At the Sydney Morning Herald and the Age, it seems, revenge is a dish best served cold.

Three years after the former feminist columnist Clementine Ford walked away from her column and accused the Herald of losing its independence, an interview with the author was spiked after it had been written by an Age journalist, published online and printed in Saturday’s Spectrum.

On Thursday the interview Kerrie O’Brien conducted over lunch with Ford about her appeared online, complete with a photo of the $300 lunch tab. The hard copy of the article was ready to go too, as it is printed ahead of the news section. But soon the online story had disappeared and that particular page in Spectrum was torn up and re-printed.

Tory Maguire, the executive editor of the Herald and the Age, confirmed the story had been pulled at the 11th hour.

“Clementine Ford spent years making vile and personal attacks on the journalists and editors of the Sydney Morning Herald and the Age after the mastheads stopped publishing her column,” Maguire told Weekly Beast. “I had knocked back a pitch for an interview with her but there was a breakdown in communication and it was commissioned and published in error. I have pulled it from Spectrum and taken it down out of respect for my team.”

The animosity was sparked by Ford’s harsh criticism of the Herald on Twitter, and in an article for Schwarz Media’s the Saturday Paper. Ford was angered by getting an official warning from her editor for calling Scott Morrison a “fucking disgrace” on social media and said she quit because of the “cultural shift” at the newspapers, which are now owned by Nine Entertainment.

She went on to write that “the change in political culture at Fairfax began long before the television network set its sights on establishing a newspaper presence”.

“To my mind, the trajectory traces back to the appointment in March 2018 of James Chessell as Fairfax’s group executive editor of Australian Metro Publishing … he has also been an adviser to former Liberal treasurer Joe Hockey, as well as a known associate of many in business and finance,” she wrote.

Chessell, since promoted to Nine’s managing director of publishing – with responsibility for the Australian Financial Review, the Sydney Morning Herald, the Age, Brisbane Times and WAToday – as you can imagine is no fan of Ford’s.

Ford, who had no idea what had happened to the piece when we contacted her, was disappointed readers wouldn’t get to read about the “lovely chat” she had with O’Brien.

She told Weekly Beast that “if something as gentle and inoffensive as a piece about love can be spiked as retaliation against valid journalistic critique” then “I do think readers should think carefully about what that means”.

She maintained her criticism of the masthead had never been directed at its staff but mainly at Chessell and senior management.

We are used to journalists quitting reporting to join the so-called dark side as advisers and lobbyists but when they go the other way it can ruffle feathers.

Read more:

https://www.theguardian.com/media/2022/jan/28/it-took-three-years-but-the-smh-finally-got-its-revenge-on-clementine-ford-kind-of

So... What does this means? It means THAT EVERY STORY (and political advertising) YOU READ IN NEWSPAPERS OR EVEN IN BOOKS have been manipulated to suit an outcome of "belief". Every politician is (should be) aware of this... and they know their own manipulation of YOUR brain.

Turn to a video on QUANTUM MECHANICS ON YOUTUBE and Clive Palmer appears as a paid advertiser before you can watch gambolling Protons. You have to watch morons (MORONS) before your show on protons... Morons don't exist on the QUANTUM MECHANICS chart!!!!!!!. CLIVE PALMER is the maximum Joseph Goebbels in Aussie politics with his mention of "FREEDOM" on auto-repeat. FREEDOOM? SURE... Clive is BULLSHIT by excellence... and journalists will promote or propagate the bullshit for who-knows what pocket money or fun, especially with their brain deficiency... Craig Kelly in the AUP? Give us a brake! I mean a break, STOP, but a brake will do!!! Craig Kelly and Clive Palmer do not care about you, but about how well they can "FOOL" YOU...

You can do better than these morons. Vote for the fence post number 247 in your paddock if you have to chose an important partner for your intellectual political choice. A vote for Palmer is a vote for Scummo, and we don't want Scummo to stay planted in the Prime Ministerial position like a dead fly squashed on your window pane. Wipe it out...

FREE JULIAN ASSANGE NOW !!!!!!!!!!!!!

BY Glenn Greenwald

American liberals are obsessed with finding ways to silence and censor their adversaries. Every week, if not every day, they have new targets they want de-platformed, banned, silenced, and otherwise prevented from speaking or being heard (by "liberals,” I mean the term of self-description used by the dominant wing of the Democratic Party). 

For years, their preferred censorship tactic was to expand and distort the concept of "hate speech” to mean "views that make us uncomfortable,” and then demand that such “hateful” views be prohibited on that basis. For that reason, it is now common to hear Democrats assert, falsely, that the First Amendment's guarantee of free speech does not protect “hate speech." Their political culture has long inculcated them to believe that they can comfortably silence whatever views they arbitrarily place into this category without being guilty of censorship.

Constitutional illiteracy to the side, the “hate speech” framework for justifying censorship is now insufficient because liberals are eager to silence a much broader range of voices than those they can credibly accuse of being hateful. That is why the newest, and now most popular, censorship framework is to claim that their targets are guilty of spreading “misinformation” or “disinformation.” These terms, by design, have no clear or concise meaning. Like the term “terrorism,” it is their elasticity that makes them so useful. 

When liberals’ favorite media outlets, from CNN and NBC to The New York Times and The Atlantic, spend four years disseminating one fabricated Russia story after the next — from the Kremlin hacking into Vermont's heating system and Putin's sexual blackmail over Trump to bounties on the heads of U.S. soldiers in Afghanistan, the Biden email archive being "Russian disinformation,” and a magical mystery weapon that injures American brains with cricket noises — none of that is "disinformation” that requires banishment. Nor are false claims that COVID's origin has proven to be zoonotic rather than a lab leak, the vastly overstated claim that vaccines prevent transmission of COVID, or that Julian Assange stole classified documentsand caused people to die. Corporate outlets beloved by liberals are free to spout serious falsehoods without being deemed guilty of disinformation, and, because of that, do so routinely.

This "disinformation" term is reserved for those who question liberal pieties, not for those devoted to affirming them. That is the real functional definition of “disinformation” and of its little cousin, “misinformation.” It is not possible to disagree with liberals or see the world differently than they see it. The only two choices are unthinking submission to their dogma or acting as an agent of "disinformation.” Dissent does not exist to them; any deviation from their worldview is inherently dangerous — to the point that it cannot be heard.

The data proving a deeply radical authoritarian strain in Trump-era Democratic Party politics is ample and have been extensively reported here. Democrats overwhelmingly trust and love the FBI and CIA. Polls show they overwhelmingly favor censorship of the internet not only by Big Tech oligarchs but also by the state. Leading Democratic Party politicians have repeatedly subpoenaed social media executives and explicitly threatened them with legal and regulatory reprisals if they do not censor more aggressively — a likely violation of the First Amendment given decades of case law ruling that state officials are barred from coercing private actors to censor for them, in ways the Constitution prohibits them from doing directly. 

Democratic officials have used the pretexts of COVID, “the insurrection," and Russia to justify their censorship demands. Both Joe Biden and his Surgeon General, Vivek Murthy, have "urged” Silicon Valley to censor more when asked about Joe Rogan and others who air what they call “disinformation” about COVID. They cheered the use of pro-prosecutor tacticsagainst Michael Flynn and other Russiagate targets; made a hero out of the Capitol Hill Police officer who shot and killed the unarmed Ashli Babbitt; voted for an additional $2 billion to expand the functions of the Capitol Police; have demanded and obtained lengthy prison sentences and solitary confinement even for non-violent 1/6 defendants; and even seek to import the War on Terror onto domestic soil.

Given the climate prevailing in the American liberal faction, this authoritarianism is anything but surprising. For those who convince themselves that they are not battling mere political opponents with a different ideology but a fascist movement led by a Hitler-like figure bent on imposing totalitarianism — a core, defining belief of modern-day Democratic Party politics — it is virtually inevitable that they will embrace authoritarianism. When a political movement is subsumed by fear — the Orange Hitler will put you in camps and end democracy if he wins again — then it is not only expected but even rational to embrace authoritarian tactics including censorship to stave off this existential threat. Fear always breeds authoritarianism, which is why manipulating and stimulating that human instinct is the favorite tactic of political demagogues.

And when it comes to authoritarian tactics, censorship has become the liberals’ North Star. Every week brings news of a newly banished heretic. Liberals cheered the news last week that Google's YouTube permanently banned the extremely popular video channel of conservative commentator Dan Bongino. His permanent ban was imposed for the crime of announcing that, moving forward, he would post all of his videos exclusively on the free speech video platform Rumble after he received a seven-day suspension from Google's overlords for spreading supposed COVID “disinformation.” What was Bongino's prohibited view that prompted that suspension? He claimed cloth masks do not work to stop the spread of COVID, a view sharedby numerous experts and, at least in part, by the CDC. When Bongino disobeyed the seven-day suspension by using an alternative YouTube channel to announce his move to Rumble, liberals cheered Google's permanent ban because the only thing liberals hate more than platforms that allow diverse views are people failing to obey rules imposed by corporate authorities.

It is not hyperbole to observe that there is now a concerted war on any platforms devoted to free discourse and which refuse to capitulate to the demands of Democratic politicians and liberal activists to censor. The spear of the attack are corporate media outlets, who demonize and try to render radioactive any platforms that allow free speech to flourish. When Rumble announced that a group of free speech advocates — including myself, former Democratic Congresswoman Tulsi Gabbard, comedian Bridget Phetasy, former Sanders campaign videographer Matt Orfalea and journalist Zaid Jilani — would produce video content for Rumble, The Washington Post immediately published a hit piece, relying exclusively on a Google-and-Facebook-aligned so-called "disinformation expert” to malign Rumble as "one of the main platforms for conspiracy communities and far-right communities in the U.S. and around the world” and a place “where conspiracies thrive," all caused by Rumble's "allowing such videos to remain on the site unmoderated.” (The narrative about Rumble is particular bizarre since its Canadian founder and still-CEO, Chris Pavlovski created Rumble in 2013 with apolitical goals — to allow small content creators abandoned by YouTube to monetize their content — and is very far from an adherent to right-wing ideology).

The same attack was launched, and is still underway, against Substack, also for the crime of refusing to ban writers deemed by liberal corporate outlets and activists to be hateful and/or fonts of disinformation. After the first wave of liberal attacks on Substack failed — that script was that it is a place for anti-trans animus and harassment — The Post returned this week for round two, with a paint-by-numbers hit piece virtually identical to the one it published last year about Rumble. “Newsletter company Substack is making millions off anti-vaccine content, according to estimates,” blared the sub-headline. “Prominent figures known for spreading misinformation, such as [Joseph] Mercola, have flocked to Substack, podcasting platforms and a growing number of right-wing social media networks over the past year after getting kicked off or restricted on Facebook, Twitter and YouTube,” warned the Post. It is, evidently, extremely dangerous to society for voices to still be heard once Google decrees they should not be.

Read more:

https://greenwald.substack.com/p/the-pressure-campaign-on-spotify

READ FROM TOP.

In Australia, the "Liberals" are the CONservatives. Like their opposing counterpart in the USA, they ALSO try to shut down dissent and alternative view points — and even try to shut down the ABC — HAPPY BIRTHDAY TO YOU ABC — EVEN  if the ABC leans more to the right than the left on average, but tends to also expose the SCOMO tricks of the deceptive political trade.

Plase don't vote for ScoMo's team at the next elections and avoid Clive Palmer like the plague...

FREE JULIAN ASSANGE NOW, MR BIDEN !!!!!!!!