Screencaps from The New Daily, Channel 10 , and Twitter
By Situation Theatre 21/3/2019“
As the great George Orwell once said, “Journalism is public relations. Printing what someone else does not want published is cause for defamation”.
Last week, Waleed Aly did some journalism in the wake of the Christchurch terror attacks. We’re not having that, said Scott Morrison.
On Friday’s episode of The Project, Aly merely reported the contents of a 2011 SMH story that was already being widely circulated on social media.
The story claimed that back in 2010 the then opposition immigration spokesman urged the shadow cabinet to pursue an anti-Muslim strategy. Just hours after an Australian white supremacist terrorist massacred 50 Muslims, to say this was not a good look would be like saying Scott Morrison had spent the last 10 years just dabbling in Islamophobia.
Still the acting Prime Minister for less time than private school Christmas holidays, Mr Morrison made it clear that unless the press were doing public relations for the Department of Prime Minister and Cabinet, he would sue them.
He described the report that he’d pursued an anti-Muslim strategy as a “repugnant lie” and “utterly offensive”, which was a astonishing level of inaccuracy for a man intimately familiar with both practices.