They’ve done it; got Hitler on the front page of The Australian newspaper alongside independent candidate Zoe Daniel. And the campaign has not even officially kicked off.
What next, the independents are really the secret spawn of Beelzebub, incubated in the Wuhan Lab by fiendish Chinese scientists sniggering wickedly as they unleash their evil emissaries on the noble ScoMo? They’ve already gone after Albo as the Manchurian Candidate, a secret Chinese agent.
The story, or “beat-up” rather, by News Corp reporter Sharri Markson, waffled on for a couple of thousand words trying to conflate Zoe Daniel – who is campaigning to dislodge Tim Wilson from the seat of Goldstein in Melbourne – with Hitler. The bizarre narrative hinged on a two year old tweet by Daniel’s manager Sue Barrett. It was such a stretch, the Oz didn’t put the tweet on page one; it spilt onto page five with quotes of high indignation from neo-con senator James Paterson.
To the Australian’s credit it placed its “exclusive” Hitler headline at the bottom of the front page, just above the Clive Palmer ad but well below the splash “Our trucks join Ukraine War” concerning the Bushmaster armoured vehicles made by French multinational weapons dealer Thales.
Just the day before, and amid three hatchet jobs on the Goldstein independent in two days, a Markson story on Daniel had been corrected by the ABC.
Michael West established Michael West Media in 2016 to focus on journalism of high public interest, particularly the rising power of corporations over democracy. West was formerly a journalist and editor with Fairfax newspapers, a columnist for News Corp and even, once, a stockbroker.