As anyone who watches Jon Stewart knows, in this degraded media environment, comedians make the best journalists.
You may have heard that last week, the writer and academic Larissa Behrendt sent a rude tweet (ZOMG!) while watching Bess Price on the ABC1’s Q&A program.
By far the best article on Horsegate comes from Tony Martin, writing in the fabulous online journal Scrivener’s Fancy.
Martin does something that everyone else seems to have forgotten: he puts the exchange in context.
The incident happened, he says, when Behrendt had been watching the HBO series Deadwood on ABC2. That was where she’d seen the fellow loving up to his horse. She then switched to Q&A, where she heard Bess Price speak in favour of the Northern Territory Intervention, which Behrendt opposes. Hence the tweet: “I watched a show where a guy had sex with a horse and I’m sure it was less offensive than Bess Price.”
Pass me the smelling salts – I may faint.
As Martin writes: “Saying that you watched a show where a guy had sex with a horse and that it was less offensive – to you – than Bess Price’s views, is not the same as saying, apropos of nothing, that Bess Price is worse than watching a guy have sex with a horse.”
In other words, two indigenous people had a political disagreement, and one of them said something mildly rude about the other.
Why is this news?
Because over the past 10 days the Australian has devoted some 10 stories - most of them on the front page - relating in some way or another to what Graeme Leech in his Strewth column today calls “the slur of the century, a slur so vile we won’t repeat it”.
Yep. Not an off-colour joke, but the slur of the century. The biggest insult of the last 100 years.
If you think that sounds, well, a teensy bit crazy, then you haven’t read Keith Windschuttle’s column this morning.
Show Comments
Comments (2)