It’s always fun to see the meeja at their salivating, blood-thirsty, xenophobic, ignorant, demonising best, and Brisbane’s bunch have come to the fore since Monday night. You could almost taste the parochial pride that the terror arrests happened here, possibly fuelled by all that State of Origin maroon. We were on CNN. Wow!
The arrest story was leaking like a sieve from early yesterday, probably out of an elected office in Canberra looking over the horizon hoping for a Tampa — for two hours before the Attorney-General made his announcement confirming what just about every media outlet seemed to already know.
The AFP and the Attorney’s media minders were giving away nothing. The vacuum of information created a lot of unhelpful speculation — like that a suspect had been arrested arriving in Brisbane.
Channel 7 won the scoop award, but the gap between the arrest at the airport and Ruddock’s and Beattie’s press conferences did little to aid clear and considered reporting.
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