Chris Mitchell: secret anti-war warrior. The Australian editor-in-chief Chris Mitchell may well be an influential man, but he doesn’t always get his own way. Take the Iraq War, launched 10 years ago in March. Anyone reading The Oz‘s editorials at that time would have assumed Mitchell was a supporter of the war. “Time has now arrived for disarming Iraq,” bellowed an editorial on March 19. “A war that we can fight with a clear conscience,” the paper said on March 21. A day later, the paper opined:

“Those who claim that the result of the US-led coalition taking action against Saddam Hussein, without the explicit support of the UN Security Council, will be a more dangerous and unstable world have got things completely wrong.”

But Mitchell was not a fan of the war, according to The Oz’s former opinion editor Tom Switzer. In The Spectator last month, Switzer recalls Mitchell “privately believed that Iraq was an unnecessary distraction from the broader fight against Islamist terrorism”. Switzer also opposed the war on “realist” grounds. So if The Oz’s editor-in-chief and opinion editor were both Iraq war doves, why did the paper back it so forcefully?

Within News Corp, it seems, the power of the editor simply didn’t extend to opposing the war. All News’ 175 newspapers supported the war, according to The Independent. “Although our editorials were strongly hawkish, we had a range of views on the opinion page,” Switzer tells Crikey. “We weren’t as hawkish as, say, The London Times or New York Post. Chris deserves big brownie points for allowing that pluralism.” — Matthew Knott 

Leigh Sales on how to beat Leigh Sales. She’s one of the most formidable inquisitors on television, so how should MPs handle a 7.30 interview? Leigh Sales offered tips via TV Tonight:

“People find it so annoying when politicians don’t answer the question, so I would say to them try to engage with what you’ve been asked. The audience isn’t dumb. If I ask a pretty basic question they can see straight away that you’re trying to dodge it or shift the goalposts. I think people sometimes forget when they sit down that it’s not just me that they have to deal with. A million people are forming an opinion as we go.

“The other thing is, obviously, try to be well-prepared. I try to be well-prepared, so don’t come on thinking it’s going to be easy. Come on thinking that I’m going to push you as hard as I possibly can. Anyone who has watched me knows that I like to come out with a very big punch straight away. I like the disarming hard questions straight off the top. I don’t tend to ease people in. I’ve seen a few guests been taken aback by the opening question. Often I’m more blunt, or direct, or rude than I would be in real life.”

Ding Dong, the Witch is (mostly) Dead. After a Herculean effort from people with a little too much time on their hands, the 1939 song from The Wizard of Oz made it to number two on the BBC charts, practically obliging the BBC to play it on Sunday night. This sent the BBC into a flatspin panic, trying to find a way to not censor it while not, as the broadcaster saw it, being used as the means to an end of a political point.

The solution was, of course, the worst possible one — a journalist introduced a seven-second clip of the (51-second) song, giving a politics 101 summary of Thatcher’s career and the reasons behind the sudden rise of an ancient musical aside. Which, for the Dingdongites, was success beyond their wildest dreams — throwing an entire state apparatus into exceptional behaviour when faced with a social media campaign started by a handful of people. Had the BBC let it go with the DJ simply noting it was the result of a social media campaign, it would have been a fizzer.

Interestingly, the confusion is not mere political cowardice — it’s a result of the changing nature of media and society. The charts are based on the idea of one-way media — that they measure the spontaneous consumption of a mass public (usually, as fixed by record companies). Now, they are part of a more reflexive, two-way media process. The implicit idea that a chart topper is a problem because people did not buy it for the song itself is part of that necessary fiction.

What would the BBC do if multiple groups started mounting such campaigns — if PETA pushed Meat is Murder to number one? What if the BNP got, I dunno, White Riot to the charts, bending the song’s meaning in the process? Who gets played, and who gets annotated? — Guy Rundle

‘You call that a bad business decision?’ In another chapter in a story vastly more interesting than any of his movies, alleged actor and long-time Australian Tax Office adversary Paul Hogan is having difficulty getting his hands on the tens of millions of dollars he stashed in offshore tax havens to avoid Australian authorities. Recent reports suggest Hogan, 78, regrets hiring a man whose professional experience includes “mastermind” and “international fugitive” as the person in control of the barbecue shrimp advocate’s vast fortunes, amassed largely from Crocodile Dundee royalties.

Hogan’s ongoing financial issues mirror the escapades undertaken by his tax-dodging character in the 2005 comedy Strange Bedfellows, in the sense they have generated few laughs and a feeling of festering resentment from the small number of people who followed the saga. According to Fairfax, Swiss newspaper Le Matin Dimanche reported that Hogan’s $US34 million bounty “has been lying for almost 20 years in account number 379854 at the Corner Bank in Lausanne”, leading some to speculate why the paper didn’t go even further with specific details — such as the branch’s opening and closing hours and the name of the manager overseeing the account.

There is already an international warrant out for Phillip “the bowler hat Englishman” Eddlishaw, Hogan’s tax “advisor”. But, Fairfax reports, “now the international fugitive has the Australian actor on his tail”, suggesting Hogan will don his iconic oiled leather hat and come after Eddlishaw armed with a hunting knife and an array of irritating jokes. — Luke Buckmaster (read the full story at Cinetology)

The Voice the rise of the imaginary talent. Television doesn’t trust us anymore. It used to be that if someone was good, we noticed. If somebody was awful, we noticed too. And if someone stood up and proclaimed that Jennifer Love Hewitt was television’s Meryl Streep or Nicole Kidman had the greatest soul voice of our time, we’d call bullshit. Rejoice, fellow citizens, for you no longer need to rely on your own judgement. Not only does television no longer trust us, it thinks we’re about as intelligent as a Ziploc bag of cat hair.

Most weeknights, for anyone too lazy to trundle on down to their local RSL karaoke night, Channel Nine’s The Voice throws up nine or 10 singers, all of them fresh from some segment producer’s office with a good story, and very few with any real charisma. Somebody wails at the very top of his or her vocal range, holding notes for applause and/or as long as he or she can, the judges hit their buttons, and those giant Doctor Claw chairs whirl around dramatically.

These (mostly) amateur singers get pointless platitudes sprayed all over them like silly string; they’re “bad-ass”, or they “just really owned it”, or maybe Seal admired their “sense of fight”. Praise is also a mayonnaise, which is helpful to remember when enduring the sheer volume of it heaped on these uneven, uncharismatic, off-key performances. Delta Goodrem, Joel Madden, Seal and Ricky Martin preside over what amounts to little more than a shopping centre talent quest with very good lighting, an inexplicably Scottish host, and plenty of motorised furniture. — Byron Bache (read the full story at Wires and Lights)

Guide is blind on TV episodes. The Guide in yesterday’s Sydney Morning Herald has done it again, promoting a TV series that has already started: Mrs Biggs, the mini series that debuted on Seven on Sunday night (and 21 minutes or so late, mind you) to disappointing figures. It was only a month or so ago The Guide had as its main story Parade’s End (Nine), which had started the previous Wednesday, bombed and was flicked to GEM before it was on the cover.

And this is the synopsis for Downton Abbey on Sunday night in The Guide: “After the Crawleys head to the Scottish Highlands to celebrate Christmas with Rose’s family, tensions bubble and a new crisis erupts.” And the final episode of next Sunday: “The Crawleys head to the Scottish Highlands for Christmas to enjoy the hospitality of Rose’s family, but tensions boil over as a new crisis unfolds.” See, Seven split the 2012 Christmas episode into two parts — The Guide didn’t bother telling its readers. — Glenn Dyer