Gerard Henderson, Oscar Wilde, the culture wars, and we will destroy you, Pravda by the Yarra ...

(Above: if thine eye offends thee, pluck it and the subbie out, but what's the bet there's a typo or three below? Is a salaray kissing cousin to my brand new drobo raidarray?)
(Above: pay for adolescent bickering and childish abuse? Tell 'em they're dreaming. Why we could cut and paste that kind of nonsense all day, and not even begin to penetrate the paywall of delusions).

Okay, that's the entrees out of the way, and now for the main course, which on a Tuesday is always our very own prattling Polonius, the man who makes desiccated coconut seem positively wet, Gerard Henderson.

Sock it to us Mr. Henderson, as Judy Carne used to sort of say, how is the world being ruined today, so we don't have to look it up in our Funk and Wagnalls ...

Oh dear, it seems news hasn't yet reached Mr. Henderson that he's working for Pravda by the Harbour, as he spends his entire column Survival the key for media, not to be broken on the rack of regulation worrying about the collateral damage Fairfax might suffer from the current media enquiry:

News Ltd publications such as The Australian and The Daily Telegraph are the principal targets but Fairfax publications would be caught up in the downside of any increase in regulation following from the media inquiry.

What? Surely not, surely they'd spare Pravda, it being so leftist and all?

Sorry, Pravda, whether located by the Yarra or within cooee of the harbour, or littered throughout the countryside, courtesy of onetime Rural Press (yes even Tamworth has a branch of Pravda, thanks to the Northern Daily Leader), is under dire threat:

The task of such entities as News Ltd and Fairfax Media in the medium term is to ensure the continued publication of printed newspapers on weekdays. Yet the left in Australia has chosen this time to launch an assault on the print media.

Uh huh. As opposed to the routine assault on the left, year in, year out, in the print media.

It seems even Pravda-inclined bloggers are facing banishment:

... anyone can set up a print or online publication since there is no limitation beyond what the market can bear. The Greens want to bring about a situation where politicians and bureaucrats determine whether an individual can go into publishing.

That's passing strange, as we thought it was Mr. Henderson who wanted to bring about a situation where he could determine whether an individual might have his thoughts published online, as he cogently explained in ABC needs to rein in the rise of abuse posing as analysis.

Back then Mr. Henderson was outraged at the way the ABC recycled the views of the American left, and the temerity of an actual listener actually phoning in to criticise Israel (shock, horror, consternation, since Israel by definition is completely untouchable, virginal and undefiled, and beyond the criticism of mere mortals, answering only to Yahweh).

Back then it seems that it was the ABC's job to transform the level of debate on the intertubes, leading by example. Strangely, this didn't also seem to be the duty of News Ltd, where feral abuse masquerading as opinion is commonplace.

Especially as Mr. Henderson was valiantly penning his piece with the right in mind of the Tea Party/Palin/Fox News trifecta to go on being as feral as they liked ... or at least until Mark Scott, exercising the right of kings in his personal fiefdom, either tamed or expelled the reprehensible Bob Ellis and others ... (yes it's a pity that Bob Ellis is completely reprehensible, but if you believe it's the right of Andrew Bolt to be a goose, then surely Ellis has the right to think he's some kind of verbal pâté).

Never mind. It turns out that the righteous Henderson, an expert in the media - unlike the lawyer and the academic involved in running the enquiry - has declined to participate in the public hearings, preferring to fry his fish publicly in his own spot in Pravda:

In his recent talk at the IQ2 debate on the media (screened by ABC TV's Big Ideas program), the Greens leader, Bob Brown, asked the rhetorical question: "What is the difference between an Australian abattoir, an Australian brothel and an Australian newspaper?" His answer was: "You don't need a licence for an Australian newspaper."

This was an unprecedented call for government regulation of the media. Traditionally, governments have issued licences for radio and television because spectrum space is limited.

Uh huh. But thanks to the arrival of the full to overflowing intertubes, spectrum space is no longer limited, and with the arrival of the NBN or some variant, the speed and access to that space will grow even larger.

Everyone can have a go at broadcasting, with the only issue control of the intellectual property rights, an issue that doesn't concern millions of bloggers, or squillions of mkv/avi file users (how does the pond know about this dark space, this black hole, this blot on the conscience of millions? Don't ask, and we certainly won't tell, but how else can you watch a full episode of Jon Stewart online in Australia, without spoofing or rar-ing or paying money to Foxtel?)

That's why Senator Conroy still wants to introduce his one size fits all vast intertubes filter, but Gerard Henderson has been remarkably quiet on the matter of the filter, perhaps so long as he has the ABC to kick around (and anyone who dares to criticise Israel, presumptuous pups).

Never mind. There are a few other comedy highlights in Henderson's piece:

Brown concluded with the following saying: "Oscar Wilde said 'in olden days they had the rack, nowadays they have the press'. Well, the king or Crown licensed the rack. It's time the Crown licensed the press as well."

Wilde was a brilliant humorist whose demise was brought about by his own choices - the press was not responsible for his jailing.

No indeed, the press wasn't responsible for Wilde initiating a private action against the Marquess of Queensberry, but by golly, once that happened, they began acting like the feral wombats we know today.

What's the betting if Wilde had been blessed with a mobile phone that the press of the day wouldn't have been hacking into it on a daily basis (after all, his speciality was ancient Greece, not factory passwords)? Even to the point where the pounding in the press saw Wilde cop it for publishing a censored version of The Picture of Dorian Gray ...

Why, it might have even led to Gerard Henderson writing a column denouncing the persecution of Oscar Wilde, and requesting the ABC to show decent restraint ...

Brown followed up his performance at the IQ2 debate with a submission to the media inquiry on behalf of the Greens. Complaining about the fact that News Ltd controls about 70 per cent of the capital city newspaper audience, Brown asked: "If the elected representatives are not to rein in this debasing of the ideals of the fourth estate, who should or will?"

Brown's comments amount to the most serious attempt by an elected politician to control the print media since Arthur Calwell, when information minister in the Curtin government, tried to censor the press during World War II. The story is told dispassionately by Paul Hasluck in The Government and the People: 1942-1945.

Paul Hasluck? Dispassionate? The comedy of course is that press censorship was widespread and strong throughout the second world war, and not just on the baddies' side. In the UK, it was in the usual Orwellian way, called the Ministry of Information, while in the United States they gave it the more honest title of the Office of Censorship ...

And these days active censorship, or soft distorting censorship of the embedding kind continues unabated in relation to war zones, which is why it's almost impossible to work out what's really going down in countries like Afghanistan ...

The notion that Arthur Calwell somehow single-handedly attempted to invent this kind of thing in Australia, or that it's a preserve of the left, is so risible as to suggest Mr. Henderson should sometimes censor himself ...

In recent days the left-wing Labor senator Doug Cameron has called the Murdoch press "absolutely reprehensible". He, too, appears to want the print media constrained by regulation. Any regulation aimed at News Ltd today could be extended to Fairfax and to as-yet unborn publications in the future. It's difficult to see how the media inquiry can make a positive contribution to the debate.

But you know, there already is self-regulation, and there is an AJA code of ethics. You can find them here, and the very first one runs thus:

1. Report and interpret honestly, striving for accuracy, fairness and disclosure of all essential facts. Do not suppress relevant available facts, or give distorting emphasis. Do your utmost to give a fair opportunity for reply.

Well there's a belly laugh, right there and then, and it takes a considerable act of imagination to see how The Australian and its then editor Paul Whittaker acted according to the AJA ethics in the matter of the AFP and terrorists, especially if you take a look at the dust up courtesy of the last Media Watch for the year, The Oz redefines happiness. According to Media Watch, it ran more like a Mafia mobster shakedown ...

2. Do not place unnecessary emphasis on personal characteristics, including race, ethnicity, nationality, gender, age, sexual orientation, family relationships, religious belief, or physical or intellectual disability.

Except of course if you're Miranda the Devine, Tim Blair or Andrew Bolt when it comes to the matter of Islamics ruining Australia as we know it ...

And of course there's a tame defanged self-regulatory beast called the Press Council, and there's the company code of conduct most journalists shove in the bottom drawer. Why you can, if you want, find the News Limited code of conduct here:

7. Harassment
7.1 Do not harass or try to intimidate people when seeking information or photographs.

Yes, the AFP would get a laugh out of that one.

So here's a suggestion as to how a media enquiry might make a positive contribution to the debate.

What might be done to ensure journalists working for large, branded media organisations, and the companies they work for, actually conform to the codes of conduct and the code of ethics they already theoretically embrace, which are already theoretically regulated by the toothless Press Council?

If the media were sensible about it, they'd jump at the notion of fixing up self-regulation so it works a little more effectively, so that things are seen to be done, in the same way as any sensible blogger runs the laws of defamation through the head while typing ...

Mr. Henderson thinks that somehow Fairfax and unborn future publications might get caught up in the culture wars surrounding News Limited, but Pravda in the antipodes is already caught up in that fight.

As Mr. Henderson showed in the matter of Mark Scott v Bob Ellis, he's not averse to a bit of regulation, intervention and discipline himself (could we even begin to count the number of times he's demanded the ABC show regulatory discipline?)

It should be possible to engage in an enquiry in a positive way, to assist in determining positive outcomes and avoid the more egregious behaviour currently going down in the mainstream media, and routinely chronicled by a number of media watchers (not least Margaret Simons in Crikey, yet again given a childish, adolescent sideswipe, as reported in Dear (Media) Diary, you are just so predictable).

Nothing can be done about the culture wars bunker mentality that sits in News Limited at the moment, but the media inquiry, with sensible input, might be a way avoid Senator 'a giant filter will fix everything' Conroy's censorship mentality ...

Not, it seems, in the ideologically fixated world of Mr. "I'm taking my bat and my ball and staying at home in a giant sulk" Henderson.

It doesn't seem to occur to him that if a newspaper intends to destroy a political party, that the political party in response might attempt to destroy the newspaper, though at the moment that would be a David v. Goliath battle ...

In the meantime, the alternative is simply not to pay for what the buggers print, a policy the pond pursues wherever a News Ltd. paywall arises ...

It's the last refuge of the hapless consumer, that and the occasional reading of Pravda by the harbour, even though it seems given to publishing the thoughts of Mr. Henderson on a weekly basis announcing that everything wrong in the world is the fault of Pravda readers ...

(Below: you could get this as a T-shirt, but it's no longer available).