Sydney Morning Herald editor Bevan Shields (Image: Nine/Private Media)

Walkley on by Crikey attended Australian journalism’s night of nights on Friday, watching Samantha Maiden deservedly pick up the Gold Walkley for her reporting on sexual assault and harassment in Parliament, and, criminally, Crikey‘s Cam Wilson fail to pick up an award despite all the work he put into hacking the process.

Several journalistic luminaries — among them Louise Milligan and John Lyons — put in an extremely respectable shift on the dance floor and while sadly no one offered us cocaine or tried to drunkenly shove anyone from the stage, apparently one high-profile journo tried vaping for the first time. Not really the same, huh?

But one notable absentee from this glittering occasion was Sydney Morning Herald editor Bevan Shields, despite the fact that a name tag and a chair had been set aside for him.

Maybe he didn’t much feel like dancing after the week he’s had — copping a great deal of valid criticism for insisting the train workers lockout in Sydney was a strike, blocking people who pointed this out on Twitter, and, even more damaging, apparently ignoring several colleagues who internally said the same thing. Or maybe he got locked out?

Taking out the trash Friday afternoon, while our news feeds were otherwise occupied, was a good time for the Registered Organisations Commission to quietly drop its investigation on historical donations made by the Australian Workers Union.

In October 2017, the Australian Federal Police raided the Australian Workers Union offices, in front of the waiting media, who had been tipped off by a member of then-employment minister Michaelia Cash’s office. Cash’s office had called the nominally independent Registered Organisations Commission’s attention to alleged improper donations to GetUp! during then-opposition leader Bill Shorten’s time as AWU secretary (which had been a decade earlier). The whole thing was a long-running embarrassment for the Turnbull government in particular, and it’s unsurprising it got the Friday afternoon treatment.

Keep on Tuckering They can be a slow old lot over at Fox News — it was only late last Thursday that long-time pro-Putin commentator Tucker Carlson hit reverse gear and started criticising the Russian president.

“Vladimir Putin started this war, so whatever the context of the decision that he made, he did it. He fired the first shots. He is to blame for what we’re seeing tonight in Ukraine,” he told viewers.

Which is interesting, given Putin has had no more reliable ally in the US media than Carlson. It’s “not un-American” to support Putin; Democrats will find you guilty of treason if you don’t hate Putin; “Ukraine is not a democracy”; Ukraine is a “puppet” of the West. The peak was a truly bizarre rant linking Putin to “cancel culture”.

Has Putin ever called me a racist? Has he threatened to get me fired for disagreeing with him? Has he shipped every middle-class job in my town to Russia? Did he manufacture a worldwide pandemic that wrecked my business and kept me indoors for two years? Is he teaching my children to embrace racial discrimination? Is he making fentanyl? Is he trying to snuff out Christianity?

This remarkable about-face was missed in The Australia media commentary today.