worked for The Australian and you would give them barely a pass mark as journalists

A very serious assertion and if it was made about you, you would be calling a defamation lawyer.

And we all know why. Because false smears about a person’s competence are highly damaging and defamation law is supposed to protect ordinary people from this kind of abuse.

BECAUSE YOU WANT TO SILENCE FREE SPEECH!

Andrew Bolt promptly explains what News Ltd means by “free speech”:

That’s Mitchell’s opinion, and I hope we are still free in this speech-strangled country to express the like without legal sanction.

How revealing. Not even defamation laws should limit the right of those with the biggest soapbox to trumpet whatever smears they like to unfairly harm other people.

That’s right – “free speech” is the right of The Australian to launch career-damaging personal attacks on other people without restraint. (And check out their other furious attacks on Margaret Simons today, including a bizarrely random attack on her via a 2003 book she wrote that Chris Kenny didn’t like.) If you truly value free speech, you must support the right of the biggest and most powerful media organisation in the land to run personal vendettas to destroy its enemies without reference to any limit (save the amount of money that Rupert Murdoch is prepared to lose on The Australian in order to maintain political influence and crush opponents).

That’s what they mean by “free speech”. Their right as a powerful media company to destroy people they don’t like. The freedom of the bully.

UPDATE: BY the way, just in case you’ve forgotten – this is the Chris Mitchell who had his very expensive lawyers send a formal Concerns Notice (the first part of a defamation proceeding to Julie Posetti for accurately quoting someone talking about him at a journalism conference. Not sure Andrew Bolt made a big deal about “free speech” that day.

Note: for reasons COMPLETELY UNRELATED TO FREE SPEECH we must moderate very heavily indeed anything anyone writes about Andrew Bolt on our site.

UPDATE #2: I note that part of The Australian‘s criticism is that these academics have been “critics of News Ltd”. Can someone explain how you could be an expert in the practice of journalism and never be critical of anything News Ltd does?

“This all comes from Finkelstein,” said one former press gallery member, now working incognito in a Hume Highway fast-food franchise and smuggling out precious analysis of internal ructions within the ALP to a public readership starved of idle and unsourced speculation. “We warned them that forcing newspapers to prominently publish corrections was the thin end of the wedge. And here we are, with the professors in charge – cracking down on misplaced modifiers and throwing passive case authors into solitary confinement.”

Attempts to overthrow the autocratic regime have been thwarted by a ruthless secret police cadre created by the government’s communications minister, Major General Grogs Gamut – a former blogger and now vainglorious enforcer who insists he be represented at every state occasion by Ralph Fiennes as Coriolanus.

And yet even now you won’t believe us. You call us self-interested hypocrites, scaremongering hacks, pathetic liars without shame who are blatantly misrepresenting what’s actually been proposed.

Well here’s one collection of our courageous predictions. Let the record show that we saw what was coming, and tried to warn you. It’s not our fault that you refused to listen.

* * *

Naturally, the far-right IPA – which was pretty darn happy with the status quo, thank you very much – was quick out of the gate with TERRIFYING PREDICTIONS OF THINGS TO COME.

Here’s man of the people John Roskam. published in the AFR:

A failure to defend liberty

The inquiry was demanded by Bob Brown and the Greens as part of their campaign against News Ltd [my hyperlink]…

A blog site visited by literally one or two people a day would fall within the ambit of the council.

Finkelstein’s recommendations are profoundly illiberal and undemocratic.

They are the most serious assault on the liberties of Australians since Robert Menzies tried to ban the Communist Party in 1949. It is almost incredible that Finkelstein, who as a Federal Court judge once adjudicated on the lives of citizens according to the laws of a liberal democracy, could conceive of such a regime to control freedom of speech.

Finkelstein’s ideological position is not hard to find. It’s in paragraph 4.10 of his report. He thinks a council should control speech in Australia because most people are too dumb or ignorant to decide for themselves about what they see and hear and read in the media.

In response to the claim from News Ltd’s John Hartigan that ultimately readers “were capable of making up their own minds” about bias in the media, Finkelstein writes, “often, however, readers are not in a position to make an appropriately informed judgment”.

This is intellectual arrogance at its most breathtaking. And it’s a great argument against democracy. If, as Finkelstein claims, people aren’t smart enough to decide for themselves the merits of what they see in the media then they’re certainly not smart enough to decide who to vote for.

This is the totalitarian fallacy: don’t let the people decide (because the people are too stupid), let judges and academics decide for them.

The Finkelstein report overturns two centuries of Western political philosophy. Since the French Revolution, the left have fought for the right of every adult regardless of class, education, or background to participate in politics and political debate. In Australia in 2012, Finkelstein and the Greens believe access to the media should be restricted.

(I like how Roskam pretends Finkelestein called people “dumb” and then reinforces his inaccurate paraphrase by suggesting Finkelstein claimed people “aren’t smart enough”. That’s some quality verballing right there.)

And here’s Chris Berg, not being silenced by the far-Left Sydney Morning Herald:

Free press to be sacrificed for political retribution

Freedom of the media is too important to be controlled by government.

The Independent Media Inquiry has proposed just what was expected: an outrageous attack on freedom of speech and the press.

Mark Pearson tried to warn readers of the ABC’s The Drum:

Scratch the surface of this proposal and you will find a harsh new regime which stands to damage Australia’s reputation as a democracy and might well come back to bite the politicians, academics and publishers who are supporting it today.

And one of Chris Mitchell’s employees at The Australian courageously gave their boss a couple of paragraphs to explain the upcoming oppression at the hand of those dastardly disease-ridden Leftists:

Chris Mitchell, editor-in-chief of The Australian, believes the problem is both cultural and political. “The media studies academic class is far removed from the concerns of viewers and readers and is engaged in a sociological project to change the world in its image. That is, to infect people with progressive left ideology,” he says.

“Journalists are interested in reporting what is actually happening. It is hilarious so many media academics who fought John Howard on the grounds he was ‘stifling dissent’ are now at the forefront of shutting down free speech. They only support free speech they agree with.

“Like many on the Left they love scrutiny of conservative governments but completely reject scrutiny of the Greens and the Green-Labor coalition.”

(Only The Australian‘s special Mitchell-Level-Hypocrisy Proof publishing system was able to repeat the “only support free speech they agree with” line by the famed defamation-suit threatener without exploding.)

The ever-reliable Gerard Henderson even explained to us why we should fear the report’s author – “Ray Finkelstein as (sic) an ABC-Admiring Kind of Leftie”.

Last, but not least, here are the great heroes of the people, Piers Akerman and Andrew Bolt – not that their readers didn’t already know exactly what to expect.

Bolt:

The rise of the totalitarians

…It takes a certain kind of mind to want such controls over the political speech of so many… the sinister Finkelstein inquiry… the totalitarian instinct behind its recommendations

Akerman:

Greens try to muzzle media

…It is a slap in the face for that fundamental democratic pillar – a free press… Of course [Brown] wants the media muzzled.

There you are. And many more, collected on Twitter under the hashtag #FinkelScares.

Wake up, sheeple.

“The storm had now definitely abated, and what thunder there was now grumbled over more distant hills, like a man saying ‘And another thing…’ twenty minutes after admitting he’d lost the argument.”

-Douglas Adams, So Long And Thanks For All The Fish.

Chris Mitchell, editor of The Australian, on Monday, cancelling an appearance by Paul Kelly at a debate on the subject of Robert Manne’s essay on the conduct of his paper:

“The Australian has finished with the issue.’’

Janet Albrechtsen, published in Chris Mitchell’s The Australian, today:

This mob does not really fancy free speech. Unless you agree with their sentiments.

That’s why contesting Manne’s criticism matters. And Manne and his illiberal comrades are not short on hypocrisy…

So will Paul come to the debate now? Or did Janet just want to have the last word in an argument wiser heads have now realised is just going to continue to embarrass them?

THE editor-in-chief of The Australian, Chris Mitchell, has won the JN Pierce Award for Media Excellence for leading the newspaper’s coverage of climate change policy.

…

For the first time, the judging panel presented the award to an editor rather than a reporter or columnist.

And who decided Mitchell and his paper deserved such an award?

The award is presented each year by the Australian Petroleum Production and Exploration Association.

While the petroleum lobby might be fans of the Oz’s coverage of climate change issues, others seem to disagree.

Should a newspaper – or its editor – feel honoured to receive an award on its reporting and coverage from a group that appears to have a clear vested interest in the nature of the coverage?

ELSEWHERE: Mitchell’s award is being discussed at Pollytics and Larvatus Prodeo. Andrew Bolt, who is normally quick to criticise awards that he thinks are judged based on how well they suit the judges’ agenda, hasn’t picked it up yet.

ELSEWHERE #2: Tim Lambert notes:

The Australian did not report on their 2008 victory in RealClimates’s prestigious award for Most consistently wrong media outlet, but the APPEA award generated this headline: Editor-in-chief Chris Mitchell wins top award.