Category: Murdoch Media
An American Fox News anchor claims Australians have no freedom while lambasting Australia’s gun laws during on live television.
The man who gunned down nine people at an Oregon community college was enrolled in the class where the fatal shootings occurred, Douglas County Sheriff John Hanlin said in a news release.
Source: Oregon shooting: Gunman a student at Umpqua Community College – CNN.com
She broke a door handle, threw a phone and a water bottle at a staff member and called her top executives a bunch of names.
The commentators who thought Tony Abbott was their champion are desperately looking for relevance after the coup.
Source: Leadership change sparks civil war at News Corp | The Saturday Paper
Malcolm Turnbull will become Australia’s 29th prime minister after beating Tony Abbott in a dramatic leadership ballot in Canberra on Monday night.
Source: Rupert Murdoch’s Crony, Tony Abbott Ousted As Australian P.M. | Crooks and Liars
The jihadist Islamic State group has used the shocking image of drowned Syrian toddler Aylan Kurdi to warn refugees against trying to flee to the West, calling it
Source: IS uses images of drowned toddler to warn refugees – Your Middle East
It was announced yesterday that 21st Century Fox and the National Geographic Society are creating a for-profit, commercial company that will encompass all National Geographic properties, including its magazines, websites and television channels. Fox will own 73% of this new company.
Franklin County sheriff says gunman who killed reporter Alison Parker and photographer Adam Ward has died
Source: Suspect in Virginia Slaying Kills Himself | Al Jazeera America
Andrew Bolt will ignore this report and wont take back his suggestion it was a hate -race crime against whites. He’ll play it like Fox News
Posted on Jun 23, 2015
Choosing a fitting communication platform to underscore his Silicon Valley background, Flickr-cofounder-turned-Slack-CEO Stewart Butterfield excoriated The Wall Street Journal editorial staff in a series of tweets Sunday evening.
The WSJ’s right-leaning editorial board drew Butterfield’s eye, ire and fire with an opinion piece published last Thursday about the hate-fueled shooting that claimed the lives of nine African-Americans on June 17 at Emanuel AME Church in Charleston, S.C.
“It is inevitable that when nine black men and women are shot to death inside their church by a 21-year-old white man in Charleston, S.C., the issue of race in America will be raised,” the Journal’s piece began, before reaching the baldly inaccurate conclusion that “[t]oday the system and philosophy of institutionalized racism identified by Dr. [Martin Luther] King no longer exists.”
Granted, it has gotten to the point where readers are obliged to take an extra step on their end to most accurately access the true meaning of the WSJ’s editorial articles—one that involves tacking the phrase “for The Wall Street Journal’s editorial staff” or “for Rupert Murdoch” onto the end of bewildering statements such as that last quote cited above.
However, Butterfield was inspired to go even further by pulling the curtain aside to expose the inner workings of Murdoch’s machinery in his takedown on Twitter. “I get that it’s a business & this is something like professional wrestling or reality TV. WSJ editorials are meant to be spectacle,” Butterfield began.
After zooming in on the article’s pronouncement that the U.S. has moved on from its racist past, the Slack exec continued: “Pretending it doesn’t exist is, cognitively, really hard work. And it is dishonest and unfair and cruel work too. It’s its own violence.”
Butterfield laid out his argument insistently before reaching a point where civil discourse apparently no longer served his cause.
Click here to read the rest.
—Posted by Kasia Anderson
Posted on Jun 23, 2015
Choosing a fitting communication platform to underscore his Silicon Valley background, Flickr-cofounder-turned-Slack-CEO Stewart Butterfield excoriated The Wall Street Journal editorial staff in a series of tweets Sunday evening.
The WSJ’s right-leaning editorial board drew Butterfield’s eye, ire and fire with an opinion piece published last Thursday about the hate-fueled shooting that claimed the lives of nine African-Americans on June 17 at Emanuel AME Church in Charleston, S.C.
“It is inevitable that when nine black men and women are shot to death inside their church by a 21-year-old white man in Charleston, S.C., the issue of race in America will be raised,” the Journal’s piece began, before reaching the baldly inaccurate conclusion that “[t]oday the system and philosophy of institutionalized racism identified by Dr. [Martin Luther] King no longer exists.”
Granted, it has gotten to the point where readers are obliged to take an extra step on their end to most accurately access the true meaning of the WSJ’s editorial articles—one that involves tacking the phrase “for The Wall Street Journal’s editorial staff” or “for Rupert Murdoch” onto the end of bewildering statements such as that last quote cited above.
However, Butterfield was inspired to go even further by pulling the curtain aside to expose the inner workings of Murdoch’s machinery in his takedown on Twitter. “I get that it’s a business & this is something like professional wrestling or reality TV. WSJ editorials are meant to be spectacle,” Butterfield began.
After zooming in on the article’s pronouncement that the U.S. has moved on from its racist past, the Slack exec continued: “Pretending it doesn’t exist is, cognitively, really hard work. And it is dishonest and unfair and cruel work too. It’s its own violence.”
Butterfield laid out his argument insistently before reaching a point where civil discourse apparently no longer served his cause.
Click here to read the rest.
—Posted by Kasia Anderson
Fox News must be stopped: Why its Charleston coverage has finally gone too far.
https://youtu.be/Ri7Ej2dgNJM
Economist Bruce Bartlett, a former adviser to both Presidents Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush, warned over the weekend that Fox News had damaged the Republican Party by creating a bubble for conservatives to brainwash themselves.
In his paper “How Fox News Changed American Media and Political Dynamics” published earlier this month, Bartlett theorized that watching the network was essentially “self-brainwashing” for viewers, making them believe that the United States was a more conservative nation than it actually was. And so the Republican Party had responded by running radical conservatives that representative Fox News viewers, but not the true state of the electorate.
“Many conservatives live in a bubble where they watch only Fox News on television, they listen only to conservative talk radio — Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity, many of the same people,” Bartlett told CNN’s Brian Stelter on Sunday. “When they go onto the Internet, they look at conservative websites like National Review, Newsmax, World Net Daily.”
“And so, they are completely in a universe in which they are hearing the same exact ideas, the same arguments, the same limited amount of data repeated over and over and over again. And that’s brainwashing.”
Bartlett asserted that it was a bigger problem for conservatives than liberals because they did not have their own network for a long time, and then they “drank very heavily from the Fox waters.”
On Reliable Sources, Bruce Bartlett Explains How Conservatives Are “Brainwashing” Themselves With Fox News And Other Right-Wing Media
Fox News was completely silent after a Christian minister pleaded guilty to plotting to attack American Muslims in New York, continuing a habit of downplaying threats to Muslims and ignoring extremist acts with no ties to Islam.
Robert Doggart, an ordained Christian minister and former Tennessee congressional candidate, was arrested and pled guilty to attempting to recruit “expert Gunners” to aid him in a plot to kill residents of Islamberg, NY, a largely Muslim community at the foot of the Catskill Mountains. RawStory reported on the details of Doggart’s plan:
He met with the informant in Nashville and discussed using Molotov cocktails to firebomb buildings in the Muslim community, which was founded by African-Americans who had converted to Islam from Christianity.
Doggart told the informant during a recorded conversation that he planned to bring 500 rounds of ammunition for the M4 rifle and a pistol with three extra magazines – as well as a machete.
“If it gets down to the machete, we will cut them to shreds,” he told the informant.
He said during a recorded call that the “battalion” he commanded hoped the raid on Hancock, which is also known as Islamberg, would be a “flash point” in a possible revolution.
“So sick and tired of this crap that the government is pulling that we go take a small military installation or we go burn down a Muslim church or something like that,” Doggart said.
The Daily Beast pointed out that the media has remained largely silent on the story, wondering at the absence of “the Fox News panic” and noting:
It goes without saying that if Doggart had been Muslim and had planned to kill Christians in America, we would have seen wall-to-wall media coverage. Fox News would have cut into its already-daily coverage of demonizing Muslims to do a special report really demonizing Muslims.
And in fact, Fox News has made no mention of the story at all. What’s more, the network does have a history of downplaying threats against Muslims while hyping any Islamic connection to terror it can find. After the Boston Marathon bombings, the network ridiculed former Attorney General Eric Holder for warning against retaliatory acts of violence, ignoring years of threats against Muslims. In 2010, Fox host Brian Kilmeade claimed that “all terrorists are Muslims.”
And Fox has reacted to terror attacks committed by right-wing extremists with a yawn. After the Department of Homeland Security released a report on right-wing terror in 2015, Fox News’ Eric Bolling claimed “you can’t name” instances of right-wing terrorism “in the last seven years,” ignoring dozens of examples.
Right-wing media have also been known to fearmonger about often-unsubstantiated Islamic terror threats. Outlets like Fox News, The Drudge Report, and The New York Post hyped an unfounded “jihadist” plot against Fort Jackson in South Carolina. And Sean Hannity and other conservatives promoted an unsubstantiated story of an Islamic State (ISIS) training camp on the U.S.-Mexico border around the same time Doggart was arrested.
Islamberg, the town Doggart was planning to attack, has also garnered Fox News’ attention in the past — a 2007 FoxNews.com article wondered if it was a “terror compound” and a report by Fox Business host Lou Dobbs claimed the town was home to a group engaging in “guerilla war training.”
Right-wing media have a plan to solve the national crisis of poverty in America — and it’s all about “personal responsibility.”
Roughly 45 million Americans live in poverty, 1 in 7 received food stamps just last year, and 20 percent of children under the age of 18 were impoverished in 2013. Politicians and media figures have offered many possible solutions to help low-income Americans break free from this systemic cycle of inequality, including expanding the social safety net and educational opportunities for all.
But over the years, conservative media have offered their own strategies. Watch as Media Matters looks back at the five easy steps they’ve proposed to help Americans living paycheck to paycheck find that “richness of spirit”:
http://mediamatters.org/embed/static/clips/2015/05/19/40050/fnc-factor-20150519-bikergang
Fox News host Bill O’Reilly interviewed a former biker gang leader about a recent biker shootout in Waco, Texas that left nine people dead. O’Reilly’s interview with his white guest was a sharp contrast to interviews the host regularly has with African-American guests, where he lectures them about black violence, culture, and family structure.
On May 17, authorities arrested roughly 170 bikers following the deadly shootout between biker gangs and police in Waco, Texas that left nine people dead and 18 wounded outside of a restaurant. According to The New York Times, “Law enforcement officials and gang experts said the conflicts between two motorcycle groups, the Bandidos and the Cossacks, led to the shooting.”
During the May 19 edition of his show, O’Reilly interviewed former Bandidos biker gang member Edward Winterhalder to comment on the bloody shootout. During the discussion O’Reilly asked Winterhalder about alleged violence and criminal activity among biker gangs and allowed Winterhalder to explain uninterrupted that “there is a lot of different types of individuals in a motorcycle club” but most are law abiding citizens who “are just regular guys who have jobs, families, and kids … the only thing they’re guilty of is having a little too much fun on the weekends”
But when discussing violence in the black community and recent police shootings of unarmed black men, O’Reilly regularly conducts contentious interviews with African-American guests where he blames black culture and family structure for violence and poverty in the inner city.
During the recent protests in Baltimore, O’Reilly hyped black crime statistics and declared “personal behavior” is the problem behind violence and arrests of blacks. In 2014, O’Reilly invited Martin Luther King III to talk about recent police shootings against unarmed black men where O’Reilly suggested that instead of protesting police shootings, African-Americans should wear t-shirts that say “don’t get pregnant at 14.” Following the 2012 killing of unarmed teen Trayvon Martin, O’Reilly demonized the teen claiming that he died because he looked “how gangstas look,” referring to his wearing of a hooded sweatshirt.
A week in Canberra watching Abbott and Hockey rearranging the figures from the Budget to try to save their fragile political careers, as well as my access again to the private papers of Sir Keith Arthur Murdoch, were two good lessons in the fragility of power.
The conservative political party that Robert Gordon Menzies created in Australia about 100 years ago, that he chose to call “Liberal“, is even more conservative than the British Conservatives of Winston Churchill.
David Cameron’s result last week was surprising and shifty. He scored better, perhaps, with Rupert Murdoch banging the table in front of his staff at The Sun, some of whom were siding with Labor.
Perhaps, once again,
‘It was The Sun wot won it!’
Meanwhile, here at home, Tony Abbott and his dopey crew of political “wannabes” have crossed into a form of reverse anarchism that gives all power to elected politicians and none to the voters. The Queensland Liberal-National Party was doing the same, with far less propriety, when the people sent them to the Opposition benches.
As for Keith Rupert Murdoch, who at least had the decency to decline a knighthood, unlike his beknighted father, has been as he has always been, the dark eminence that has wrecked all ideas about democracy.
Sir Keith Arthur Murdoch, his father, knew all about power and how to use it. His only son instead acquired the skills of a tyrant.
That showed in his father’s private papers:
‘There is only one secret to the production of a good newspaper, and that is infinite care and accuracy and constant attention to detail.’
And, another comment:
‘The real thinking and leadership in Australia has to be done by the Australian people, informed by the truth in all matters.’
Sir U Bet I’m Gone Rupert Murdoch: “Kill Miliband!” Kill Labour. Kill Labor. #ukpolitics #auspol
Mind you, these words were not written to support the Labor Party. Murdoch senior was never anything other than a Menzies conservative, even though he would often brush aside complaints from Menzies. Keith much preferred Billy (William Morris) Hughes as prime minister.
He wrote personal messages to his staff in his own hand and chose to do so because he suffered from a speech defect.
As a newcomer at his Melbourne primary school, he was both shy and afraid of the rowdier youngsters who chose him as a target because his conservative religious upbringing came in a strict family of two clerics — a grandfather and father of the Scottish Free Church. He paid the price of being a child within a public school of mixed and rowdy backgrounds. A well-mannered, well-behaved newcomer soon became an easy target for bullies.
He developed a nervous stutter that haunted him throughout his life, even in spite of those who helped him. When he was a young man, his family sent to him England to study and to take speech lessons from the celebrated Adelaide therapist, Lionel Logue, who had a practice in London and had famously taught a stuttering King of England to speak in public.
Keith Murdoch”s speech improved in London as he moved through higher circles because of his short connection with the Anzacs. Back home, as his journalistic career thrived, he eventually became editor in chief of the Herald and Weekly Times under Theodore Fink, the company’s founder, chairman and managing director.
From that time, Keith preferred writing short notes of both praise and criticism to his editors and reporters, both to encourage them and to train them in the arts and skills of journalism.
To a Herald editor who allowed an error to escape his eagle eye, he wrote:
‘We must always assume that the public reads us critically and so must be ever watchful wherever a meaning might be misinterpreted.’
To a reporter:
‘The circulation of our newspaper is based on sound writing and intense loyalty to the truth and such must never be in doubt.’
More false glorification of war. Why embellish if the truth is so great? Sir Keith Murdoch’s Gallipoli heroics https://independentaustralia.net/business/business-display/the-truth-about-sir-keith-murdochs-gallipoli-heroics,7656#.VUgFL4FsZvA ….
To a new political reporter in Canberra:
‘I hope you will move consistently among the Federal members and write about their personalities and be ready to challenge any of their scattered inconsistencies.’
To a sub-editor:
‘You have made your leading headline scarcely worth reading. A good rule is the advice to a musician – ”do not sound a top note every day and make the unimportant unnecessarily important.”‘
To an editorial writer:
‘The real thinking and leadership in Australia has to be done by the Australian people, not by this newspaper.’
To a young reporter:
‘The secret of a good story is infinite care and strict attention to detail.’
To a rural correspondent:
‘We talk of land monopolists. Why? The sheep men are doing great work for Australia. We should not ally ourselves with those who call good men ”land monopolists.”‘
To all the staff one day he circulated:
‘When you travel home by train please count the number of people reading The Herald.’
And then an occasional word of praise:
‘The paper is well edited today and the wireless and bus features are splendidly done. It is altogether a paper to be proud of.’
You can follow Rodney Lever on Twitter @RodneyELever.
How all Australians could bring down the Murdoch news empire, if only they followed this advice from a young girl. http://tinyurl.com/lax4a3u
Hoping to create permanent criminal investigations into Bill and Hillary Clinton’s dealings — reminiscent of the ones that hounded them in the 1990s — conservative commentators employed by Rupert Murdoch have been demanding that the FBI or the Department of Justice open inquiries to determine if the Clintons are guilty of criminal wrongdoing. Their hook is the new Murdoch-published Clinton Cash book, which alleges wide-ranging misconduct by the Clintons and their global charity, the Clinton Foundation.
Hoping to take author Peter Schweizer’s fantastic claims of foreign donors buying influence, Murdoch media voices at Fox News, Wall Street Journal, New York Post and elsewhere want to create a churning culture of subpoenas, testimonies, and legal briefings, likely all in the hopes of catching somebody in a misstatement while under oath. Recall that the 1990’s impeachment crusade surrounding president Bill Clinton’s sex life grew out of special prosecutor Ken Starr’s completely unrelated investigation into the Clintons’ money-losing Whitewater land transaction.
A criminal probe sparked by Clinton Cash would be a dream come true for partisan media outlets.
“When you have a presidential candidate, Hillary Clinton, who is going get the nomination of her party, the FBI has a duty to, we the people, to investigate any appearance of impropriety. Does it not?” asked Bill O’Reilly this week. “The FBI has got to go in and look. They have to go in and look. If they don’t, that’s corrupt.”
The only problem for Murdoch’s minions is they can’t point to any evidence that even remotely indicates the Clintons broke the law via their foundation or foreign donations to it. The claims of bribery or quid pro quo deals are entirely flimsy, drowning in innuendo. Instead, the Fox News-led posse is essentially demanding criminal investigations be launched in order to find the evidence first, and then proceed to political prosecutions. It’s a bold attempt to criminalize politics.
That blueprint worked while Bill Clinton was president, so it’s not surprising conservative media, working alongside Republicans, are trying to resurrect the strategy, hoping to create enough “foreign donation” hysteria to prompt some sort of inquiry.
“I think this warrants investigation,” Clinton Cash author Peter Schweizer recently stressed to Fox News.
But again, the debunked book doesn’t come close to delivering a plausible map for prosecutors to follow. Instead, Clinton Cash is a mishmash of allegations glued together by innuendo and falsehoods.
That hasn’t stopped the choreographed calls for investigations; for publicly funded fishing expeditions designed to trip up the Clintons for years to come. And of course, the drum beat comes complete with claims that any failure to commence criminal inquiries represents a sprawling government effort to protect the prominent Democrats. It’s a favorite tactic of conservative commentators: Prove you don’t have a liberal bias by taking seriously our empty allegations.
“It is a double standard and it is quite remarkable and it is not an accident that the people who have been indicted or been hounded are ones who are adversaries of the Democratic administration or the Democratic Party,” Charles Krauthammer announced on Fox News this week.
Note that President Obama and Democrats have been subjected to similarly sustained, permanent attack inquiries in the form of Congressional Benghazi investigations. The fact that Republicans are summoning Hillary Clinton to testify again about Benghazi this month, nearly 30 months after she first answered questions at a Benghazi hearing, indicates how long-term these partisan tribunals can run. (Rep. Elijah Cummings (D-MD) pointed out that the Benghazi investigation is “on track to last longer than the investigations of Iran-Contra, the Kennedy assassination, Watergate and 9/11, and it will squander more than $6 million in taxpayer funds in the process.”)
Now, Murdoch media outlets are trying to turn Clinton Cash into a brand; a self-sustaining scandal machine like the ones they built to distract Bill Clinton in the 1990s. It’s a very old playbook.
“Strident House Republicans have been on one continual witch hunt since the 1994 takeover of the House,” The Atlantic‘s Michael Hirsh noted in 2012. Writing at the time about the endless Fast and Furious investigation sponsored by House Republicans, Hirsh noted the investigation was “more light than heat” and that Republicans have been playing that same hand for years:
We all remember the endless (and fruitless) Whitewater investigation and the Monicagate scandal that emerged from it, like the monster baby in the cult movie Eraserhead. But perhaps you have forgotten all the furor in the late ’90s when, helped along by misleading reporting by The New York Times, Republicans on the Hill pursued an endlessly snowballing series of pseudo-scandals.
The déjà vu demands to criminalize the Clintons continue today. “Is anyone at Justice or the FBI investigating the Clinton Foundation and Hillary Clinton for accepting foreign donations while she was Secretary of State?” asked a Wall Street Journal editorial this week. “The foundation and the Clintons insist there isn’t a ‘shred’ of evidence that these actions were illegal, but the facts certainly would seem to warrant an investigation,” the paper opined.
“I believe the Clinton Foundation story dwarfs all previous Clinton scandals because it appears to be an unprecedented case of foreign governments and entities buying influence with a U.S. government official,” wrote Fred Fleitz at Foxnews.com. “The Clinton Foundation scandal requires congressional hearings and an investigation by the Justice Department,” he concluded.
On Fox News, Andrew Napolitano stressed that if Schweizer’s claims hold up, “The Justice Department must commence a criminal investigation of Mrs. Clinton’s behavior.”
Elsewhere, Fox’s James Rosen found two partisan Republican attorneys to quote regarding the need for criminal investigations into supposed Clinton bribery crimes and presented that tenuous analysis as news [emphasis added]:
With a sitting Democratic senator recently indicted on federal bribery and corruption charges, top criminal defense lawyers in the nation’s capital say Democratic presidential front runner Hillary Clinton could conceivably face similar scrutiny, amid mounting disclosures about the tangled finances of her family’s philanthropic foundation.
As Clinton Cash fades in the rearview mirror, its political impact negligible at best, vocal Murdoch boosters are left demanding a criminal probe in search of a crime.
http://mediamatters.org/embed/static/clips/2015/05/05/39848/fnc-otr-20150505-terror
Fox host Greta Van Susteren claimed the White House “has not yet connected” the Garland, TX shooting to terrorism. In fact, the White House described the shooting as “an attempted terrorist act” earlier that day.
On May 5, the Islamic State (also known as ISIS) claimed responsibility for the May 3 shooting in Garland. CNN noted that the group “offered no evidence” of their connection to the attack, and quoted an FBI agent saying the shooters “may not have had formal contact” with ISIS and that he did not think “they were directed by ISIS.”
On that day’s edition of Fox News’ On the Record, host Greta Van Susteren claimed that “the White House has not yet connected this to terrorism,” and asked: “Is the Obama administration being overly cautious and could it hurt national security?”
But the White House had referred to the shooting as an act of terrorism earlier that day. White House press secretary Josh Earnest said that what “we can say definitively, because of the quick, professional, brave work of local law enforcement forces, is an attempted terrorist act was foiled.”
The criticism represents another instance of a long-standing trope at Fox News. Fox has repeatedly suggested that President Obama did not call the Benghazi terror attack an act of terror. In 2014, an on-screen timeline asserted the White House did not call the attack an act of terror until September 20, when in fact Obama described it as such in his initial statement on September 12. In January, Fox personalities were not satisfied by the White House calling the Charlie Hebdo terrorist attack an “act of terror” and insisted the administration specifically mention “Islamist terror.” Last year, Fox host Ainsley Earhardt complained that Obama had referred to the Pakistani Taliban terror attack as “terrorism” but had not specifically mentioned the Taliban.
It’s the article that caused an outcry in the UK and pushed some pundits to compare the attack on migrants and refugees to the Nazi’s denigration of Jews.
On Friday, British tabloid The Sun, published by Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp, ran an article by columnist and former ‘TV Personality’ Katie Hopkins.
“Rescue boats? I’d use gunships to stop migrants,” the title ran.
It was an article clearly designed to create controversy written by an author who has made a career doing just that. It worked.
“No, I don’t care. Show me pictures of coffins, show me bodies floating in water, play violins and show me skinny people looking sad,” Hopkins started out, before referring to those fleeing north Africa across the Mediterranean as a “plague of feral humans”.
“Make no mistake, these migrants are like cockroaches. They might look a bit ‘Bob Geldof’s Ethiopia circa 1984′, but they are built to survive a nuclear bomb. They are survivors,” she went on.
What does Hopkins think should be done about these people?
“It’s time to get Australian,” she wrote.
“Australians are like British people but with balls of steel, can-do brains, tiny hearts and whacking great gunships.”
“Their approach to migrant boats is the sort of approach we need in the Med.
They threaten them with violence until they bugger off, throwing cans of Castlemaine in an Aussie version of sharia stoning.”
“And their approach is working. Migrant boats have halved in number since Prime Minister Tony Abbott got tough.”
It’s not entirely clear why someone cashing in on anti-immigrant sentiment would praise something they compare to “sharia stoning”, but there you go.
On radio, Hopkins described Australia as her “spiritual home”.
While other columnists have tried to avoid making the work of writers like Hopkins stories in their own right, the article was so extreme they couldn’t hold off.
Writing for The Guardian, Joe Williams saw similarities in Hopkins’ rhetoric and that used during the Rwandan genocide.
“This characterisation of people as less than human, as vermin, as a “virus” (as she did elsewhere in the article) irresistibly recalls the darkest events in history,” Williams wrote.
“It is eerily reminiscent of the Rwandan media of 1994, when the radio went from statements such as “You have to kill the Tutsis, they’re cockroaches” to, shortly afterwards, instructions on how to do so, and what knives to use.”
Over at The Independent, Simon Usborne saw similar parallels.
“In the environment that led to creation of the Third Reich in Germany, Polish people were seen as “an East European species of cockroach”, while Jews were rats.”
16 days out from the UK’s General Election, Labour supporters are using Hopkins’ opposition to their party as evidence of its merits. They’re hoping she’ll keep this promise.
The issue of boat arrivals has come to the fore in Europe as mass drownings continue to occur. Just days after Hopkins’ column was published a boat sank off the coast of Libya, sparking fears as many as 700 may have perished.
But Hopkins’ column didn’t even bother to raise the ‘deaths at sea’ argument, now the favoured talking point of those pushing inhumane policies in Australia.
While Hopkins’ work is self-evidently abhorrent, there is one compromise we should possibly be prepared to make when considering her arguments.
If Labour does win the UK election, and Hopkins is forced to flee with the hope of reaching her ‘spiritual home’, we’ll happily advocate for the gunships to be deployed to prevent her landing in Australia.
The Courier Mail reported in its Sunday Mail edition that Timothy Paul Gear, 23, had been sentenced to 12 months imprisonment, fully suspended for 18 months for child sex offences. Gear was the Chairman of the LNP Currumbin Branch and Secretary of the Gold Coast LNP. He had aspired to be a future member of parliament.
The Gold Coast remains a power base for the LNP with voters religiously voting blue. At the 2015 state election, despite MP for Mermaid Beach Ray Steven’s “chicken dance”at reporter Dave Donovan, despite MP for Broadwater Verity Barton’s three confessions to driving without a license and despite the huge swing to Labor, the Gold Coast seats remained barely dented.
So it came as no surprise that Gear, a school captain at Elanora State High School, began his political life with the LNP. He became a protege of LNP MP for Currumbin and former Newman Government Tourism Minister, Jann Stuckey. In 2008, Stuckey praised him in her online newsletter, saying, “Member for Currumbin, Jann Stuckey today congratulated three local students Timothy Gear, Benjamin Naday and Leigh Moran on their selection for the 2008 Queensland Youth Parliament.”
To Stuckey, he was simply the best. Hansard showed that on May 31, 2012, in an Address-in-Reply speech, she told parliament, “To my fantastic campaign team—Richard Stuckey, Carley McNeil, Tim Gear, Peter Barrett, Ben Naday, Anne and Robert Wright, Virginia Freebody and Minna Knight: you are simply the best.”
However, in 2014, a dark side to Gear began to emerge. He publicly admitted to trolling online. In political terms, trolling is the process by which a person uses social media to attack political opponents using anonymous accounts. These apparatchiks tow the party line by reposting messages from politicians of their party. They also attempt to dissuade other social media users from promoting ideas against the party by engaging in personal attacks, use of foul language and propaganda.
Claims that all sides of politics do it have been made before but no one has been so brazen as Gear about it. Labor candidate for the state seat of Burleigh Gail Hislop had blocked a Young LNP member from her facebook page. In response he threatened to, “set up troll accounts closer to the election”. It was then that Gear responded to this by writing, “We all have troll accounts”. The startling confession suggested there existed a network of political trolls on the LNP side.
At 21, he’d been caught by police posing as underage children in an online operation to catch sex offenders. He was charged with two counts “of trying to procure a child under the age of 16″. He entered a guilty plea. A spokesman told The Courier Mail that Gear had resigned from the party before the charges were known to the party.
Gear, now 23, was sentenced on March 16, 2015. He had made two previous court appearances, one in December of 2014 and another during the election campaign in January. His facebook page showed him campaigning with former LNP Premier Campbell Newman, former LNP MP for Brisbane Central Robert Cavallucci and a pre-election photo of Federal LNP Senator for Qld James McGrath. Sources have also told NoFibs Gear appeared with Stuckey during the campaign at Elanora State High School.
A senior member of the Gold Coast LNP, a declared campaigner for a Newman Government Minister and a self-confessed troll had been convicted of a sex crime. Yet, there was no media coverage of any court appearances or the allegations during or prior to the 2015 election. The report of his crimes only appeared 34 days after he had been sentenced.
What had elapsed during all that time?
On March 27, 2015, eleven days after the sentencing, the LNP began its assault on the Labor Government, pushing for a by-election over the allegations made against MP for Cook, Billy Gordon. The Courier Mail launched a barrage of anti-Labor front pages at the Palaszczuk Government. Speaker of the House Peter Wellington described the paper as attempting to “discredit this government”.
So, over the two year period, had the media simply missed the whole story? Possibly, but it seems unlikely when every week on the nightly news and online we hear the court reports on people we’ve never heard of.
A West Ipswich scout leader has been charged with making and sending child porn: http://short.ninem.sn/Y27btem . #9News
Conspiracy theories abound. The deception is almost water tight, however, there is one clear clue in The Courier Mail’s article which shows the outlet must have known all along of the Gear case. It’s the photo of him smoking with the caption, “Timothy Paul Gear after being convicted of child sex offences.” The photo could only have been taken by someone that knew Gear would be appearing on March 16, 2015 for sentencing. It would appear the paper embargoed the story so as not to distract from the upcoming LNP attack against Labor over Billy Gordon.
olddogthoughts 
You must be logged in to post a comment.