Westie being accused of being a Nazi by Adolf Hitler.

In any case, receiving a tutorial on journalistic ethics from the folks at News Limited is a bit like being accused of being a Nazi by Adolf Hitler.

It is with a deep sense of gratitude and humility that we pay homage to Rupert Murdoch’s News Ltd today and The Australian newspaper.

For yesterday, The Oz puffed a story about yours truly off its front page. A very nice picture it was too. Strangely, there was no “exclusive” tag on the story but it was terrific advertising nonetheless. The point of the story itself, “GetUp! cash behind ‘independent’ journalist” seems to be an effort to discredit yours truly as somehow in GetUp!’s pocket.

As per the clear disclaimers at the bottom of our tax coverage, GetUp! and the Tax Justice Network are funding michaelwest.com.au to investigate the financial statements of 20 multinational companies and their tax affairs. It is a one-off arrangement. There is no Faustian pact.

Appreciate the publicity thanks. My questions for you:

1. Did The Australian lose $50 million last year? If not, how big were the losses?

2. Please explain the financial arrangements between The Australian, News Ltd and the oil and gas industry.

3. Would you care to provide a statement explaining why you believe the independence of your journalism is not compromised by a). News Ltd’s advertisers and other commercial arrangements and, b). the stewardship of Rupert Murdoch?

4. Is News Ltd still regarded as the ATO’s number one corporate tax “risk” in Australia?


5. I assume from the tenor of your final question that you intend to question my integrity. Are you personally comfortable to be firing the bullets for a global media organisation (whose newspaper loses money) against a small business person who has taken significant personal risk and whose journalistic enterprise is 1). well regarded, 2). engaged in important public interest journalism and 3). profitable?

In any case, receiving a tutorial on journalistic ethics from the folks at News Limited is a bit like being accused of being a Nazi by Adolf Hitler...Media minnow is grateful for swipe by foreign media gorilla News Corp

Former FBI Director James Comey’s  prepared testimony about President Donald Trump — delivered on Thursday before the Senate Intelligence Committee — is gripping.

But it’s not just gripping because of its contents, or its allegations that President Trump asked Comey to stop investigating Michael Flynn or demanded what amounts to a loyalty oath. It’s gripping because of its style.

Comey’s testimony is astonishingly well-written, with beautifully precise sentences and a perfect five-act structure. It reads less like bureaucratic legalese than like a classic American short story.

  

Here’s why — on a literary level, making no claims toward its political or legal importance — Comey’s testimony works so well as a story.

 James Comey’s prepared testimony reads like a great American short story 

 The five-act story structure is an elegant template that we all recognize intuitively, because we’ve seen it so many times before. It was the structure of choice for Renaissance playwrights like Shakespeare, and it’s a fantastic mechanism for putting story beats into place. 

Here’s how it works: Act 1 establishes the status quo and sets up a complication. InRomeo and Juliet, Act 1 shows us that there are two powerful families feuding in Verona, and by the end of the first act, two of their children have fallen in love.

Act 2 is rising action, with everything building up towards a climax. In Romeo and Juliet, it’s where Romeo and Juliet get married.

Then in Act 3, everything goes to hell: Mercutio and Tybalt die; Romeo is banished; Juliet is told she has to marry Paris. It looks like nothing will ever come together.

Act 4 is falling action. It’s putting the pieces together for the final confrontation. InRomeo and Juliet, it’s when Juliet drinks the potion that will make her appear to be dead rather than marry Paris. 

And finally, in Act 5 the final catastrophe comes, and the story resolves itself for good or bad. Romeo and Juliet die, and their parents promise to end their feud.

Comey’s testimony, with its account of five different meetings and phone calls with Trump, is a five-act story.

Act 1 is the January 6 meeting in which Comey briefs Trump on certain “salacious and unverified” reports about him that are about to hit the press (presumably these), and assures Trump that he is not under FBI investigation. It establishes the status quo — Comey, as then-FBI director, is working on a scandal that involves the then-president-elect — and it introduces a complication: Comey is so struck by Trump’s reaction that he feels the need to document the meeting in a detailed memo and share it with his staff. It was, Comey makes clear, not his habit to document meetings with other presidents in this way, but this first meeting with Trump “compelled” Comey to document this and future meetings.

Act 2, the rising action, comes with the January 27 dinner in which Trump allegedly requests a loyalty oath multiple times. In the classic five-act story structure, Act 2 is meant to build tension, and Comey’s account is gripping:

A few moments later, the President said, “I need loyalty, I expect loyalty.” I didn’t move, speak, or change my facial expression in any way during the awkward silence that followed. We simply looked at each other in silence.

We haven’t come to a full-on crisis yet — that’s saved for Act 3 — but the reader can feel the crisis building.

The crisis comes with the February 14 meeting in which Trump allegedly dismisses his other advisers to get Comey alone, brings up the FBI’s investigation of Michael Flynn, and asks Comey if he’ll “let it go.” That meeting is the linchpin of the arguments over whether or not Trump obstructed justice. It’s what everything else in the testimony revolves around.

Act 4 is the falling action, where all the pieces move into place for the final resolution. Here, it’s the March 30 phone call in which Trump complains to Comey about how the Russia investigation has created a “cloud” over his presidency. Trump urges Comey to complete the investigation quickly and publicly state that the FBI is not investigating Trump, and when Comey puts him off, he turns belligerent and starts to make obscure threats. In action-movie terms, this is when everything is gearing up for the boss fight.

Finally comes Act 5, the final resolution, the April 11 phone call. Trump calls Comey and demands to know when the FBI will publicly state that they are not investigating him. He makes oblique and threatening references to “that thing,” a phrase Comey claims not to understand. Comey tells Trump to make a request through the Department of Justice, effectively cutting off communication with the president, and the story resolves itself.

The result is that we can recognize the testimony as a real story, because it has the structure we subconsciously expect from stories. It registers as an elegant and pleasing narrative, not just an interesting collection of facts.

 James Comey’s prepared testimony reads like a great American short story 

“Hardened grown-ups, when asked for information, may brazenly supply it, right or wrong; but rather seldom resort to a courageous, `I don’t know.’ The confession is something of a feat in itself, since to know we do not know is next best to knowing.”

And yet experts, when I hear them on the radio or read them online, reliably and confidently supply answers I could never supply to a vast range of questions. I’m with Guy Davenport, who said of his childhood (and adult) taste in books: “What I liked in reading was to learn things I didn’t know.” Many people, I suspect, if they read at all, do so to confirm what they already think they know. Davenport said he wrote not for critics but for “people who like to read, to look at pictures, and to know things.”

The author of the passage at the top is Walter de la Mare, and the book is Early One Morning in the Spring (1935). He continues the thought above: “Or second best, perhaps, if we remember Dr. Johnson’s habit when he found himself in a library unfamiliar to him, of quietly browsing from title page to title page. When his lynx-eyed henchman observed him so engaged, and enquired why, he replied that in future he would know where what he wanted to know would be at his disposal.”

De la Mare is recalling Boswell’s account of the visit he, Johnson and Sir Joshua Reynolds made to the home of Richard Owen Cambridge on April 18, 1775. Boswell was already acquainted with Cambridge, whom he introduced to Johnson in the library. With pleasantries out of the way, Johnson “ran eagerly to one side of the room intent on poring over the backs [spines] of the books.” Boswell quotes Reynolds as saying, “He runs to the books as I do to the pictures: but I have the advantage. I can see much more of the pictures than he can of the books.” (See Reynolds’ portrait of Johnson reading.) A cultivated and courteous man, Cambridge says to Johnson:

“Dr. Johnson, I am going with your pardon, to accuse myself, for I have the same custom which I perceive you have. But it seems odd that one should have such a desire to look at the back of books.” Boswell observes that Johnson, “ever ready for contest, instantly started from his reverie, wheeled about and answered”:

“Knowledge is of two kinds. We know a subject ourselves, or we know where we can find information upon it. When we enquire into any subject, the first thing we have to do is to know what books have treated of it. This leads us to look at catalogues, and at the backs of books in libraries.”

In my head I carry around maps of a dozen libraries and bookstores, some of which no longer exist.

`To Know What Books Have Treated of It'