How does a small handful of commentators such as Alan Jones and Ray Hadley wield political power?
As you walk the corridors of Parliament House in Canberra, many of the TVs in the offices are tuned to the pay TV channel Sky News late into the night. Ministers’ and backbenchers’ offices, and even the cafe down the hall, echo to an anxious call to arms from the same political quarter – the right wing of the Liberal party. It’s here that you’ll find climate change denial, sexism and racism aired with regularity. And then there’s Peta Credlin, still haunting parliament, driving home the same message that led to Tony Abbott being ousted as prime minister.
There are others too; Alexander Downer’s former media minder Chris Kenny, Andrew Bolt and Paul Murray, recently in the news for his “hot mic” confession that “Sky News at night is a Liberal party echo chamber”. As if to emphasise the point, shortly after Murray was outed, the Liberal MP Craig Kelly, famous for saying that burning fossil fuels protects us, and equally famous for threatening to move to the crossbenches if he didn’t get preselection for his New South Wales seat, joined the Sky team, replacing Ross Cameron, the former Liberal MP who was sacked for his offensive descriptions of Chinese people. This followed the sacking of the controversial former Labor leader and now One Nation politician Mark Latham in 2017.
Continue reading...from The Guardian http://bit.ly/2SrZdI6
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