Fairfax Mergers - The Smage ?

Do they employ a psychic at The Guardian newspaper or perhaps they have called upon Britain's top astrologer Victor Olliver to cast the runes ?

Their timing is perfect to enter the Australian market and seize the left-of-centre ground abandoned by the once great Fairfax empire.

Now a war of words has broken out between newsmen as former Fairfax editor Andrew Jaspan today told the mUmBRELLA website that The Age & Sydney Morning Herald will combine and  "switch their editorial positioning away from the high ground occupied in the past by Fairfax’s metro mastheads and towards what is referred internally as ‘Middle Australia’. That means more mid-market fare: sport, showbiz, gossip, and fast news. He describes this as"like 2 bald men fighting over a comb".

Andrew Jaspan                 Garry Linnell

Current editor Garry Linnell has hit back and described Japser's claims as "complete fiction" and accused him of having taken The Age downmarket during his tenure.

 The Guardian's Australian editorial team are already in Australia and preparing the new local Guardian website.Many of Fairfax's best writers who last year took redundancy have been offered work on the new web newspaper.
Fairfax would do well to actually take Japser's comments as good advice. Well that's what we reckon.

When two tribes go to war over rogered gerbils

Catherine Deveny

Sad news as the columnist Catherine Deveny is fired from The Age, the Fairfax newspaper which is one of the oldest broadsheets in the world and was once considered one of the finest. Her crime was to 'tweet' a message from the interminably boring Logies, Australia's version of the Oscars.

Included in the list of the 100 most influential people in Melbourne, Deveny was twittering amusing messages on 'celebrities' as they arrived on the red carpet for the glitzy night of yawns at Melbourne's ghastly Packer owned Crown Casino (Gordon Ramsey has just opened his first Oz restaurant there which says it all !).

 Her crime-one on the daughter of the late Steve Irwin : "I do so hope Bindi ( Irwin) gets laid". In these days of pedo hysteria and the fear that there is a perve behind every bush or newsdesk any such talk is verboten. After a day of  the rampaging shock jock Neil Mitchell and phone calls from "shocked" listeners The Age's editor Paul Ramadge finally caved in and sacked Deveny. There is a lesson here. In the legendary rivalry between Sydney and Melbourne, it hasn't dawned on those in power in the southern city that the day of shock jocks is well and truly over.

It's been nearly five years since NSW's ruling Labor Party finally realised that the supposed king of shock jocks Alan Jones who they pandered to, really only had a listening audience at best, of around 50,000 people in a city of 4.5 million and a state of nearly 8 million. And most of them were either living on the leafy North Shore or the redneck Southern Suburbs now famous for the Cronulla riots. They were conservative voting strongholds. Why appease the pink shirted parrot ?(as his co-workers call him behind his back). From the day they decided to deny Jones interviews and concentrated on the government run Triple J yoof station with the highest audience listernership, their stocks began to rise.

And now a delightful piece of schadenfreude has come back to bite someone on the bum. The fragrant right-winger Miranda Devine of the Age sister publication the Sydney Morning Herald who castigated Deveny (they are are about as opposite on the political spectrum as possible) on her shocking Bindi tweet, Miranda has been caught out herself.

Gerbil

Devine

After Devine's series of anti-Deveny tweets and a column devoted to attacking Deveny, 20 year old reader Justin Barber tweeted Miranda :" you've had enough of attacking gays for now I see. Great, Thanks" . And Miranda's replied : "you've had enough of rogering gerbils now I see. Great thanks". Unfortunately for Devine, the tweet went out to 2500 people and she was forced into an humble apology to Barber.

Anyone who knows Miranda will know she would rather eat broken glass than apologise. The tale hasn't ended there. A new topic is raging amongst thousand of twitterers under the tag #rogeringgerbils.

# Prediction : Fairfax Publications will wait a suitable time-say 6 months and re-employ Catherine, one of the best writers they have ever had, just as they had to re-employ the superb Mike Carlton who was sacked in similar circumstances. Deveny has said "I'm sure I'll be back. But in the meantime, could someone write me a CV!"

No 11 in " Madame Arcati's 10 most stupid journalists of 2009 "

From Melbourne's The Age-one of the oldest and once most respected broadsheets in the world, comes a wacky piece by Lawrence Money titled "Three Gays and A Baby".

It concerns a lesbian couple from Ireland, who now live in Australia, who were ordered by the Irish Supreme Court to allow regular visitation rights to the biological father of their three year old child, because Ireland's constitution recognises him as the father.

Lawrence Money quotes from a " Longitudinal Study of Lesbian Families’ in 1999 by Susan Golombok and Fiona Tasker (which) found that 15 per cent of 39 children raised in 27 lesbian families had gone on to have a gay relationship. That compares with none of the kids from a comparative group of heterosexual families." That's a US study involving possibly around 150 people in a population of (then) about 280 million.

 Money follows with the claim "and that also compares with about two or three percent of the general community who identify as exclusively homosexual. It doesn’t do much for the old gay-rights argument that homosexuals are born, not made, does it?" Uhhh?

 Money should have read the 2008 report from the same group here that shows that the very prejudicial garbage Money writes is one of the problems kids in same sex parents families face.

 Money draws these conclusions about his "two or three percent of the general community"-which in Australia alone would number 600 to 700,000 gays and lesbians or in the USA approx 9 million from a study of "39 children raised in 27 lesbian families"

So where the fuck does Money think these "two or three percent "of gays and lesbians come from given that same parent families are a miniscule minority?. Is he inferring they were "made" by their heterosexual parents ?

Step up to podium Mr Money and proudly  accept your Jan Moir Homophobic Fuckwit of The Year award.

## Lawrence concludes "I've long held the view that humans should need a licence to breed.". Be warned. tSS has finally perfected a time machine and set the date to 1960 and upon arrival will be immediately revoking Mr & Mrs Money's licence to re-produce.

### our apologies to Mr Money for mispelling his name as Mooney-which a fellow blogger reminds us rhymes with loony, and he is not to be confused with the very funny comedian Lawrence Mooney. Sub-editor Mildred Pierce the moggie has been allowed back into the office-for now-tSS accepts the blame.