Greeny News

After the phone-hacking scandal rocked Britain, News Corp officials in Australia struggled to put some daylight between its local operations and the rest of the empire, assuring the public that the country was spared phone hacking and other unethical practices. It is perhaps unlikely that wire tapping or phone hacking was practiced in Australia, simply because the local specialty of the Murdoch organs and their shock-jock allies has been a fairly low-tech reliance on outrageous spin.

And despite the robustness of its editorial, the Australian appears remarkably thin-skinned. Its editor-in-chef threatened to sue a former reporter for defamation because she reportedly said writing about climate change at the paper was "absolutely excruciating. It was torture."