Gerard Jackson

Matilda published a hit job on Professor Spurr written by Wendy Bacon and Chris Graham. Motivated by ideological-driven spite this pair based their piece on private emails by Professor Spurr that had been illegally obtained. This behaviour would not surprise anyone with knowledge of Wendy Bacon’s lack of ethics. Like all dogmatic leftists she thinks ethical behaviour is for the shmucks, meaning those who disagree with her unthinking leftism.

Wendy Bacon refers to herself as an “investigative journalist who is also a political activist”. That this is an oxymoron never occurred to her. She was a leftwing activist, and still is, not a real journalist. And like all of these phony journalists she was prepared to lie and cheat to advance a leftwing agenda. This paragon of virtue publically admitted (The Australian 24 January 1999) that Jim McClelland confessed to her and others that Lionel Murphy, Labor Party hero and High Court Judge, had been corrupt. Not only that, McClelland, who had been a prominent member of the Labor Party, also confessed to perjuring himself at Murphy’s trial thus securing Murphy’s acquittal. Now let us try to comprehend the full import of what Wendy Bacon did.

She justified concealing the admission of perjury by claiming confidentiality. What needs to be noted is that any reasonable view of “journalistic privilege”, a concept with no legal standing, cannot include a criminal act, especially a serious one. The other point is that by making the same confession to a number of other people McClelland made a mockery out of any claim to confidentiality, something his leftwing media admirers fully understand.

Yet leftist journalists like Bacon, Brian Toohey and David Marr still concealed the truth from the public. Why? After all, perjury is an offence that strikes at the very heart of the legal system, particularly when it involves the highest court in the land. Bacon inadvertently revealed these so-called journalists’ ideological motive when she wrote that “McClelland was only one of several confidential sources on the progressive [emphasis added] side of politics…” For progressive read left-wing.

What guaranteed these phony reporters silence was ideology, pure and simple. Without a shadow of a doubt, if McClelland had been a conservative judge this story would have been splashed across the front pages of every paper in the country — and rightly so. But McClelland was a leftist and that made all the difference and to their leftwing mindset that justified their lying and cheating. These so-called journalists had a choice: uphold the rule of law and so protect the integrity of the High Court or aid and abet Murphy and McClelland in their corrupt activities. They chose the latter, as did the Labor Party itself. These actions render any discussion about the ‘profession’ of journalistic ethics superfluous. In other words, what is there to discuss?

Wendy Bacon and her comrades are living proof that the so-called profession of journalism is morally and ideologically corrupt. It certainly helps explain why so many Australian journalists rushed to Clinton’s defence while pouring scorn on his critics, even going so far as to twist the truth. It explains why they savaged Howard and Bush and why they drooled over Obama and why they sneer at Tony Abbott.

The sordid McClelland-Murphy scandal alone makes it abundantly clear that we simply cannot believe what the mass of ‘journalists’ tell us. It made clear the fact that for the media, meaning the mass of ‘journalists’, ideology counts more than truth and integrity. This means that which side of the political fence you stand on will determine how you will be treated and to hell with any notions of bourgeois honesty and fairness. We can at least thank Wendy Bacon’s revelations for bringing home these facts so forcefully.

Note: Wendy Bacon followed her revelation with an article (The Australian, 2 February 1999) in which she tried to justify her actions in not revealing McClelland’s perjury. It seems that the Declaration of Principles of the International Federation of Journalists declared that “journalists should respect confidences in all circumstances”. (Tell that to Professor Spurr). What pompous Rot! Journalists are not priests and they have no confessionals. Would, for example, Bacon expect any journalist to protect the identity of a serial killer because he confessed in confidence?

Bacon, Toohey, Marr and the rest of the pack knowing betrayed the public interest by allowing a corrupt left-wing judge to sit on the High Court bench. The way things are in the media today, journalists who mouth-off about ethics have as much credibility as a pimp who preaches the virtues of chastity to his girls.