Smoking gun: Paul Barry finds out how News Corp and Big Tobacco overthrew Whitlam
NEXT on Twitter, the Media Watch host will blame us for the Great Flood.
Donald Gutstein on Rabble.ca on July 26, 2011 (as tweeted yesterday by journalist Mark Skulley to economist Stephen Koukoulas, then retweeted by Paul Barry):
PHILIP Morris and News Corp drew together during the 1970s, driven by ideology, money and a hatred of government, except for those of Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan. In 1975, the companies worked with Australia’s Liberal Party to overthrow the Whitlam Labor government, which had a policy of restricting tobacco advertising.
Hatred of non-Thatcher, non-Reagan government. Mungo MacCallum in The Monthly in 2009:
THE Murdoch papers had campaigned vigorously for Labor in 1972.
From the “about me” section on Gutstein’s website:
I’VE studied the media and right-wing think tanks for two decades. My concerns are to understand how and why the Right is winning the war of ideas and to encourage the Left to get on the battlefield … I’ve written four books on a variety of subjects, the most recent being Not a Conspiracy Theory: How Business Propaganda Hijacks Democracy ... I’ve also written books about the commercialisation of the internet (How the Internet Undermines Democracy) ...
Ever wonder how it was that Graeme Wood’s The Global Mail went bust? Tony Horwitz in The New York Times on Thursday:
LAST fall a new online publication called The Global Mail asked me to write about the Keystone XL pipeline, which may carry oil to the US from the tar sands of Canada. The Global Mail promoted itself as a purveyor of independent long-form journalism, lavishly funded by a philanthropic entrepreneur in Australia. I was offered an initial fee of $15,000, plus $5000 for expenses, to write at whatever length I felt the subject merited ... So I plotted an ambitious road trip, from the tar sands of subarctic Alberta through Montana, the Dakotas and Nebraska, and returned a month later with a blown-out travel budget and enough material to write 40,000 words. As I wrote feverishly through the winter, The Global Mail negotiated to co-publish with Byliner. In giddy calls and emails from Sydney, editors said the first instalment I sent was “a ripper” and Byliner thought we might sell up to 75,000 copies, with me getting a lofty cut of the profits.
The sadly inevitable denouement:
I FINISHED writing in late January … Exhausted but exhilarated, I headed to the liquor store for a celebratory bottle and returned to an urgent call from my editor in Sydney. “Mate, we’re (bleeped),” she said. The Global Mail’s backer had had a bad financial setback at his firm and evidently decided he could no longer afford a folly like quality journalism. He’d abruptly pulled the plug just hours before I filed my copy ...
Read to stop/start smoking. Elizabeth Farrelly kicks off her Sydney Morning Herald column, Thursday:
LEONARDO di Caprio mentions our shameful Barrier Reef devastation and we act like it’s a bad thing. Like tourism is our biggest issue here? What about truth? What about climate change? A new solar roads project shows what we all know. We can’t wait for governments to make this call. It’s time to act. A people’s revolution is required. Democracy is failing us. So far, smugness and stupidity seem a more likely sinkhole for the democratic experiment than the bloodshed and tyranny that George Washington predicted, but if climate change really gets going it could still come to that. Democratic governments are abject moral cowards. Like bad parents they yield to our demands before we even voice them.
Mark Colvin on Twitter on September 16, 2011:
I’M not sure Liz Farrelly’s correctly identified why people can’t get to the end of her columns.