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Gerard Henderson: "Poisonous little toad"

Gerard Henderson postures as some sort of arbiter of ethics - based on what is difficult to fathom other than his own self-appointed importance - on all manner of things but yesterday on Crikey sank to the level of writing one expects from either Piers Akerman or Andrew Bolt. The latter 2 are probably the most disreputable people [certainly not journalists] anywhere given any space to vent their spleen .

Mike Carleton writing in Crikey [this part free on line] today sums it all up neatly:

"Gerard Henderson can be a poisonous little toad when he puts his mind to it. To drag my wife into the Jonestown brawl, as he did in Crikey yesterday, is the sort of nasty irrelevance we have come to expect from him. "Mrs Carlton", he called her, with old-fashioned sexist condescension. It will no doubt come as a surprise to him and Mrs Henderson, but a lot of married women don’t automatically take the husband’s surname these days. Fancy that.

He and the rest of Alan Jones’s frothing crew of admirers resolutely ignore the central theme of the Masters book. It is not Jones’s homos-xuality that’s the problem; it’s his dishonesty as a broadcaster and its baleful effect on, among other things, the body politic.

But the right wing rabble – Henderson himself, Devine, Flint, Pearson, Akerman, and Bolt, the Melbourne village idiot – won’t touch that with a barge pole. Jones is to be defended at all costs, so they hide behind the smokescreen of attacking his critics as homophobes.

David Marr a gay-basher? Oh, please. This is a breathtaking piece of hypocrisy from people who, over the years, have revelled in putting the boot into the Sydney Gay Mardi Gras, Justice Michael Kirby, gay marriage, gay rights at law and so on.

Henderson’s endless posturing as the high arbiter of ethics in the media is tedious and disingenuous. The chair of the board of his family business, the Sydney Institute, happens to be Ms Meredith Hellicar, who is also chair of James Hardie. Is Gerard taking money from the asbestos killers? I think we should be told."

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