Miranda Devine returns to The Telegraph
Miranda Devine, one of Australia’s most polarising newspaper columnists, is switching from Fairfax back News Ltd in a further blow to the Sydney Morning Herald which lost commentator Annabel Crabb to the ABC just months ago.
Devine will produce two columns a week which will run across News Ltd’s metro papers nationally.
Daily Telegraph editor Garry Linnell said: “Miranda originally joined the Daily Telegraph as a police reporter in 1989. She went on to become an assistant editor and a twice-weekly columnist who forged a reputation as one of the most widely-read and influential writers in the country.
“She is the latest addition to our powerful stable of opinion writers who set the local and national agenda.”
Devine’s columns tend towards conservative on both political and social issues. Last year she wrote a controversial column on blame for the Black Saturday bush fire disaster in which she suggested: “”it is not arsonists who should be hanging from lamp-posts but greenies”. The Australian Press Council dismissed complaints about the comment piece.
Asked about her new salary, Devine told today’s Media section of The Australian: “It was never about the money.”
Meanwhile, The Daily Telegraph is to stage a debate on Wednesday night which will see Prime Minister Julia Gillard and Opposition Leader Tony Abbott both appear but not debate directly with each other. the public forum will take place at Rooty Hill RSL in Western Sydney in front of 200 undecdied voters. it will also be aired on Sky News.
Linnell said: “We believe this debate could well signal a turning point in the campaign. Several key marginal seats are in NSW, and it is those swinging voters who are about to become the ultimate power brokers in this country. This debate is about bringing politics back to the people.”
Tim Burrowes founded Mumbrella in 2008. He worked on Mumbrella until 2021. At various points he was editor, content director and editor-at-large.
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What a blessed relief. It’s only a shame that this doesn’t show a return to higher journalistic standards from Fairfax.
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I’m not sure ‘stable’ is the best word to use in proximity to ‘News Limited opinion writers’.
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Who cares. She’s a hack conservo myopic journo and the Tele is where she belongs. A bogan writing for bogans.
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shock horro right wing journalist joins News Ltd, is this really news worthy….
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Still, whatever you thought of Devine (and Gerard Henderson) the two of them were the only thing stopping the Herald descending into a trite, middle-class version of The Socialist Worker… It’s often soooooooo PC as to be nauseating (read the letters pages every day and you’ll see what I mean).
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Yay, maybe the SMH is moving back to sanity!
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Going back to where she belongs, to be read by bogans battler and “strayans” . She is a hack and was tarnishing the SMH reputation.
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‘Tend towards conservative’?? Is that the understatement of the year. She is an extreme right-wing fruitcake that belongs with Piers Akerman, Andrew Bolt, Dennis Shanahan and the other unhinged freaks that ‘editorialise’ for News Ltd.
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Devine is a fake. Her opinions aren’t her own.
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She’s not “polarising” – she’s a troll.
Her views are bigoted and hateful. But this is not what I resent. I resent her lack of talent.
Regardless of whether one’s own sympathies fit with Miranda Devine’s, her writing is poor. She tends to jump on a topic long after every other journalist has picked it up and thrashed it out. She is never witty, never amusing, never brilliant, never informative nor entertaining.
She clearly ended up as a columnist because her father was some “legendary” and respected Australian journalist; nepotism that happens far too often within the media.
Devine drags us all down.
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Oh, dear. Short that fairfax stock, comrades. The bright young things in the thread above might want to consider what happens to a publication that has alienated 51% (according to last week’s polls) of its potential market. Down the toilet it goes.
While all you proto-Conroys are delighted to see the range of opinions in the Silly Moaning Imperilled further restricted (apparently on the basis that opinions you dislike should not be heard), Fairfax continues to sink as a vast slice of potential readers decline to purchase it.. And where will you lot be then, once the last gurgle has been heard and fairfax has gone the way of the Argus and Sydney Sun??
Why, you’ll only Rupert’s keating-provided monopoly.
The totalitarian streak on the left is really something to behold — although it does make a more edifying spectacle than the perpetual game of soggy biscuits that constitutes the left’s answer to adult debate.
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Inky – one is a newspaper (with its faults, for sure) but the other is just something to wipe your arse on. A newspaper in name only.
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Mat, I’m glad to see you are wiping your arse on other people’s opinions.
No doubt it is due to your faith in re-cycling, although less charitable souls might be tempted to suspect that a petulant, uncouth and perpetually adolescent mindset is at work.
Beware of ink smears on the sphincter, by the way. If those opinions are indeed as toxic as you suggest, close proximity to your nether regions might lead to brain damage.
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Inky – you don’t think I’d actually buy a newspaper when I can read it online for free and not waste any paper at all?
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YYYAAAAAYYYYYYYYYYYYYYY , thank god is all I can say. Miranda Devine is an awful, awful writer and a terrible person. At least she is now where she belongs, with all the other right wing nut jobs. Good luck Miranda, I WON’T miss you 🙂
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I wonder how many more disgruntled Fairfax staff are going to leave. Seems to be a major exit of staff in all areas of the business (including digital). More so than any other publisher. No matter what their spin.
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I prefer Miranda Sawyer.
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A twice weekly dose of formulaic contrarianism carefully engineered to shock and outrage has found its natural home……
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It’s a huge loss for the Herald and a bigger gain for News Ltd.
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Devine makes Abbott look like Einstein. Tough task I know.
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thank god for that. devine and bolt could possibly spawn the devil itself.
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Brett … maybe the chronological inverse applies!
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Ah Inky, it seems that your argument is based on the tres amusant presumption sustained by a very small number of right-wing cheerleaders (some of whom are posturing from a teensy position of conflict of interest, as their livelihood depends on the presumption): that “balance” requires that any human being who will offer a contrary view to that peddled by the majority of writers (or held by the majority of readers) of a publication, should automatically be employed and continue to be employed indefinitely, regardless of the extent to which the given human being exhibits writing talent, insight or originality.
Yep, we’re talking about something that these cheerleaders seem to despise in every other context: quotas and affirmative action.
As noted by others, Devine is dull, reactive, a poor writer and re-arranges others’ views under her byline without ever adding any additional insights to them.
Incidentally, playing up to, and not challenging, its consumers’ biases, apparently hasn’t gone too badly commercially for another media organisation that you would doubtless decry as “totalitarian”: Fox News in the US.
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SimonH: I think i am following your logic, but the constipated prose makes it a little difficult. Do you write editorials for The Age? You would be perfect for the job, certainly by current standards. By the way, read Orwell on the use of tres amusant foreign-isms, which he notes are the comfort and refuge of those who would package banalities as the profound.
But to what I take to be your point:
It is not a question of affirmative action or quotas, it is a simple matter of commercial acumen. The Silly Moaning Imperilled purports to be the journal of record for all of Sydney, the respectable, sober, balanced news organ that reflects the city it serves in all its breadth and diversity. Sadly for fairfax shareholders, it has adopted just your attitude — that perspectives its editors find personally distasteful should be accorded token space on a quota system. If you accept that logic, Devine’s departure is a body blow, as the last fig leaf of balance has now been shredded. It is even worse at the Age, where Devine’s columns have never been run.
On a larger point, the blinkered insistence on the part of the Silly and The Age to position themselves as Guardians on the Yarra/Harbour is lunacy. The Guardian can stake its claim to that small section of partisan turf because it must compete with, what??, nine or ten rival Fleet Street dailies. In such a crowded market, it is actually an astute commercial strategy to nail your colours to the flagpole and say ‘this is what we stand for, this is the market section we own’.
In Sydney and melbourne, matters are rather different. In each of those markets, there is a broadsheet and a knuckle-dragging tabloid. which snaffles the bulk of daily sales. This should leave the broadsheet free to till the field of all the readers left over, to tap the better demographics represented by broadsheet audiences. Instead, both papers have decided to focus solely on the Guardian market, thereby limiting their penetration to the those who share the editors and reporters biases.
That the approach isn’t working became self-evident years ago — witness the inexorable circulation declines. Yet fairfax persists in pursuing it. The definition of madness is, as they say, doing the same thing over and over in the expectation of a different result; by that standard fairfax senior management are fit for the sheltered workshop.
If you genuinely believe Fairfax is on the right track (and not just to scathing rulings by the Press Council), I would suggest you might like to buy some Fairfax stock. At $1.50 or thereabouts it is reasonably priced and may well provide some short term gains if the upcoming numbers are relatively good. But you should be wary of holding it for too long. There is no future in dominating a small section of a small market, and that is why Devine’s departure will hurt the franchise mightily.
And you’re right. I will be voting LNP — although the Lemon had my support the last time around. As a former member of the ALP it still feels odd awarding #1 to the coalition, but there are two issues that work against voting according to instinct.
The first is competence, of which we have seen none whatsoever — cash for clunkers being the latest example of foolishness.
The second is Conroy’s filter, now waiting to be implemented once (if) the electorate give labor a mandate to treat it like children.
The party of Gillard/Rudd is both dim and dangerous. It is a cocktail I find very hard to swallow. As someone who believes, presumably, in personal freedom, you should too. Then again, perhaps you oprefer to have your decisions made for you.
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And one last point about Fox: It has done well because conservative thought represents at least 50% of the market in the US. Come November this will be evident when the Republicans regain control of the House and, quite possibly, the senate as well.
The Age and the Silly, by contrast, have their focus on the Green-voting segment of the electorate, which is 10%-15% of the potential they might have tapped. If you doubt the green orientation, google “melissa fyfe” and read how The Age’s state parliamentary correspondent recently jogged the entire length of the East Coast to ‘raise awareness of climate change”. The Age gave her a blog to record her anguish at the ravaged landscape she passed along the way and allowed her to do the run on company time. Once back in melbourne she returned to her regular gig, which largely consists of reporting events through a dark green prism.
Seriously, can you think of a better advertisement not merely for a newspaper’s biases but, moreso, for its will to self-destruction?
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What is this fascination with Annabel Crabb? She is not funny, she is embarrassing!
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Now that her worthless father (former murdoch editor) has snuffed it, how predictable that this cow has been welcomed back to the murdoch ranch. Soon the murdoch ‘news’ papers will be as dead as Frank Devine, and the right wing grovelling glove puppets who work there will be looking for work.
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anon1 has got it right. This worthless creature Miranda only has a job because her father was Frank Devine, a thankfully-now-dead grovelling Murdoch handpuppet. How unsurprising she’s been given a home at a Murdoch rag.
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How wonderful. Miranda’s unbalanced right wing rants were one of the few disappointingly unthinking opinion pieces in the Herald. A News Ltd tabloid is the perfect place for her ultra-conservative screechings.
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…but the Herald has counterbid, and won. Miranda’s staying at Fairfax.
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