Friday, January 4, 2019

Why I Don't Buy 'The Saturday Paper'

Here's the reason I don't buy Melbourne publisher Morry Schwartz's The Saturday Paper, which, I hear, is quite popular with progressive Australians:

"Schwartz says: 'I think Israel is over-tackled. The media are too obsessed with it, but a balanced view, sure'." Schwartz also publishes the Quarterly Essay and The Monthly (See my 4/3/14 post The Saturday Paper.)

"The Saturday Paper's coverage of Israel's [2014] assault on Gaza has been conspicuously, well, non-existent." Tim Robertson, Palestine & the Saturday Paper, overland.org.au, 1/8/14 (See my 28/1/15 post The Glass Wall.)

"[The Monthly's] seen as a left-wing publication but the publisher is very right-wing on Israel. He's Jewish... and he's very much to the Benjamin Netanyahu end of politics. So you can't touch [Palestine]. We just don't touch it. There's just a glass wall goes around it." John Van Tiggelen, a former editor of TSP and now staff writer at The Monthly (See my 28/1/15 post The Glass Wall.)

Now as it happens, a copy of TSP dated 27/10/18 has just come my way. That issue contains an analysis, by the paper's chief political correspondent, Karen Middleton, of the fallout from Morrison's Jerusalem fizzer, covering both its impact on the Wentworth byelection and on our relationship with Indonesia. Reading through the piece, Turnbull used to head off regional distrust - lo and behold! - I find Middleton characterising the Palestine/Israel conflict as "longstanding unrest between the Israelis and Palestinian people."

Which, I assume, is music to Morry's ears.

3 comments:

Grappler said...

"Israel is over-tackled". The country that can bring down a PM of Australia for not paying enough homage, as your previous post shows. Sure! We don't need to know about that, do we?

MERC said...

Shouldn't that be 'Reporting on Israel is over-shackled'?

Anonymous said...

I like Middleton's 'long standing unrest', that is factually incorrect, no matter which way you spin it!