Nick Cater, editor of The Weekend Australian, is one of the lesser known Murdoch editorial heavyweights in Australia.
But, by jingo, hasn’t the former BBC correspondent been doing his bit to establish public fealty to the Murdoch family during their time of need.
Cater’s attempt to discredit The AFR’s pay-TV piracy series across various sections of Saturday’s paper was masochistic and sycophantic.
There was a news story across the top of page one complete with a large out-of-date picture of The AFR’s resident Murdoch expert, Neil Chenoweth.
We then had a two-page feature in the Inquirer section attacking Chenoweth and a full-length editorial which was more focused on defending News Corp and Rupert Murdoch. Cater himself produced a comment piece attacking the BBC, his mate Brendan O’Neil backed up with a savage sledge of the Leveson inquiry and there was also another page one story suggesting moral equivalence with The Age accessing the ALP’s Victorian data base.
With the likes of John Durie and Mark Day refusing to defend a lost cause, it was left to the relatively junior business reporter Anthony Klan to plough through 4000 stolen emails from NDS published on AFR.com.
Miraculously, with complete independence and no conflict of interest, Klan concluded on page one that Chenoweth was a beat-up merchant who had over-reached.
After years of battering critics into submission by sheer force and repetition, News Corp’s thuggish operators have still not adjusted to the new reality. Politicians, regulators and competitors aren’t going to be stood over any longer. They will fight back.
It doesn’t matter how many Cut & Paste attacks, cartoons or pictures of Chenoweth and his editor, Michael Stutchbury, are run, the current leadership at Fairfax seems robust and forthright. Stutchbury produced another editorial today defending The AFR’s coverage of News Corp.
When the various emailed questions from The Australian started coming through last week, The AFR could have curled up into a ball. Instead, it decided to open a new front.
Saturday’s paper included another stunning Chenoweth feature, this time detailing how the pay-TV piracy shenanigans unfolded in the US.
And unlike The Australian, which has suffered a slump in online readership since erecting its paywall, The AFR published Chenoweth’s feature free online and it is already the most popular story on AFR.com for the past week as thousands of readers globally poured over the detail. Well done, Mr Cater.
When you are up against a bloke who has already written a 100,000-word manuscript for publication in a book later this year after following a story for 10 years, did Cater seriously think a half-baked analysis of one element — the NDS emails — by a junior reporter would do the job?
Cater wrote this piece for Brendan O’Neil’s UK ezine Spiked shortly after the BBC aired its original Panorama piece on the NDS dirty tricks campaign against News Corp’s global competitors.
He described the Panorama journalists and Lee Gibling, the hacker that News Corp recruited to run the notorious THOIC.com piracy website on its behalf, as follows:
A team of so-called respectable journalists used secretly recorded private conversations and stolen correspondence to make damaging allegations that have since been comprehensively denied. Their threadbare case relied on the testimony of a chain-smoking, whisky-drinking pirate who has been living in exile from the UK for nearly 10 years and was corroborated with information furnished by a convicted criminal.
OK, so let’s just take one excerpt from Klan’s feature on Saturday as he attempted to claim Chenoweth was selectively quoting from various NDS emails:
“But the rest of the email makes clear there were sound commercial reasons for de-linking the signals since Irdeto could be hacked:
An independent assessment of the issues with Irdeto, security failings, can be professionally and independently put in by ADSR. This will be totally convincing. We do not want simulcrypt in our lives.”
The Australian doesn’t seem to realise that ADSR is Oliver Kommerling’s company. Oliver was the German super-hacker hired by NDS to train an Israeli-based team of pirates to crack rival codes. We can believe Oliver because The Weekend Australian tells us he’s professional and independent, not some chain-smoking, whisky-drinking pirate on the run. And that’s why Chenoweth quotes him so extensively explaining the nefarious things he did for NDS to destroy its competitors.
Unsurprisingly, Cater and his wife Rebecca Weisser, The Australian’s opinion page editor, were working hard yesterday dedicating all of today’s Cut & Paste to Chenoweth’s Saturday feature.
The professional and independent Kommerling was back to being someone whose case can be dismissed as the “unsubstantiated word of hackers”.
I would love to hear Rupert Murdoch and long-serving NDS chairman Abe Peled comprehensively rebut everything that Oliver Kommerling has alleged.
Similarly, what is the official News Corp response — not the anonymous Cater-Weisser effort in Cut & Paste, to Chenoweth’s piece in The AFR on Saturday, which explained how the statute of limitations helped News Corp fend off the Echostar piracy court case in California.
Then again, this was Rupert in year five of News Corp’s comprehensive denial strategy with phone hacking at the AGM in October 2010:
Rupert Murdoch: we have very very strict rules. There was an incident more than 5 years ago. The person who bought a bugged phone conversation was immediately fired and in fact he subsequently went to jail. There has been two parliamentary inquiries, which have found no further evidence or any other thing at all. If anything was to come to light, we challenge people to give us evidence, and no one has been able to. If any evidence comes to light, we will take immediate action like we took before.
Shareholder question: did you read the 5000-word piece in The New York Times claiming they had spoken to no less than 12 former editors and reporters for the News of the World, confirming that the practice was wide spread?
Rupert: No.
Shareholder question: The actual committee said in its report, there was “deliberate obfuscation” by our executives, there was “collective amnesia” by the executives and you’ve just demonstrated this again, and this point ….
Rupert Murdoch: I’m sorry. Journalists who have been fired, who are unhappy, or work for other organisations — I don’t take them as an authority, and least of all I don’t take The New York Times as authority which is the most motivated of all.
Which is precisely why the laughable drivel published in The Weekend Australian on Saturday should be filed away for future reference when we look back and reflect on the rise and fall of a rogue Australian media mogul.
On Jonathan Green’s (yes, former Crikey ed) Sunday morning slot on ABC-RN there was a discussion with three people, one of whom (name escapes me) admitted he had a 30 year hero-worship of Rupert and another was “Professor” Judith Sloan (that’s an Adjunct Professorship at the Institute of Applied Economic and Social Research; the public may not be aware but an AP is worth the proverbial bucket of warm spit, except of course for those who have the need to primp up their pompousness to the clueless; as a former AP myself I understand.).
As usual Sloan went on an all out attack on the anti-Murdoch enquiries in the UK, calling Tom Watson a clown and other slurs. During none of this or in Green’s introduction of her to the program was Sloan’s principle paying job as economics commentator for The Australian mentioned This position was achieved after Green gave her a regular (weekly) gig on the ABC-Drum last year, following a pattern set up earlier by Green providing high-frequency airtime to Nikki Savva and Glen Milne, (even Jo Nova and Gavin Atkins though these only get occasional pieces in The Australian but it gives one an idea about quality thresholds).
Sloan in now a regular resident “expert” on Green’s radio slot but one wonders for how long. As anyone who sees her modus operandus, for example on QandA, I suspect she is rapidly burning out her audience tolerance threshold, not to mention any other panellists. One suspects Green has trouble finding another expert to balance her presence because who would really want to appear with her? Just a few weeks back on the Sunday radio program Tom Switzer, nominally in the same economic-philosophical camp as Sloan (and fellow scribe in The Australian), copped a tirade of abuse from her which Green mildly attempted to moderate to no avail. Just as on QandA she deploys her loud mocking and sneering laughter over the top of the other speaker.
Ah, our ABC, Fair and Balanced as ever.
Some people say that the Australian and associated newspapers as well as Sky News are the arm of an evil media empire headed by a not fit and proper person to run a media business.
God knows what media we are going to have in the future, but what we have is plainly done. Finished. This whole shouting match is typical of what has happened to media. If they had any sense of purpose both the Oz and the AFR would have ignored each other and let story sit. But every day we get truckloads of newsprint full of rubbish: all of it the reflection of reckless self-importance and mind-numbingly dull speculation. Over-run with columnists, edited by puffed-up prigs who spend their time imitating personas they’ve read about (Beaverbrook, Hearst, et al), they barely notice that no one is even vaguely interested. Writers like these (including Mayne himself) who preen and posture but are really no more than pimps for spin. Where are the reporters, reporting. News that makes you think or even have a laugh. An interview that had someone saying something interesting. Some respect for the reader? The failure continues and soon they will certainly die.
As for the AFR, they made no attempt to tell anyone what all that NDS crap is really about, why it is important, why the heavily damaged competitors took no action, etc etc. Looks like Stutchbury just picked up his excitement joystick and ambled over to the AFR with exactly the same breathlessly turgid agenda that he had at the Oz. (And I suspect with exactly the same impact on the political writing staff). And, of course, with a band of hugely uninspiring delinquents from the Oz he has filled the AFR with picture bylines (some scary) of people who shout at their readers. I imagine the revolution is working a treat, much as it did in France. Known there as the terror.
I am now only able to rely on a few little web sites in Oz and some great international media for my news.