Tag: australian media

A cracked mirror lying in ash and rubble reflects a distorted television news broadcast showing a Middle East map and missile imagery, surrounded by torn newspaper pages and a broken press camera, symbolising the destruction of journalistic truth in wartime.

The First Casualty

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They told you Iran’s missiles were being swatted from the sky. They told you the Iron Dome was holding, the Patriot batteries were working, US and Israeli air power was surgical and winning. They told you this on the ABC. They told you this on Sky.
They were telling you nonsense.
MIT Professor Ted Postol — the man who proved the Patriot missile failed in the Gulf War while presidents were claiming a 97 percent success rate — has now established that current intercept rates against Iranian missiles run at a few percent at most. The systems are depleting. The decoys are multiplying. The official story is, in his own carefully chosen word, a fraud.
The first casualty of war is truth. But the deeper insight, the one Phillip Knightley identified fifty years ago, is that the lies are not random. They serve purposes. And right now, they are serving purposes that Australians have every right to examine.

Construction workers at a union rally — the CFMEU has faced decades of political and media campaigns despite winning better wages and safety conditions for Australian builders.

The Perennial Persecution of the CFMEU: Demonisation as a Defence of Power

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For thirty years, Australia’s most powerful construction union has served as a moral punching bag for the nation’s political and media establishment. Every few years another “reckoning” arrives: a Royal Commission, a regulator’s dawn raid, a media exposé discovering organised crime in high-vis. Each time, … Continue reading The Perennial Persecution of the CFMEU: Demonisation as a Defence of Power

The War Nobody’s Paid to See Coming

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Right now, the USS Abraham Lincoln and nine escort warships are sitting in the Persian Gulf like a loaded gun aimed at Iran’s heart. Not one Australian media outlet can independently verify what this means for Australians when the shooting starts. Are we up shit creek with America again?

Editorial illustration showing split screen of US military helicopters bombing Caracas at night on left, with oil infrastructure and corporate symbols on right, representing imperial resource extraction in Venezuela

The Venezuela Playbook: How Australian Media Sold Us Another War

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Venezuelan strongman Maduro seized in daring US operation.” That’s how our ABC led the coverage. But what we witnessed was an illegal military invasion of a sovereign nation dressed up as law enforcement. This is the anatomy of an imperial project: demonisation, sanctions, crisis, military intervention. We’ve seen it in Iraq, Libya, Syria. Now Venezuela. The pattern is identical. The oil is the prize. The “narcoterrorism” is just marketing. And Australian media are selling it with a straight face while we’re complicit through intelligence sharing and lockstep UN votes. Part One of an investigation into how empires manufacture consent—and why we keep falling for it.

Uday and the Rotting Throne: Lachlan Murdoch in 2025

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Imagine inheriting a media empire after spending $1.1 billion per sibling just to buy off your siblings. Then discovering you’ve just spent billions to secure control of something that looks glorious on the surface but is, underneath, a paper tiger gasping for oxygen. That’s Lachlan Murdoch in 2025. The real story of Lachlan’s consolidation isn’t that he won. It’s that he inherited a media empire at precisely the moment when media empires stopped being empires. A forensic examination of how News Corp became a hollowed-out dynasty, why Lachlan can consolidate control but can’t actually run the thing, and what it means for democracy when the last large-scale independent news organization enters managed decline.