Wide of the Markson … Fox/facts? … cry for the Moon

Top Markson Even by her own exultant standards, News Corp’s Sharri Markson has had a blockbuster couple of weeks. She uncovered the shock that Anthony Albanese was a bit further to the left 30 years ago. Then she followed up with a devastating “exclusive” where she applied the investigative approach of “reading a publicly available news publication” and finding a pro-Albanese piece in the CCP tabloid The Global Times (written by a former Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade diplomat Bruce Haigh).

Taking a break from the campaign, now she’s reporting on footage of Grill’d co-founder Geoff Bainbridge “fondling himself” while honking on a crack pipe, footage we’re told is as “graphic as it is shocking”. Except, of course, the “exclusive” tag on this one (co-written with Kylar Loussikian) is even shakier than usual because Bainbridge, after the Oz contacted him, got out in front of the story, going to the Nine papers and telling them the video was part of a extortion plot against him, giving the impression that maybe publishing it was perhaps a little grubby? Regardless, he’s quit his current gig as Lark Distilling CEO.

Markson’s column going through the Oz‘s side of the story takes a swipe at The Age — for “suspending belief” — and Bainbridge for being (in the words of people who know him, apparently) “conniving, manipulative and clever”. She says that when contacted Bainbridge’s lawyers had made claims about the footage being manipulated, claims absent in The Age piece. But our favourite detail she shares to discredit his version is that he talks about “meth”, which is the sign of a hardened drug user if ever we saw it.

To be fair on Markson, no one likes to lose their scoop. Of course the saga nicely mirrors what happened with Barnaby Joyce’s leaked text messages, with the PMO packaging up a more sanitised version for The Australian to extinguish the Nine papers’ scoop. All in the game, we guess.

Stupid like a Fox! Culture wars aside, facts are facts. The “freedom convoy” blockade in Canada, which has provided such inspiration to a similar movement in Australia, is ultimately an expression of political freedoms, and that’s still supposed to mean something in this crazy world. So we applaud Fox News legal analyst Jonathan Turley for invoking the following extremely apt analogy, after Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau invoked emergency powers to quell the protest:

By this rationale, they could have cracked down on the civil rights movement. They could have arrested Martin Luther King.

Whatever arguments you wish to have about the curbing of dissent in Canada, it seems very much in keeping with the modern American conservative engagement with King as a cuddly figure of consensus rather than someone who was arrested nearly 30 times and produced one of his most famous works in a jail cell.

(Sell off) the whole of the moon We’ve been very critical of neoliberalism here at Crikey, but look — when you’re right, you’re right. Neoliberal think tank the Adam Smith Institute (ASI) knows how we can solve poverty by selling off the fucking moon. According to the report’s authors: “A clear, morally justified and efficient system for assigning and governing property rights in space would present vast benefits that go beyond financial rewards for people who would become owners.”

And who are these kooks? Actually the ASI has been bizarrely influential on British politics since the time of Margaret Thatcher, providing a great deal of the ammunition for successive rounds of privatisation. Its president, Madsen Pirie, told The Guardian in 1987: “We propose things which people regard as being on the edge of lunacy. The next thing you know, they’re on the edge of policy.”

And look, we wouldn’t put much past a desperate Boris Johnson. Watch this space.