Call for media inquiry is just a witch hunt

FEW issues are capable of drawing out and exciting the ignorant and the conspiracists as vigorously as discussions about the media. As transparent as most media operations are and as open as most media employees tend to be, those who seek to create a distraction, sow confusion and reap the rewards like to flog the messengers when their own political support begins to flag. Those who have something to hide fear exposure and generally attribute far greater powers to the press than those whose lives would not warrant public interest. Enter Prime Minister Julia Gillard, Communications Minister Stephen Conroy and Greens leader Bob Brown. While investigation into the assorted crimes allegedly committed by some staff at the now defunct News of the World and a few members of the British police is both understandable and justifiable, the shrill cries for yet another inquiry into a section of the Australian press without any evidence or even allegation of wrongdoing reflect more upon those calling for it rather than even hint at any malpractice. It was not surprising that the first to attempt to arouse public indignation in Australia at what occurred on the other side of the world was Brown. For years Brown has benefited from an overwhelmingly benign media which has accepted without question his claims. In the current climate, the Green cultists have assumed the role played by the Puritans in New England in the late seventeenth century. Then, drawing on warped teachings from the Bible, the original Puritans launched a fanatical and self-righteous jihad against members of the community, mostly elderly women and people at the poorest end of the spectrum, with accusatory denunciations not dissimilar to those made by Brown and his mindless sycophants against those who question their pursuit of their extremist agenda. Seizing upon the hysterical accusations of a handful of teenage girls, the Puritans energetically set out to punish those responsible, the witches in their society. After a fevered search during which increasingly fantastic delusions were fed to an anxious society, an extraordinary number of people were denounced and placed on trial. Hundreds were accused and, after bizarre trials before figures not unlike some who sat on the committee investigating News International in London, 18 were hanged in Salem, Massachusetts, to which we owe the expression witch-hunt: hysterical inquiries into non-existent crimes. The Green cultists, our faux Puritans, have assumed their natural place at the head of the current witch-hunt. The situation revealed in Fleet St by a series of inquiries going back to the last century reveal that a handful of private investigators have worked the British press's appetite for scandal and catered to a huge public interest for years. One 2006 report based on files seized in 2003 by the British Information Commissioner, who in turn examined police records from a 1999 inquiry, included a ranking of 31 publications which had engaged in trafficking in confidential personal information with just one investigator. The News of the World was fifth in the pecking order, which certainly does not excuse the behaviour. However it is apparent that the state of affairs revealed 12 years ago, and earlier, failed to ignite political or public excitement. What distinguishes today's furore is that those pressing for inquiries are conveniently ignoring the reality that the abominable practices were apparently so widespread that no single proprietor or organisation was singled out. Today, of course, there is such an individual being hounded and it is Rupert Murdoch, proprietor of this newspaper. The irony is obvious to anyone who has any actual knowledge of the state of global media rather than those who trade in gossip, fuel hysteria and harvest paranoia, like Gillard and Brown. For a number of years Murdoch has been the saviour of newspapers and journalists here and abroad as other proprietors seek to walk away. It is always interesting to note that those dissatisfied with their newspaper in Australia who call upon the government to provide a national journal are generally from the Left and extreme Left - what they are really asking taxpayers to fund is a newspaper which will support their point of view. Something like a print version of the mono-cultural ABC. Despite Salem, The Crucible, even some aspects of US Senator Joe McCarthy's search for Communists in the US government during the 1950s, we seem to have forgotten the lessons of 1692.