News Corp Australia marshalled its troops on Thursday after the pesky Labor government in Victoria banned Sky News from metro railway platforms following the appearance of far-right extremist Blair Cottrell on the network. Sky News devoted much airtime to expressing its furious disagreement with the decision, based mainly on the fact that the Cottrell interview was never shown on the railway platforms. Everyone from David Speers and Laura Jayes – who sandwiched the transport minister, Jacinta Allan, between them in an aggressive double-headed interrogation – to Andrew Bolt and Paul Murray prosecuted Sky’s case.

Sky News Australia (@SkyNewsAust) Victoria's Public Transport Minister @JacintaAllanMP: I am aware that longer-form interviews do not screen on the Sky News service provided to @metrotrains. The advice I had was that the interview was screened.



MORE: https://t.co/jTJuRZu8uk #newsday pic.twitter.com/2JsMe4IhiR

In a stunning display of solidarity with Sky, Rupert Murdoch’s print organs fell into line, accusing the government of “Stalinist” tactics and “retrograde socialist-style censorship”.



The Herald Sun, being the hometown paper of the Victorian metro railway ban, devoted its front page, opinion page and editorial to the story, skewering Allan for muddling her answers in an interview on Sky.

The front page splash pivoted from blasting Allan for banning Sky to a story about everything that was wrong with the trains: overcrowded, delayed and cancelled.

“For a government minister to seek to silence a free media is reckless and dangerous,” the Herald Sun editorialised.



“Ms Allan must reverse her draconian decision, which was based on her political objection to Sky and not on the facts.”

The Australian published a 3,500 word story online, complete with a transcript of the minister’s Sky interview. The paper had four reporters covering every angle for a front page story, and two comment pieces condemning the decision, one from Peter van Onselen and one from Caroline Overington, who wrote: “It’s about punishing Sky. It’s 100 per cent political.”



But it was Bolt who went for the jugular and called for the minister to be sacked “for so misleading the public in attempting to justify such unprecedented censorship”.



Bolt: “So what is the real reason for Labor’s ban? It is because Sky has some conservative presenters, me included, and has covered what the Andrews Government hates — topics such as its weakness on ethnic crime.

“Sky is also part of the same News Corp media group as the Herald Sun, which has infuriated the government by leading the investigation into its weak policing and stealing of taxpayers’ money.

“The Herald Sun is too big to ban, but the government reckons Sky is not. Do not think this is a conspiracy theory.”

The Victorian government can expect the assault to continue apace, especially since Rupert Murdoch, wife Jerry Hall and son Lachlan are said to be arriving in the country this weekend and Murdoch Snr likes to see his mastheads throwing their weight around.

Direct male

Macquarie Media, part of Fairfax Media and almost certainly soon to be part of the proposed Nine media empire, is home to commercial radio’s biggest names.

Ray Hadley, Alan Jones, Neil Mitchell, Ben Fordham, Chris Smith, Steve Price, Ross & John, Ross Greenwood and Tom Elliott fill the airwaves at 2GB, 3AW, 4BC and 6PR.

Elly Baxter (@ellybaxterpr) I just got an email from Macquarie Radio encouraging me to buy radio advertising from them because trust in radio is so high. This is the graphic from the email. pic.twitter.com/xZFQQBioUN

Macquarie sent a glossy prospectus out to media buyers and advertisers recently claiming the network “spoke with 1.9m people every week” through its stations. Just who is doing the talking is clear from the accompanying photograph, which featured nine white men and not a single woman.

“Our News Talk stations are home to Australia’s all-time most successful broadcasters,” the brochure said.

“In a media world where fake news, fake measurement and data security have become critical issues, a recent Galaxy study has revealed the latest findings into consumers’ trust in media. Increasingly, marketers are turning to radio as the medium to trust with their brand message. That’s because consumers trust radio.”

We asked Macquarie’s newish chief executive, Adam Lang, about the photograph. He said the company does employ female broadcasters but admits they are outnumbered by men.

“It is a work in progress to find the best possible presenters for our audience,” Lang said when asked how he justifies the lack of diversity. “We have women presenters such as those below, who are part of our current and next generation of talk radio presenters.”

Lang listed presenters including Erin Molan, Deborah Knight, Diane Dunleavy, Caroline Wilson and Sally Obermeder but they are either casual or off-peak presenters who fill the weekend or night time slots.

Why did the number one radio network in the country choose to represent itself with this image?

“We use different photographs in our trade representation,” Lang said. “These gentlemen represent our most popular current programs.”

Learning curveball

News Corp has rebooted an old tactic in the culture wars: the undercover sting. When you want to expose how the universities are a hotbed of marxism and political correctness, send in a reporter disguised as a student and pick up nuggets of evidence from a spattering of lectures.

The tactic was used back in 2014 by Sharri Markson when she was media editor at the Australian. Markson infamously went undercover at universities in Sydney to expose the so-called leftwing academics who were allegedly indoctrinating students against her employer, News Corp Australia.



Four years on and the Daily Telegraph has repeated the stunt, sending a reporter to infiltrate the top three universities in Sydney “for a first-hand look at campus life”. What did reporter Chris Harris find in his exclusive reports? “A culture of cotton wool and political correctness”, “wacky professors”, “white privilege” and “safe spaces”.

The Daily Telegraph (@dailytelegraph) #EXCLUSIVE: A SYDNEY university lecturer has flippantly advised students to use alternative search engines if they plan to kill themselves in order to cover their digital tracks. Via @Chris____Harris https://t.co/tZn0ZxvR8K

“Universities, once bastions of free speech and spirited inquiry, now treat students like preschool toddlers, teaching them to avoid embarrassing words in sex education, pat dogs to understand racism and keep quiet in classes if they are shy,” was the nonsensical lead in one report.

In another report Harris revealed that media studies lecturer Fiona Martin referred to the work of the late Bill Leak as “vile” and said “may he not rest in peace”. In 2016 Leak’s cartoon of a drunk Aboriginal father who had forgotten his own son’s name was widely labelled as racist, but was defended by the Australian.

The University of Sydney’s vice chancellor Michael Spence has defended Martin’s use of the words vile and racist to refer to the cartoon. “A cartoon that denigrates the bond between a father and his children by suggesting that a whole community of fathers don’t care about their sons, impugning them simply on the basis of race, and implies to the affluent readers of a metropolitan newspaper that generations of social disadvantage and community disruption can be remedied simply with a bit of personal responsibility, is, by any measure vile,” Spence said. “I am proud to work at a university in which people are willing to call that out. I believe that the editors of The Australian should be ashamed to have published the cartoon in the first place, and that they and the editors of the Telegraph should be ashamed to have given it new currency.”



The Tele’s exclusive expose of campus life spawned opinion pieces and follow-ups on Chris Smith’s 2GB program and in the Australian.

The Oz followed with a news story and a comment piece by Leak’s son Johannes, who is now a cartoonist for the paper. Leak Jnr says criticism of the Aboriginal kid cartoon is “a mindless pile-on by virtue-signallers and spiteful conformists who either never saw the cartoon in context or never bothered to understand what it was about”.

Smith – one of the nine men pictured in the Macquarie brochure – asked: “Is this seriously what our students are being taught?”

Wrong call

Fairfax Media announced this week that it is bringing its Sydney Morning Herald and Age subscriber call centre back from the Philippines to an in-house arrangement in October to improve customer service. “The arrangement reflects our business strategy where subscriber growth is a core part of our future success,” the staff were told.

The announcement was supposed to be kept quiet as the Philippines staff had not been told. But the secret plan was busted wide open when they found out via the internal messaging app Slack.

Everything in moderation …

With the resignation of Courier Mail columnist Paul Syvret after 30 years in journalism, News Corp’s pool of moderate voices is looking very shallow. The Courier Mail does run Tory Shepherd and Terry Sweetman, who can in no way be described as rightwing, and the Australian has Peter van Onselen and Troy Bramston.

But Syvret has been a lone voice of small “L” liberalism in the News tabloid stable and certainly in Queensland, where he often butted heads with colleague Des Houghton.

He didn’t miss in his last column (headlined “Cry, my beloved and sadly divided country”), taking a rare stab at two big names of the empire – Sky News and Andrew Bolt.

Paul Syvret (@PSyvret) Some personal news: I've just filed my last ever @couriermail column before finishing up on Friday. My choice, as after 30 odd years in newspapers it is time to seek out new, though as yet unidentified, horizons. 1/2

“We have become an Australia where not just those with somewhat extreme views, but a full-blown bloody Nazi who wants Hitler and Mein Kampf in our classrooms is given time on national television to air his views on immigration, praising minister Peter Dutton in the process,” Syvret wrote.

“This in the same short few days in which newspaper columnists have warned darkly of ethnic and religious ghettos, blamed migrants for traffic congestion, and all but called for a return of the White Australia policy.”

But not all the readers make Syvret feel at home. One wrote below the line: “Paul, what in heavens name has twisted you so much against this great country. It is a country that has given hope and opportunity to millions of its own people and others from all around the world.”

Another said: “You are leftwing in your opinions and I tend to disagree on most of what you said. Guess I’m the ugly Australian you write about.” And another pulled no punches: “Thank goodness this is your last post, you won’t be missed I can assure you.”

And they are just the comments that got through the moderators.