A shortage of right-wing political books was the subject of a big whingefest on the weekend from The Weekend Australian’s foreign editor Greg Sheridan.
“On a two-party preferred basis, 53 per cent of the people have just endorsed the Howard Government for its fourth term. Surely they are entitled to, say, 15 or 20 per cent of the shelf space?”
Sheridan seems to have created some regime of censorship of the Right by Australian publishers in his article, where Right wingers are seemingly writing intelligent books en masse and simply being turned down by the biased publishing industry. Could it simply be Greg that there just aren’t that many good conservative books being written right now? Or could it be that poor little Greggy might have recently had a book of his own turned down by publishers?
Australians might have recently returned a conservative Government, but this is mainly due to a perceived excellent handling of the economy rather than any other policy they have implemented. The economy does not make for very good books, and many supporters of Howard’s economy do not support the lies or the war or the destruction of Medicare and native title. And these are far more interesting topics for books. In my opinion they are also more important issues, but many voters disagree.
Poor Sherry laments that Howard is not getting enough coverage:
“How can it be that here we already have a welter of biographies of Mark Latham, who has yet to achieve ministerial office of any kind but only one, highly unsatisfactory, biography of John Howard...?”
I’m not sure if Sheridan refers to Robert Manne’s The Howard Years or David Barnett’s Howard biography, but why don’t you write one Greg if you are so concerned? I somehow doubt that publishers would turn down someone for writing a bio of the PM. There is no conspiracy here. Just a lack of authors. Maybe Johnny just doesn’t want to be followed around by anyone, or maybe no one wants to follow him around.
How can it be that here we already have a welter of newspapers singing the praises of the Liberal Party, and yet we have only one, highly Sydney-centred ALP paper?
Sheridan launches a tyrade against those he disagrees with, calling Michael Moore, Noam Chomsky and John Pilger “the extreme and ridiculous”. Moore of course exaggerates, but then he can hardly be considered a very serious commentator. Pilger suffers his usual ridiculously emotive demonisation. But Chomsky? One of the most influential academic intellectuals of the 20th Century? Chomsky is possibly the only Renaissance man left and has been highly influential on linguistics, political science, rhetorical studies and many other areas.
Sheridan dismisses Simon Adams, Guy Rundle and author of Not Happy John, Margo Kingston as mere “local imitators” rather than critics of the Howard Government. I suppose then that Howard is but a local imitation of the Republicans and The Australian newspaper but a local imitation of the New York Times?
And then come the good ole accusations of mental illness against the loony left with “the politically demented, such as Bob Ellis”. In Sheridan’s words, these accusations are “ponderously predictable”. ALP celebrity and classic screenplay author Ellis is eccentric. An intellectual elitist of the greatest magnitude. And he certainly doesn’t shy away from extreme hyperbole. But he is infinitely more interesting and reasoned than Sheridan. For a start, Ellis usually backs up what he says, rather than simply launching a tyrade of abuse in the style of say Greg Sheridan or Champas Socialist.
“By accepting the absurd premise that there is something inherently evil about the Australian Government, Australian publishers seem to drop all editorial standards,” rabbits on Sheridan.
Coming from The Australian, this is the pot calling the kettle black. Once an intelligently-written newspaper, catering to an educated audience that demanded journalistic scrutiny and balance, The Australian these days is only slightly better than the local imitation, The Courier-Mail. Celebrity pap adorns many of its pages, the bias is as strong as if Laurie Oakes (the 2004 Oakes that is) were writing for them and the writing is patronisingly simple, often descending to tabloid quality.
What is more, publishers do not necessarily accept the premise that the Howard Government is evil, but they accept that authors are entitled to publish this view, which is not nearly as absurd as Sheridan claims. He does not actually bother to tell us why it is an absurd claim. And yet he has the hide to say things like:
“There is no need to marshal facts for an argument. If there is any research in most of these books, it consists of assembling newspaper clippings to illustrate the predetermined thesis.”
When Sheridan starts listing Ellis’ sins, at first I thought the following quote was a deliberate tongue in cheek effort, but reading on, I realised that Sheridan had not noticed his own glaring hypocrisy:
“And the third is a complete abandonment of stylistic discipline, so that sentences ramble interminably on, adjectives bolted together seemingly at random, disconsolately unable to find their full stops, to be followed by some staccato burst, some slogan whose frequent repetition Ellis takes to be stylistically clever.”
Although Sheridan spends about three quarters of the article launching into Ellis’ new book, only mentioning Kingston, Manne and Chomsky in passing, he decides to taint the entire ‘left wing’ set of authors with the same brush:
“You have to conclude that Australian publishers have no standards of honesty, factual accuracy or elementary decency; that they will publish absolutely anything, no matter how bad, if the author is well known and is attacking conservatives.”
If this is how it works in the book publishing world, then in the newspaper world it seems to work exactly the same, once you replace the word “conservatives” with “left wingers”.
Then Sheridan goes on to claim that anyone who is at University and intelligent is right wing and will rebel against this publishing bias:
“One is left with the impression of a large group of undistinguished writers who sell in quite modest numbers essentially to each other and to university students conscripted by course reading lists into this orthodox tedium. The smart ones, of course, understand that the orthodox tomes are not giving them the full picture, or even half of it, and rebel”.
Of course, Greg! Anyone who agrees with them is obviously someone who somehow fluked it into University, probably cheated by looking over the shoulder of some rich kid. Does Sheridan truly believe that books about John Howard and George Bush’s influences on foreign policy would go through the roof and be less “isolated from normal Australians”, the same Australians who generally don’t give two hoots about politics? I wonder how Greg then explains the fact that despite the fact that the media is turning further and further Right, and also being dumbed down (these are two separate factors) newspaper readership is dropping.