Rebekah Brooks, once Rupert Murdoch’s favourite editor, is in the dock in London charged with conspiring to pervert the course of justice. Rupert meanwhile has turned his attention to his former home, Australia, again focussing the weight of his tabloids on Labor, first Gillard then Rudd, as Robert Manne reports in this very interesting article in the Monthly. Now Abbott is in the saddle, vicious attack has turned to fawning praise.
Meanwhile in London at the same time as Brooks faces the judge and jury, the right-wing press are resisting any notion that they should be regulated by anyone but themselves, all in the name of freedom. But freedom to report is not the same as freedom to manipulate as Murdoch has consistently done, or to smear as in the Daily Mail’s recent attack on Ed Miliband’s father.
The media should not be the arbiters of their own standards. At the end of the day, with a few exceptions, when it comes to politics it is the proprietors or the boardrooms that make the decisions, not the editors.
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