SUNDAY, AUGUST 1, 2021 • THE VICTORIAN NEWS • VICTORIANNEWS.COM.AU
Occupants safe following Brighton house fire By Ashley Geelan Saturday, 31 July, 2021,16:00 Firefighters arrived within five minutes to a unit fire in William Street, Brighton this afternoon. The sole occupant - a 40-year-old male had fortunately evacuated before Fire Rescue Victoria (FRV) firefighters arrived on scene. First response firefighters entered the unit wearing breathing apparatus immediately commencing an aggressive fire attack. The fire was bought under control 30 minutes after arriving and firefighters will remain overnight to ensure the fire is extinguished and no 'flare ups' occur. The cause of the fire is yet to be determined whilst FRV Fire Investigators attempt to establish the cause of the fire. The 40-year-old male was treated by paramedics for mild smoke inhalation. Five pumpers, a rescue unit and one aerial appliance with 28 firefighters attended the scene.
News Corp walks a delicate line on COVID politics By The Conversation Saturday, 31 July, 2021,10:00 Denis Muller, The University of Melbourne Elements within News Corporation are now fighting among themselves over how its platforms should position themselves in response to the worsening COVID crisis in New South Wales. This has become clear with the decision by the editor of News Corp’s Daily Telegraph, Ben English, to ditch Alan Jones as a columnist. Over the past few weeks, as the coronavirus outbreak got inexorably worse, the Telegraph ran a series of characteristically shrill columns by Jones attacking mask-wearing, lockdowns and NSW Premier Gladys Berejiklian. Yet Jones also promotes these opinions on News Corp’s Sky News, where his Sky-at-Night slot is undisturbed. Indeed, Jones makes a virtue of this, telling The Sydney Morning Herald: Have a look at Sky News YouTube, Sky News Facebook and Alan Jones Facebook and you can see. The same column that I write for the Tele goes up on my Facebook page. On July 29, the Telegraph also took the opportunity provided by an outburst against Jones by the NSW health minister, Brad Hazzard, to distance itself from
its former columnist, referring to him as a “Sky News host”. At The Australian on July 30, Jones’s opinions were confined to rugby union. Trying to read the entrails of what goes on in News Corp is akin to Kremlinology, but this is the second piece of evidence in the past couple of weeks that the Telegraph is executing a delicate pivot. A decision to switch to an overt anti-Coalition position would be well above the editor’s pay grade. However, a couple of weeks ago, the Telegraph’s editorat-large, Matthew Benns, wrote a curious critique of Scott Morrison’s handling of vaccination and quarantine, written as if by the Morrison family dog. It contained quite a lot of nipping at Morrison’s heels. Meanwhile, the paper’s opinion columns have been replete with morale-boosting propaganda reminiscent of the 1940s and 1950s. It has continued to report the growing COVID crisis straight, publishing pictures of a strained-looking Berejiklian but refraining from attacking her in commentary. Putting all this together, the Telegraph seems to be positioning itself as champion of an heroic people, contingently tolerant of Berejiklian, intolerant of attacks on her policies, restless with Morrison, yet anxious not to damage the Liberal Party politically. The degree of difficulty involved in staying upright while executing this manoeuvre is considerable. Meanwhile at Sky, Jones goes on as before, and Peta Credlin resorts to some very dodgy logic in an attempt to show that the performance of the Labor government in Victoria is still clearly inferior to the performance of the Coalition government in New South Wales. Her proposition is that the 172 cases of the Delta strain reported on July 28 was nothing like as bad as the 700 cases a day at the height of the Victorian crisis last year, even though, she said, Delta was
Page 1/28