Julian Assange court
(Image: EPA/stringer)

Filling the gaps Just under a year ago Crikey posed a question. Quite apart from concerning a potential 175-year prison sentence for an Australian Walkley winner, the Julian Assange story was simply great copy. It had spies and conspiracy, abduction, poisoning. So why was it relegated to page 20-ish of Australian papers? See now the revelations in Yahoo! News this morning which details the personal interest Donald Trump’s CIA director, Mike Pompeo, took to get revenge on Assange for the Wikileaks “Vault 7” revelations, the biggest data loss in the agency’s history:

Some senior officials inside the CIA and the Trump administration even discussed killing Assange, going so far as to request ‘sketches’ or ‘options’ for how to assassinate him. Discussions over kidnapping or killing Assange occurred ‘at the highest levels’ of the Trump administration, said a former senior counterintelligence official. ‘There seemed to be no boundaries.’

We’re glad to see someone taking a detailed look, but it’s embarrassing we left it to the Americans.

Stenographer watch Part 478 or so in our series cataloguing just how far the press gallery will go to pretend Scott Morrison has some specific policy aimed at reducing emissions. This morning we got yet another: front page, an above the fold splash under the headline “PM’s clean energy export plan”. Even by the standards of this kind of coverage, the piece is thin. If you can detect anything of the sort in the following, you may have a future in journalism:

… the prime minister told The Australian he was advocating for climate action involving realistic ‘plans, not just a number and a date’.

Asked if he would commit to a specific climate target, Morrison told The Australian: ‘I can assure you we will have a plan.’

‘People will know what we will be doing and what that will be achieving. We believe that will address what they would like to be achieved.’

Crying Fowler Just as for every action there must an equal and opposite reaction, for every Labor Party faction drama that makes it into the papers there must be an equal and opposite bit of backgrounding.

So it was over the weekend, with The Sydney Morning Herald running a counterpoint to the general tone of incredulity regarding the parachuting of Kristina Keneally into the multicultural seat of Fowler. Ah, but Tu Le, the lawyer of Vietnamese heritage who had to make way for Keneally and had been largely seen as the victim of internal Labor nonsense, is also an outsider. So say four Labor figures who support Keneally, three of whom declined to put their name to that support.

This piece reveals that Le moved to the electorate of Fowler only last year, after years of living miles away in … the neighbouring suburbs of Belmore, Bankstown and Birrong.

“There are plenty of other talented people who have been here for 20 years,” says one anonymous branch member. “People are really angry. People in Fowler are saying: why are people in Fowler not good enough?” says another.

Which could be fair enough, but no one in the piece is able to connect that though to an explanation of why it’s preferable to instead select someone who lives in exclusive hideaway Scotland Island, which is several times further away from, say, Cabramatta than the above suburbs.