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Mark Latham ,media whore and general all-round fuckhat ex-leader of the Australian opposition Labour Party, is releasing a book that basically blasts everyone in the party who he worked with except Julia Gillard because she has nice hair. Aside from the Labour Party spending as much time "not commenting" on it as possible, we have mediawank. Lots and lots of it. It's well-summed-up by Media Watch HERE, but I'll provide the general gist.

First of all, Latham's publishers Melbourne University Press allowed and interview to the ABC's interview show Enough Rope (hosted by Andrew "Wannabe Parkinson" Denton) and which screens their little latest-celebrity-book/movie-release publicity slot every Monday evening on the ABC at 9:30. However, News Limited (the Australian newspaper branch of Murdoch's NewsCorp ) had purchased sole-interview rights from the publisher as well, for their September 16th edition of the national newspaper The Australian (as well as several other News LTD newspapers) for $80 000AUS. However, Tony Jones of the ABC's Lateline had been getting all cuddly with Latham for a while and had also managed to score an interview for his progam, directly from Latham. Melb. Uni. Publishers did not know this.

Denton filmed the interview. News LTD started beating up the release of the book and their "exclusive" interview to make sure nobody would pass it up for the Denton interview. Tony Jones did not tell Andrew Denton & the Enough Rope producers about his interview. They found out anyway, and weren't impressed. They wanted guarantees the Lateline interview would not run before theirs. Lateline gave it, but Denton & Enough Rope didn't buy it, so they wanted to run the interview at 8:30 on Thursday night instead (the night before the 16th when NewsLTD was supposed to have their "exclusive" first-interview).

Obviously, NewsLTD found out about this and took out an injunction to prevent the program running. At 8:15pm on Thursday night they were successful. At 10:15 they weren't, and the injunction was dissolved because the judge ruled the "beat up" they'd been running the past week for their "exclusive" interview contained most of what was in the ABC interview, so the public wouldn't truly have access to anything "exclusive" from Denton's interview anyway. (Still with me?)

In the end, Enough Rope trumped Lateline as the ABC decided to run the Denton interview just before Lateline was meant to go to air that night at 10:30pm.

The best part is the aftermath, of course. NewsLTD pulled the "taxpayers money" attack card that every commercial media company does in Australia when it gets its arse kicked by the ABC, ignoring the fact that if they hadn't been such asshats in the first place, the ABC & Enough Rope/Denton wouldn't have had to spend the taxpayer's money in courts against them.

Tony Jones of Lateline tried to defend his case by suggesting his under-the-table-Latham-sucking was somehow more honourable than the chequebook journalism that the public actually knew about.

Latham and MUP sat back and laughed evilly as the dosh rolled in and the book went into its second print run. And all was right with the world.

Posted here and not political_wank because it's more about things outside politics than actual political shitflinging.

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Childfree wank meets customers_suck. It's, like, the holy grail of otf_wank!

iris_magic opines that people who park in the "Mothers and Children" spaces in front of her store are sucky customers. Others beg to differ. indefatigable42 brings the questionable logic.

[EDIT: indefatigable42 just wants everyone to get along. Predictably, this does not happen. Thanks for the heads-up, mathilde!]

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