Skip to main content

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."

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Robert Fisk's predictions for the Middle East in 2013

There is no gain-saying that Robert Fisk, fiercely independent and feisty to boot, is the veteran journalist and author covering the Middle East. Who doesn't he know or hasn't he met over the years in reporting from Beirut - where he lives?  In his latest op-ed piece for The Independent he lays out his predictions for the Middle East for 2013. Read the piece in full, here - well worthwhile - but an extract... "Never make predictions in the Middle East. My crystal ball broke long ago. But predicting the region has an honourable pedigree. “An Arab movement, newly-risen, is looming in the distance,” a French traveller to the Gulf and Baghdad wrote in 1883, “and a race hitherto downtrodden will presently claim its due place in the destinies of Islam.” A year earlier, a British diplomat in Jeddah confided that “it is within my knowledge... that the idea of freedom does at present agitate some minds even in Mecca...” So let’s say this for 2013: the “Arab Awakening” (the t...

The NPT (Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty) goes on hold.....because of one non-Treaty member (Israel)

Isn't there something radically wrong here?    Israel, a non-signatory to the NPT has, evidently, been the cause for those countries that are Treaty members, notably Canada, the US and the UK, after 4 weeks of negotiation, effectively blocking off any meaningful progress in ensuring the non-proliferation of nuclear weapons.    IPS reports ..... "After nearly four weeks of negotiations, the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) Review Conference ended in a predictable outcome: a text overwhelmingly reflecting the views and interests of the nuclear-armed states and some of their nuclear-dependent allies. “The process to develop the draft Review Conference outcome document was anti-democratic and nontransparent,” Ray Acheson, director, Reaching Critical Will, Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom (WILPF), told IPS. “This Review Conference has demonstrated beyond any doubt that continuing to rely on the nuclear-armed states or their nuclear-de...

#1 Prize for a bizarre story.....and lying!

No comment called for in this piece from CommonDreams: Another young black man: The strange sad case of 21-year-old Chavis Carter. Police in Jonesboro, Arkansas  stopped  him and two friends, found some marijuana, searched put Carter, then put him handcuffed  behind his back  into their patrol car, where they say he  shot himself  in the head with a gun they failed to find. The FBI is investigating. Police Chief Michael Yates, who stands behind his officers' story,  says in an interview  that the death is "definitely bizarre and defies logic at first glance." You think?