Influence Game?

Marionettiste in Prague on Charles Bridge.[A]

With the exception of a story at The Sydney Morning Herald Online (published yesterday morning, Thursday 16th), an op-ed by free-lance journalist Graham Readfearn (at The Drum Unleashed), and a piece by Amber Jamieson (at Crikey), both of which appeared yesterday towards the end of the afternoon, apparently no Australian media organization considered newsworthy the alleged leaking of documents from The Heartland Institute and the subsequent statement by the Institute.

In particular, yesterday I could not find any reference to this in the ABC, SBS, the private TV free-to-air channels (Seven, Nine and Ten). And I certainly did not expect to find any reference in the News Ltd press.

This in contrast to The New York Times, The Guardian, BBC, AP, The Washington Post, Forbes, New Scientist, National Geographic, ABC (America), ZDNet, Slate Magazine, Scientific American, The Financial Times, and a host of minor publications in English language, all of which have reported on this subject during the last 24 to 20 hours, as this screen capture of Google News partially shows:

In fact, an hour ago (approximately 11:00 am, Australian time) even The Australian (a branch of News Ltd.) finally reported on this subject.

I am not privy to how news editors work in Australia. Maybe they are too conservative (both in the political sense, or in the sense of considering newsworthy only a set of conventional subjects). Perhaps they are too overwhelmed with really newsworthy items like the investigation by French police of the theft of a diamond-studded dog collar from a grave at the world's oldest pet cemetery (see here).

But I would hate to believe that political considerations stop news from being reported, and that they are only reported after the Australian public has been exposed to foreign news sources.

Image Credit:
[A] Marionettiste in Prague on Charles Bridge. Wikipeda.