Monday 13 October 2014

Secret agent Sharri uncovers seditious academics not praising the Sun King

Secret agent Sharri uncovers seditious academics not praising the Sun King



10





Media editor for The Australian, Sharri Markson, bravely goes where she has never been before — journalism school. Associate Professor Martin Hirst describes her shocking revelations.



THERE IS A FIFTH DIMENSION; a parallel universe that revolves around a
decrepit, dying and dangerous orb of hot gasses that is liable to
frequent explosions raining down hot solar gusts of bile and venom on
any random planetary object that displeases the ancient Sun King.




Welcome to the universe of News Corp; a solar system cut off from the
rest of creation by an impenetrable wall of bias and a cult-like
devotion to a host of terrible Gods.




This parallel universe defies the laws of gravity and the morality of
humans; it relies instead on the ancient and immutable laws of
Murdochracy.




Even those who have served the Sun King with loyalty for many years
live out their lives in fear of his vengeful minions. As former Times editor Andrew Neil famously wrote,
to lose favour with the Sun King; to break the unwritten rules of
Murdochracy is to be cast out from the universe to while away your days
among mere mortals.




All life revolves around the Sun King; all authority comes from
him. He is the only one to whom allegiance must be owed, and he expects
his word to be final. There are no other references but him. He is the
only benchmark, and anybody of importance reports directly to him.
Normal management structures—all the traditional lines of authority,
communication, and decision-making in the modern business corporation—do
not matter. The Sun King is all that matters.







So we know that to cross the Sun King or one of his ambitious
courtiers means that vengeance will be slow and brutal. It will also go
on for a long, long time. There is no swift beheading; no merciful
bullet to the brain in the rules of the Murdochracy. There is just
eternal, painful torture at the hands of those who are beholden to the
Sun King and who drink deeply from the NewsCorpse kool-aid.




The list of the Sun King’s enemies is long and getting longer; as
older hands die they are replaced by new names. There is no way, except
death, to remove your self from The List.




When your name comes to the top of the list the comets of doom come
hurtling from the orbit of the Sun King to inflict shame and damage.




Today it was the turn of Australia’s journalism educators. Just about
all of them are on The List and subject to frequent meteor showers.




The problem is, as The Australian’s media editor Sharri Markson found out, there is a palpable and unhealthy leftwing bias in journalism and media education.



According to Markson’s EXCLUSIVE in The Australian’s media section this week:



‘Uni media students are getting an anti-Murdoch message.'






Of course, such blaspheming of the Sun King can never go unpunished.



In order to confront the menace of university lecturers in journalism
and media studies saying unkind and critical things about her boss,
Sharri Markson went ‘undercover’. That’s right, she posed as a student
to gain access to a handful of lectures given by staff at the University
of Sydney and Sydney’s University of Technology (UTS).




Over a period of five weeks, The Australian attended some
lectures on an undercover basis and obtained the audio recordings of
other lectures from students.





Wow, powerful journalism from Ms Markson, but we are not told if she
identified herself to the students she ‘obtained’ the lecture recordings
from.




Did she perhaps maintain her cover and gain access to the recordings
on false pretences? You know, like did she pretend that she needed them
to study for her essay or something; a little white lie maybe?






We’ll never know; just like we’ll never know if Ms Markson
interviewed any students for her story and, if so, did she follow the
MEAA Code of Ethics and identify herself according to clause 8:




Use fair, responsible and honest means to obtain
material. Identify yourself and your employer before obtaining any
interview for publication or broadcast. Never exploit a person's
vulnerability or ignorance of media practice.





Markson’s excuse may well be that by going undercover she is absolved
from this clause. That’s a tenuous argument, but it can be made if
there is a strong public interest in the story that’s being pursued.






Frankly, it’s hard to see much real public interest in what Ms Markson wrote as a result of her experiences in the classroom.



I also tweeted @sharrimarkson to ask if she took any notice of these following clauses too (numbers 4, 5 & 6):



Do not allow personal interest, or
any belief, commitment, payment, gift or benefit, to undermine your
accuracy, fairness or independence.


Disclose conflicts of interest that
affect, or could be seen to affect, the accuracy, fairness or
independence of your journalism.  Do not improperly use a journalistic
position for personal gain. 


Do not allow advertising or other commercial considerations to undermine accuracy, fairness or independence.


I think this is important because clearly Markson’s personal interest is in serving the Sun King and his minions – in particular her editor Chris Mitchell.







There could well be a conflict of interest here to be
disclosed too. The interest of News Corp is to deflect any criticism,
particularly informed criticism from people who know a thing or two
about the news media. Finally, I am pretty sure that accuracy, fairness and independence would be undermined in this story by the Sun King’s commercial considerations. I’m sure that if Sharri Markson overlooked the MEAA code it was inadvertent and that explanations will be forthcoming.




Well, when you orbit close to the Sun King, as Markson does in the constellation of Terror Australis, your vision can become a little blurred, the heat and the sweat in your eyes can also overheat the brain.



That is why the kool-aid is supplied in industrial quantities in the
NewsCorpse bunkers. It appears to be a cooling drink, soothing for the
parched throat, but it is really a deadly and corrosive poison excreted
from the bile ducts of the Sun King himself.




Not content with the exposure her EXCLUSIVE would receive in The Australian – which as we know is an underperforming and loss-making newspaper – Markson also went onto the 2GB
program of her fellow Sun King devotee Miranda Devine to expound for
nearly seven minutes on the “load of garbage” being taught at USYD and
UTS.




The dead giveaway though – the reason why we should all just laugh
out loud at this pathetic attempt at (ahem) ‘journalism’ – is the faux moral outrage that Markson and Devine express at they way that the reporting of climate change is taught in these “most prestigious” of universities.




According to Markson, climate science is ideological:





Journalism students should always be taught to present a balanced
point of view. Climate change, there are about seven or eight slides
that the students are shown where they’re told to present only one side
of a [sic] argument and the lecturer was very strong on this point and
she said, she likened it to the topacco [sic] debate in the past, even
to racism in ah, in ah in the American, south America [sic] saying that
if we give the skeptics air time it gives the perception that there’s
this raging debate going on on global warming when there’s not. So, even
from 18 years old, young students are being fed a very, very left-wing
ideology.





Yep, so not only is Ms Markson a super-sleuth undercover reporter, she’s an expert on global warming and she knows it is a “very, very left-wing ideology”.
Of course she does and of course it is because that’s been the
editorial line in the Sun King’s newspapers for a decade or more.




Markson says she was also disappointed about how critical the targeted lecturers were about News Corp.



Again, no surprises there. Sharri Markson has literally grown up inside the court of the Sun King



The daughter of a famous media insider and spin doctor to the stars,
Markson now has an exhalted place in the firmament of loyal minor
planets orbiting the Sun King. She is a regular guest on Andrew Bolt’s
Channel 10 show too.






As a trusted acolyte, Markson would know very well the lessons of the Murdochracy; no criticism, no dissent and no questioning of the Sun King’s authority.



As a result of internalizing the lore of the Murdochian alternative
universe, Ms Markson finds it almost beyond comprehension that such
criticism is allowed within the journalism classroom.




Students were left with the impression that all The Daily
Telegraph, The Australian and other News Corp papers did was to serve
Rupert Murdoch’s interests.





Incomprehensible really.



The simple beauty of assassination by stealth is that it plays well to bleachers









However, the flipside is that it is also quite easy for a counter-narrative to spread via social media too.









You can access other critiques of Ms Markson’s performance on Crikey, at Birdee magazine and at Junkee, among others.



You can also read a statement
from the journalism educator’s professional association, the Journalism
Education & Research Association of Australia (JERAA).




You can read more by Dr Martin Hirst on his blog Ethical Martini and follow him on Twitter @ethicalmartini.



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This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Australia License



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