Henderson twisting the quotes. Gerard Henderson broke off from his furious correspondence last week (“Dear Waverly Council, yesterday I passed one of your workmen using a jackhammer and he called me a ‘paranoid little weirdo’, in Morse code”)* to assail the inner-city elites from his bunker at the Sydney Institute (address: Philip St, Sydney, 2000). They were guilty of moral superiority he noted, brandishing his evidence — a copy of the Griffiith Review, several years old, which must have taken a bit of grubbing around to find.

In this issue of the review, Margaret Simons had an essay in which she thought about the different textures of suburban and inner-city life, noting, inter alia, that a place like Lygon St Carlton seemed weirdly provincial compared to the massive enterprise of Fountain Gate shopping centre she had passed through earlier. The piece was an attempt to foreground and consider assumptions and clichés regarding social group differences. Simons noted at the time of the Tampa incident in 2001, she was living in an outer suburb and finding it best not to speak of politics, with her best friend Ellie, a supporter of John Howard.

Here’s Gerard’s summary of the next part of the essay:

“In her quite extraordinarily snobbish contribution to the collection, Simons recounted how — after a journey to the outer suburbs — she agreed with a friend ‘over latte in the central city’ that: ‘We are morally superior.’ Really.”

And here’s Simons’s actual words:

“So I saved my political discussions for my trips to the city. One afternoon, I lived a cliché. Over latte in the central city, I discussed the state of the nation with a friend who had taken on the heavy task of being a regular volunteer visitor at the Villawood detention centre. I was telling her how furious Latham’s circle was with the attitude of the left-wing intellectuals — particularly the idea that those who were concerned with asylum seekers were morally superior to those who were not. She was genuinely puzzled. ‘But we are,’ she said. ‘We are morally superior.’ I thought of Ellie with a pang and felt shocked by my city friend’s assumption. But I wasn’t sure that I didn’t agree with her.”

Henderson’s rendering is an obvious misrepresentation of Simons, since it clearly suggests the quote (“we are morally superior’) is hers. It isn’t, and Simons is recording her dissension from it, but also some doubt. It takes a wilful misreading to render “I wasn’t sure I didn’t agree with her” as “she agreed” with the statement. Henderson’s game is an old and tiresome one: bleed any form of complexity or ambiguity out of a piece of writing for a few quick gotchas. Usually it’s just snide and dispiriting, part of Henderson’s net negative contribution to Australian intellectual life; in this case he is plainly wrong.

“The key division in democratic societies is no longer between rich and poor…” Henderson writes. True: it’s between right-wing elites who turn up to inner-city Sydney Institute gabfests, and people who get ripped off by some of them — such as Rodney Adler, or NSW prisoner 181362, who was a major donor to the place for years. You won’t see many of HIH’s victims at Gerard’s sherry and Coon nights in Philip St. Really. — Guy Rundle (*thank you, Emo Phillips)

Boobs and tennis: the SMH footage. Fairfax is not above a titillating video. But this one seems like a particular low. As one Crikey reader responded: “Thought I was reading Zoo magazine for a moment.”

Phone hack investigation: arrested ‘may have written for NotW‘

“Detectives investigating phone hacking by the News of the World have arrested a woman in West Yorkshire, Scotland Yard has said. The 39-year-old woman is believed to be Terenia Taras, who has contributed more than 30 stories for the News of the World, although Scotland Yard would not confirm this.” — The Guardian

Google ‘faces major US antitrust probe’

“The US Federal Trade Commission (FTC) is poised to open a formal antitrust probe into whether internet search giant Google has abused its dominance on the web, The Wall Street Journal reports.” — SBS News

Bristol Palin’s new memoir engulfed in date-rape controversy

“Bristol Palin’s new memoir, Not Afraid of Life: My Journey So Far, has already stirred the kind of controversy only a Palin can generate.” — The Daily Beast

Sharp-eyed viewers catch US MasterChef faking a huge crowd

“On Monday’s episode of Fox’s Gordon Ramsay-hosted cooking competition MasterChef, the opening scene featured a shot of a huge crowd supposedly gathering to audition for the show. Yesterday, an eagle-eyed Reddit user noticed something weird about the crowd. Namely, the same people showed up multiple times in the same shot.” — Yahoo News

FBI announce arrest on Twitter

“The FBI arrested one of the top ten most-wanted criminals late last night, and rather than writing out a press release or holding a press conference, they tweeted the news. The arrest happened just after midnight on Tuesday night, and the FBI took to Twitter to let the public know they are just a little safer.” — Media Bistro

SBS to hold Go Back To Where You Came From forum

“SBS will screen a special discussion forum on its conversation-starting documentary series Go Back To Where You Came From to capitalise on public interest in the program. The forum will be taped on Monday night and broadcast at 8.30pm Tuesday on SBS1 featuring series participants Adam, Gleny, Raye, Raquel, Darren, Roderick and their family and friends. The audience will be drawn from viewers who participated in the debate on various social media platforms as the series went to air.” — The Australian

Tasmania loses WIN weekend news

“WIN Television’s Tasmanian station has confirmed that it will be axing its weekend news bulletin. The station has made the position of weekend newsreader John Remess redundant, according to ABC News. It will also axe one camera operator’s position at its Launceston bureau and another in Hobart.” — Media Spy