalist friends such as Alan Jones these facts are being kept away from the tax payer. Australians have been systematically brain washed with false hoods by the media they cannot believe the facts.
The facts are:
Under Gillard Government the tax to GDP ratio is around 22.1% in 2012-13, historically this level of the tax to GDP ratio is very low. The first five budgets of the Labor government has delivered a Tax to GDP ratio of 21%, a rate which was never achieved by in any of the 12 budgets delivered by the Coalition Government up to 2008. Yet the misleading media has brainwashed the people to think otherwise.
The tax to GDP ratio was 24.2% in 2004-05 and 2005-06 under the Howard Government, and that was the highest taxing government in Australia’s history. Once again lot of people cannot get themselves to believe this as a fact as they have been systematically brainwashed to believe that the Coalition was the lowest taxing government.
In dollar terms in 2012-13 Australian Tax payers have $20 billion per annum in their pockets compared to what they were being taxed on average during the twelve years of the last Coalition Government. In other words the Gillard government has put $20 billion dollars in the pockets of public compared to the Coalition governments yet thanks to venomous tongues and lies the Australian Tax Payers have been made to believe the Gillard Government is public enemy Number One.
People such as Mr. Jones who gets heavily paid to spread misleading venom day in and day out in the name of independent journalism never bothers to tell the Australian Taxpayer above blatant arithmetical facts.
What about the lies that Tony Abbot keeps on peddling about ‘Gillard the Socialist” -the ‘class war’ monger?
To start with, the basic principle of Socialism is public ownership of the means of production. No political party in Australia let alone Labor has this in their political agenda, yet this lie was blatantly used by Tony Abbot and no journalist called Mr. Abbot a liar. Why?
Last year the distinguished Economic magazine Euromoney named Wayne Swan as the Finance Minister of the Year.
In September this year the Gillard government received the AAA rating from three leading credit rating agencies including Standard & Poor’s (S&P). This is in recognition of the commendable economic performance of the Gillard Government which has been the envy of the developed world, with the best combination of solid growth, low unemployment, low interest rates, record investment and contained inflation.
This achievement would have made Julia Gillard’s father very proud as this was the first time in our history that we received the rolled-gold AAA-rating from all three global rating agencies – something never achieved by any previous government. Yet as a journalist Alan Jones has chosen to ignore all this and resort to hatred and indecency by bringing Ms. Gillard ‘s fathers demise to throw insults at Ms. Gillard.
Do not the above facts show and prove over and over again there are many liars in the Coalition ranks including John Howard, Peter Costello, Tony Abbot and Joe Hockey?
The other big lie is about a dysfunctional government, but the truth is Julia Gillard’s leadership has shown courage against venomous slanders and opposition from every one of the Coalition and continuously hostile media including journalists such as Alan Jones to have more than 300 bills passed to carry out reforms and legislation.
No doubt Julia Gillard’s father had many number of reasons to be really proud of her. Alan Jones who has gone beyond human decency to bring journalism to disrepute must resign from the honourable profession in shame.
And I might add, that $20Billion dollars per annum is enough to fully fund Gonski, dental health and paid maternity for the next 5 years! All these idiots complaining about this governments’ economic credentials don’t have an economic clue! They just believe the Liberal lies. And what did Howard and Costello do with that extra tax? frittered it away buying votes! The informed populace knows who the real liars are!
Oh, and what was that about interest rates always being higher under a Labor government? Was that ……shock….horror A LIE? Yes it f*****g was!