Fairfax: Mark Latham departs but foul Clementine Ford’s fine

Fairfax columnist Clementine Ford has sold “F..k Tony Abbott” T-shirts and tweeted profan­ities with abandon.

Twitter tirade.

Fairfax Media columnist Clementine Ford has sold “F..k Tony Abbott” T-shirts, abused an Iran­ian-born rival for not being a white male and tweeted profan­ities with vicious abandon.

Yet just days after celebrating Mark Latham’s departure as a Fairfax columnist over abuse and sexism, Ford has justified her behaviour by saying she is less offensi­ve than other columnists.

During a week in which Fairfax and Mr Latham parted ways over the former opposition leader’s inflammatory commentary about Australian of the Year Rosie Batty and transgender milit­ary officer Cate McGregor, Ford lashed out at her political and media rivals, News Corp Australia columnists Miranda Devine­ and Rita Panahi, with sexist and racist tweets.

Of Panahi, who is of Iranian descent, Ford tweeted: “No matter how hard she tries, she’ll never be a white man.”

On August 18, she tweeted of Devine: “And this pile of steaming turd column is a reminder of why I called Devine a “f..king c..t.” Ford’s Twitter account — which has 39,000 followers, many of them women — is filled with profan­ities and in 2013 she was caught selling “F..k Tony Abbott” T-shirts.

But Fairfax, which last year moved to suspend The Sydney Morning Herald columnist Mike Carlton for bullying Jewish readers by email and Twitter, was silen­t yesterday when asked about Ford’s online behaviour.

Ms McGregor, whose complaints to Fairfax chief executive Greg Hywood and The Australian Financial Review’s editor-in-chief Michael Stutchbury in part led to Latham’s departure from the newspaper on Monday, questioned the difference between Latham’s abusive tweets and those written by Ford.

“There is a culture of impunity at Fairfax,” Ms McGregor said. “You don’t see people using this language on News Limited sites, in my experience. I blocked Ford ages ago. It’s an echo of undergraduate virulence that I don’t think is very useful, frankly.”

Ford, a self-proclaimed feminist who writes for the young women’s website The Daily Life and The Sydney Morning Herald, celebrated Latham’s resignation this week after investigative work by Buzzfeed’s Mark Di Stefano, tweeting: “Nice work @MarkDiStef! Mark Latham’s weird obsessio­n with left wing women puts him in good company with Tim Blair. Ew.”

She has not apologised for her tweet about Panahi and said yesterday that she was justified in calling Devine a “f..king c..t”.

When asked if there was a hypocrisy in her position, Ford reasoned that her tweets were appropriate because News Corp Australia columnist Tim Blair and Panahi were equally abusive. She claimed Devine had written a homo­phobic column and denied her tweet about Panahi was racist.

“Rita Panahi’s timeline is full of abuse against Fairfax writers, Daily Life writers in particular,” she said. “Tim Blair’s blog is relent­less in its attacks against women in particular. There is no comparison between the kind of unsolicited, targeted commentary Mark Latham (in vague disguise) offered and telling someone to f..k off because they’ve been harassing you for hours.”

But Blair rejected the suggestion his Daily Telegraph blog was abusive and pointed to Ford’s history of selling “F..k Tony Abbott” T-shirts as further evidence of her vitriol. He said he invented the word “frightbat”, which he used to describe left-leaning female commentators, but said it was not abusive and was hardly comparable to calling a woman a “c..t”.

“I don’t abuse anybody. I mock and ridicule,” he said.

Ms McGregor said Ford’s language was unacceptable and her tweets about Devine were “in­excusable”. “It’s stupid and shortsighted for women like Ford to think we can benefit by using extreme­ profanity especially toward­s women,” she said.

“By definition, feminists would try to give the benefit of the doubt to another woman regardless of ideological differences.” Ford said she had previously defended Devine­ and Panahi from offensive online sexualised abuse.

“Interestingly, neither of them have ever returned the favour,” she said. “Instead they seem to revel in criticism of women on the Left even though they know that sharing Blair’s rubbish only results­ in mouth-breathing troglodytes filling our timelines with abusive tweets about how ugly we are, how fat, how stupid and how mentally deranged.”

Panahi described Ford’s abuse as “racist and sexist”. “A feminist that harbours such seething hatred­ for her own sex is not only confused but utterly unprincipled,” she said.

Devine said: “Anyone who disagrees with Clementine Ford is a homophobe, a bigot or a racist, accordi­ng to her. She sprinkles abuse around but no one bothers reading her, so who cares?”

Fairfax Media declined to comment.