Last word, and for mine, the best, goes to our marsupial friend over on Margaret Simons’s thread:
There was never any “public interest” involved, it was always “journos interest”.
When you have a gallery filled with rampaging egos whose intellectual aspirations generally exceed their abilities, this sort childish rubbish is what we expect from people that live in a bubble that is as narrow in its width as it is shallow in its depth – too often confusing issues of trivial personal and industry interest with that of public importance.
Tens of thousands of words have been written about this and more will continue to be churned out – nearly universally by people that have never published anonymously in their lives, folks that have certainly never been forced by circumstance to do such a thing, and don’t have the faintest clue about why anyone would ever need or desire to do it.
It’s piss and sticks and navel lint, all wrapped up in a bunch of pretentious, self-serving twaddle – where a faux debate has been created by a bunch of miscreants that expect reality to fit into the limitations of their own life experience and the leadership of a Newspaper that thinks linkbaiting and trolling the internet is classy business model.
Meanwhile, Grog had to actually deal with the real life fallout of these self-indulgent games, committed by a bunch of infantile, ethical destitutes.
Amen to that. I won’t say any more than this outside academic papers, but make no mistake, this is a low ebb.
UPDATE:
Sorry – forgot to point to Tim Dunlop’s excellent post, too. He gets at one of my least favourite features of all this – the crocodile tears/faux concerns for Grog’s welfare from the “Australian Defence Force”, aka their media section:
Also, could they stop pretending they are concerned about Grogs’ welfare. James Massola said in another article that he hopes Grogs keeps writing. Elliot goes further:
Twitter would have been no use to Martin Luther King or to Biko without their bravery and that of their supporters. But it sure helped Jericho become a name in the Australian political and media market. He’s now even more popular, thanks to The Australian. Thankfully, he didn’t lose his job and is likely to get offers from media concerns in any case. And why not?
Massola saying he hopes Grogs keeps writing is like the guy who punched you in the face saying he hopes your broken nose gets better. Elliot’s claim that all this has been to Grogs’ benefit is just another pathetic attempt at justification. Clearly, it is not for them to judge. Besides, if they are that keen on his writing, they should’ve just hired him in the first place rather than outing him.
