What happens after Tony Abbott gets sprung snooping? Or the Sydney Morning Herald is sprung bullshitting?
Wednesday, 20 November 2013
This has now been changed online by Fairfax. You'll have to follow a few steps to see the way it was first published.
Go to google.
Search for "after tony abbott is sprung snooping"
You'll see this.
The original story looked like this.
The subeditor had followed the line in the story to produce a headline that fits the copy.
They've now changed the headline to this, suggesting the point of the story is that President Yudhoyono (like Shane Warne and Liz Hurley) has a larger number of Twitter followers than Tony Abbott.
But the copy of the story is there in its original deceptive form.
It's always awkward, isn't it, to get caught snooping? Whether it's rifling through your spouse's pocketbook when you think they're in the loo, or mounting a highly sophisticated 3G phone surveillance operation on the head of state of your professed ally and then boasting about it to your superiors in a PowerPoint presentation, well, you're going to feel a mite sheepish when surprised in the act.
And when you're caught, you can go one of two ways: prostrate yourself before the object of your snooping; or - and we'll call this the ''Abbott model'' - offer an apology, couched firmly in the passive tense, for ''any hurt or embarrassment caused'', without naming yourself as the direct cause of these emotions. And then imply that they should have expected you to do it anyway so you're not really sure what the big fuss is about.
Tony Abbott has a contemporary problem with President Yudhoyono not because he himself was caught snooping, rather because he took responsibility for responding to actions of the Australian Government under Mr Rudd's "snooping" direction.
Any suggestiong that Mr Abbott has been caught snooping is just bullshit. The SMH will need to do more than change a headline to atone for that.