The Daily Telegraph’s Sharri Markson blasts claims her Barnaby Joyce story had been broken earlier
National political editor of the Daily Telegraph, Sharri Markson, has rejected critics’ claims her Kennedy Award-winning story revealing former Deputy Prime Minister Barnaby Joyce’s affair with a staffer and a subsequent cover up had previously been covered by smaller online media outlets.
Markson’s comments that outlets Independent Australia and True Crime Weekly were “blogs” which publish “absolute rubbish” drew a scathing response from publisher Dave Donovan who described them as “defamatory”.
Speaking on a Walkley Foundation panel last night, Markson said the outlets claiming to have broke the story had a habit of printing rumours and ‘rubbish’, and that the Barnaby Joyce story was hard to verify to the standards of a major metro paper.
I read a story in Independent Australia which, from memory, ran in the weeks preceding the by-election. No mention of BJ’s name but it was pretty clear he was the key person. It mentioned his family distress and questioned whether the outlet itself should name names (and consequences if it did). Feedback encouraged naming, but then you would if you didn’t have to wear a defamation suit.
Markson did a cut and paste job on her story from others that published first, that she won an award for it shows just how crap Australian MSM is now.
Spot on. I read the story online in multiple smaller sources and knew all about it before Markson “broke” it.
The story was well known in the electorate; the scandal is the press buried it until post the by-election.
I think it reflects badly that we need such stories to flog papers and so called news.
Adults (politicians or otherwise) involved in sexual affairs, politicians attempting to hide from media, telling fibs, double dealing? Hardly news, hardly surprising…….Why do we care?
It is news Richard Moss, when this particular politician tried to hide the facts from his electorate which included how jobs had been created for his girlfriend at great cost to the taxpayer. The fact that he had been sitting in Parliament for years when should not have been is also not to be dismissed.
You’d be right if this didn’t involve the Deputy PM having an affair with one of his publicly paid office staff then procuring another publicly funded job for her to get her out of the way as the pregnancy became obvious.
What politicians do in private with private citizens completely separate from their public duties is their business.
Independent Australia had it before Markson and TrueCrimeWeekly had it before Independent Australia. Her refusal to acknowledge that she did not break the story and the main stream ignoring sources outside of their bubble shows how irrelevant they have become to Australians (other than their dinner party guests) .
Markson has done pretty well, for someone impersonating a journalist.