Our dedicated reader would know that our Media Glass House researchers have taken aim at various News Crap Australia outlets with disappointing regularity over many years for so-called “news” stories accompanied by headlines which present some claims as facts.

Our MGH teams always wonder why it is seemingly so difficult to include a couple of inverted commas around a few words that express contested claims rather than cold hard facts.

But then they usually find the practice is seen most often in political stories, usually anti-Labor or anti-teal independents, or anti-Green ones, in line with News Crap’s role as PR agency for right and far-right parties and causes.

Here is just a small random sample from our records…..

In May 2022 various News Crap outlets carried the story above which clearly branded teal independent candidates and MPs standing at that year’s federal election as “arrogant”, but without the quotation marks.

This description and its omission of basic punctuation – based on the candidates’ failure to meet a News Crap demand to respond to politically loaded questions on policy matters – presented their supposed arrogance as fact to News Crap readers.

As shown above, in October 2023 it was Sydney Lord Mayor Clover Moore’s turn to wear the arrogant label applied as fact by News Crap Australia’s Daily Telegraph for daring to suggest she might establish her own indigenous voice to her council.

Around the same time Rupert’s Melbourne turdbloid The Herald-Sun took aim, as shown below, at the then government of Dan Andrews over its decision to walk away from hosting the 2026 Commonwealth Games.

By all means The Herald-Sun could editorialise on the decision and call it deceitful, but it went the next unethical step and presented the Labor government as deceitful, as fact, in a news story’s headline.

There are many, many more examples. But we’re sure you get the drift.

Surely, our MGH teams argue, the extra cost of the ink needed to print quotation marks around politically loaded adjectives in hard-copy newspapers would not cost much, especially since the print run of Rupert’s fishwrappers these days might well be counted on the fingers of just a few hands.

For online stories, the insertion of quotation marks would cost the price of a few electrons for a few extra pixels, no more.

But no, that doesn’t happen because the slack, sometimes non-existent, ethical standards applied within News Crap Australia apparently demands that anti-Labor, anti-teal, anti-Greens claims be turned into fact in headlines and in readers’ minds to assist those on the right and far-right of the political spectrum.

Which brings us to a story in the Media section of The Guardian Australia this week pointing to an Australian Press Council (APC) ruling critical of just this practice in a story that ran on 4 December in The Daily Telegraph. (below)

The “fact” Labor backed the murderous Middle Eastern terrorist group Hamas was based on the actions of the Albanese Government’s support for a United Nations’ resolution backing a two-state solution to the Israeli-Hamas war in Gaza.

The Guardian item said the APC had found that “given an absence of inverted commas” the headline was presented as statement of fact with “the clear implication being that the Labor government is ‘backing’ Hamas”.

The Guardian also noted that although the slanted headline appeared on page 3 of the Tele back in December, the APC adjudication was printed on page 14 of the turdbloid’s hard-copy edition on Wednesday.

Our MGH researchers would like the APC to know that they, as in our MGH teams, have a file of many, many more such biased headlines in News Crap outlets stretching back many, many years if the Council wishes to pursue other cases.

They are all carefully stored in a big, bulging file labelled “Murdoch media’s deliberate and unethical political bias”, but with no inverted commas around the words deliberate and unethical political bias since that’s a fact.

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