Fuck it, I'm done.

Earlier today the Australian’s Media Editor, Sharri Markson, copped a bagging on Twitter for her “undercover investigation” into how universities are supposedly brainwashing the innocent minds of The Youth by telling them basic facts about the media and teaching them how to think critically about Australian journalism.

It’s already been ripped to pieces, on Junkee and elsewhere, by people who, in the course of doing media degrees at university, learned dangerous, radical ideas like “News Corp sometimes displays bias” and “it tries to influence the government”. Those are ideas Markson not only believes are untrue, but so patently false that to believe in them is either proof of an extreme ideology or an easily-swayed mind.

On a completely unrelated note, here’s a new ad for Daily Telegraph Plus, the Tele‘s subscription service, in which a lonely man on a train is comforted by the reassuring presence of the whitest group of journalists you will ever see.

Did you see that? Twelve seconds in? Here’s a screencap if you missed it.

On the right, we have News Corp columnists Andrew Bolt, Andrew Clennell and Miranda Devine. On the left we have Premier of NSW Mike Baird. In an ad. For the Daily Telegraph.

In an ad.

For the Daily Telegraph.

In.

An.

Ad.

Truly staggered the NSW Premier @mikebairdMP has appeared in an ad for The Daily Telegraph. Jaw dropping https://t.co/xhdvGjp0ln #nswpol — Bevan Shields (@bevanshields85) October 13, 2014

Put aside, for a moment, that the above picture makes it look exactly — exactly — like Mike Baird is going for a job interview, and the interviewing panel is made up of three News Corp columnists. Ignore that image, and its diamond-like purity as a commentary on the state of Australian politics, for a minute. Ignore as well how those three columnists would react if a progressive politician appeared in an ad for a publication like Guardian Australia or The Age.

Instead, try to wrap your head around this: in Australia, a major media company can rope the Premier of the country’s largest state into an ad for one of its newspapers, and publish a 1,500-word “investigation” into how universities are indoctrinating young people to falsely believe that that same media company sometimes wields undue influence in politics. Four days later. And not see how that might be a problem. This is genuinely the lived reality in which we find ourselves.