The Australian’s editor vows to keep up pressure on Press Council despite warning campaign risks future of self regulation

The Australian is carrying out this campaign with full confidence that its symbiotic relationship with the Coalition government means any type of forced regulation is not even a remote possibility. They can basically do whatever the heck they want.

The readerships figures last week prove The Australian’s woefully small readership figures are in terminal decline. Once upon a time they had relevance – not anymore.

Mitchell is flopping out his manliness as chief ego if News Corp in Australia. This is the hubris that presaged the blatant abuse privacy by Rupert’s bovver troupe in the UK and which led to illegality on an industrial scale.
We are beginning to see how News will behave when fairfax is gone.

Unbelievable hubris. The Oz simply cannot ever admit that it is not entirely correct about everything, always, in perpetuity.

Much like their readership – stuck a few decades behind the present day.

Sabre-rattling editors impressed a small percentage of the small-minded – in the 70’s. It was immature then but at least the tanty was being chucked by someone who’s editiorially slanted articles had a readership.

Now we’ve got a question to ask – If a tree falls over in the woods but no one is around to hear it – does it make a sound? Or – If a newspaper bullishly refuses to be regulated but no one reads it – will anybody notice?

I used to read the Australian on Saturdays then decided to read every month to see what it is saying. This went to six monthly. No longer tempted to buy it at all. I’m its demographic but enough is enough. A lot of journalists there whose talent is wasted by its crap. The declining readership will see it will slip into irrelevance and it won’t be missed.

It is a pity that all these comments did not discuss whether the Press Council should or shouldn’t be in the business of judging stories. As if Australian defamation laws were not strict enough. Everybody here seems to think, let’s add another layer of top down thinking for the masses, or better still, let’s not think at all.
As the last person wrote, if you don’t like The Australian don’t read it. Free will indeed.
Goebbels would be proud of this mission creep by the APC.

Mitchell appears to have conflated his esteem in the eyes of Rupert with pretensions to intellectual superiority. I forecast disappointment.

Changes to the APC regulations that demand factually based material for op-eds is the real reason behind this attack.
Maurice Newman’s unbelievable op-ed on a cooling globe last week is a case in point. It is a perfect example of why we need the APC – to prevent ideologically based journalism spouting flat-out misrepresentations over vital public issues.
This attack is to prevent the APC from curtailing The Australian’s ideologically driven campaign journalism that has warped serious policy discussions for years.

@roger Colman: it is the purpose of the APC to judge stories. This is why they exist. Surely that is not a complex idea?
If you are done over by the oz the APC is supposed to judge whether that was fair. Nothing is solved by people buying another paper. As others point out this sort of bullying is what led to the phone tapping arrogance in the UK. They clearly thought news corp was the sole judge of propriety. And it turns out that was pretty crook.

Roger Colman: the News Corporation culture is clearly seriously ill. The UK experience is totally clear on that. Mitchell is both obsessive and relentless in his pursuit of perceived opponents. This instance with Disney is over the top and indicates that Mitchell is beyond any usual notion of reasonable behaviour by those who own the pulpit.
Hopefully Disney will stand up to Mitchell and all of us will be alert to the possibility that serious misuse of power by Murdoch in Britain is not to become the case here.
This is not a trivial matter.

Newspapers have influences as long as they have credibility. At The Australian they are running out of both.