Copyright Eric Drooker www.drooker.com

- Censorship -

Case Study: The Bendigo Advertiser

My writing ‘career’ has been neither long nor illustrious. As of this time, I’ve had some random drivel published on an independent online lifestyle e-zine (www.ribmag.com); some belligerent ranting which I managed to pass off as ‘CD reviews’ on www.sinister.com.au (an online rock, metal and hardcore site); and the jewel in my crown is my series of publications in The Bendigo Advertiser’s ‘Loop Magazine’, a weekly 4-page insert which publishes anything that any young person sends in, no matter how mindless or badly-written it is. Pulitzer, here I come.

Bendigo is a relatively small town in central Victoria, home to about 100,000 citizens. The Advertiser is its beloved local rag, covering burst water mains and broken shop windows in rigid defiance of the problems of the world at large, for almost as long as the town has existed. It has a regular circulation of just under 15,000 people – which in a small town, is not an inconsequential figure. Revolutions have been started with less…not that the Advertiser is likely to be the spearhead of any great social upheaval, but I’m getting to that.

I’ve had a total of about 7 articles published in Loop, in a period of time spanning a year or so. Most of it was totally harmless stuff – movie reviews, a local band’s CD launch, an anecdote about a doomed garden hose…stuff like that. Every one of them was censored in some way - without my consent - by the Advertiser’s editor, Leanne Younes, or one of her minions. Some of this censorship made a degree of sense; for example, I didn’t expect them to stand for my terrible habit of cursing like a sailor. It was the other things they omitted that gave me cause to scratch my head in confusion. They printed the word ‘bastard’ in a movie review, as it was part of a title; but they omitted the word ‘god-damn’ in another article. ‘Bloody chaos’ became ‘chaos’. ‘What the hell I’m talking about’ became ‘what I’m talking about’. Details like these were puzzling, but they weren’t anything that was keeping me awake at night. Rather than diluting the point of my articles, they were just subtly altering the language to make it sound lamer, for some inscrutable reason. Life goes on.

Of the 7 that were published, only one had subject matter which you could possibly describe as controversial – entitled ‘Illusion Of Democracy’, it was a sweeping attack on the pretentious and superficial political system of our nation. It might not sound like such a hot potato, but it was a thinly-disguised drunken rant espousing the opinion that every single politician should be thrown out of office (literally thrown, by seven-foot goons armed with clubs and broken whiskey bottles) and the entire bureaucratic and electoral process be razed to the ground and re-invented to actually fulfil its intended function of serving the people’s wishes. I maintain that to this day, the only reason it was published was because I submitted it under a pseudonym designed to sound like some intellectual university chick – ‘Meredith Hamilton’, I think it was. I have reason to believe I’ve gotten something of a black mark against my name in the editorial office of the Advertiser, my sometimes contentious opinions meaning that my every submission is liberally raped with a red pen. It’s also possible that Ms. Younes heard about the time I said I was going to set her on fire, whilst in a fit of pique. She has little to worry about in any case, as the list of people I’ve threatened to set on fire is much longer than the list of people I HAVE set on fire.
Aside from those 7 published articles, there were 4 that were torpedoed completely and utterly, that never saw the light of day in the Advertiser’s hallowed pages. These articles, friends and neighbours, are the focus of this little tirade – the ones that were not just altered, but flat-out rejected. My objective here is to analyse them with the benefit of hindsight, and compare them with some submissions that the Advertiser did publish – submissions that I thought were far less constructive and more morally reprehensible than anything I could ever churn out in the grip of the foulest drunken fugue.
What is the point, you ask? Is this just the jabbering of a bitter, twisted little hack on some pissant vengeance trip? Well…yes and no, but mostly no. In thinking about the censorship I’ve faced thus far I’ve made some weird observations on the community that Younes and her minions are trying to protect from reading my incessant quacking. And while the actions of the editorial office of one small-town newspaper may seem inconsequential when looking at the bigger picture, the Advertiser has often reminded me of a hideous microcosm of the Melbourne Herald-Sun, like a bastard mutant offspring with all the Sun’s ugliest features exacerbated by the Advertiser’s necessarily narrow focus (I despair for the future of the human race when I think of the people who rely on the Advertiser for their world news intake).
The Herald-Sun wouldn’t touch me with a seventy-foot pole so I can’t write about any experience I have with their censorship policy; but as I say, the Advertiser’s stance seems to reflect the attitudes of some very influential major dailies (the Herald-Sun has a circulation of over half a million people and Andrew Bolt, one of their regular and most popular columnists, is a borderline fascist with all the compassion, good sense and essential humanity of a pudding).
Also worth keeping in mind is an advertisement announcing job vacancies at the Advertiser, which stated that it was “one of the fastest-growing newspapers” in “one of Victoria’s most progressive regions”.

So without further ado, these are the articles that Just Weren’t Good Enough for the Bendigo Addy.
The first was a bizarre, psychedelic, stream-of-consciousness account of a dream I had whilst afflicted with a terrible case of the flu. I was surprised that it was rejected, as it contained no profanity or sinister undercurrents of political subversiveness. My best guess is that was shot down simply because it was very unpleasant in nature, and not altogether coherent; but still, the decision makes little sense to me.
Another was a spontaneous ‘tribute’ to the late journalist Hunter S. Thompson, which was really just a belated attempt to express the sheer weirdness of my feelings about his suicide. In that case I think it was either the inevitable mentioning of drugs that peppered the piece, or perhaps my reference to the ‘splattering shower of blood and brains’, that finally broke the camel’s back…retrospectively, that last one MIGHT have been in poor taste, but what do you want me from me? The grieving process is sometimes an ugly one, and my writing process is ALWAYS an ugly one, so piss off.
The third was not really something I wrote at all, just a long list of quotes from the cream of America’s Conservative crop. Among these were the Army general who claimed that Bush Junior was not elected by the majority of voters, but was in fact “appointed by God”; the Texan Senator who claimed that the AIDS virus was created by an angry God to “wipe out the faggots”; the lady from down South who wanted to make non-patriotism illegal; and other mind-boggling examples of stupidity from the policy-makers of the most powerful nation in the world. It was claimed by Younes that this article wasn’t really “written” by me, so there was no real reason to publish it. She perhaps had a point, but I seriously doubt that was the only consideration.
The fourth, final and most significant of the pieces was entitled the War On Drugs. Unlike the others, I am quite proud of it, and it is one of the few occasions I’ve gathered my wits about me for long enough to produce a well-reasoned opinion on paper. It was a mid-length essay (2,500 words) expelling my frustration about the drug ‘problem’ as I see it. The thrust of the piece is, in a nutshell, that our country is using scare tactics instead of education to try to steer kids away from drug abuse; and what’s more, that this strategy is dumb and does not work. The article is an urgent call for a total re-appraisal of Western drug policy, both legally and in terms of the popular attitudes created by the Powers That Be. I may not be next in line behind Ghandi and Mother Theresa, but it was motivated by a genuine concern for young people in Australia, and all Western countries; I feel we’ve been given a cold and unlubricated fisting from Day One on the subject of drugs, that our ‘education’ has come from a wilful ignorance that goes beyond stupidity and touches on irresponsibility.
At no point in the article did I support the legalisation of any drug. At no point did I claim to be a drug user. At no point did I advocate drug use or abuse of any kind. The idea was to point out the futility of our current drug strategy – or lack thereof, since I wouldn’t call sticking your head in the sand a ‘strategy’ – and the damage that it is causing. Claiming that the article supports drug use is like saying that To Kill A Mockingbird is a ‘Law & Order’-style courtroom drama.
But it was rejected; not with any well-reasoned argument that I could discern, merely that it ‘could not be printed the way it was’. After seeing what the fearsome editorial process of the Bendigo Advertiser could do to a piece of writing, I decided the piece was better off unseen and unread by the world.

I can almost hear you thinking – “a small newspaper wishing to avoid controversy won’t publish an article with some fairly radical ideas about drug reform, so what?” And at first, I thought the same thing. I put the piece’s rejection down to some well-entrenched conservatism in the minds of the people running the Advertiser; just a few small-minded Nazis who didn’t want to ruffle any feathers, step on any toes, as in a small town the consequences for such a thing are often swift and vicious. I put it out of my mind and set about trying to get someone else to publish it.

However, I often wind up reading the Advertiser – more often than not because it’s a permanent fixture on the table in the breakroom at my place of business. I like reading the Letters To The Editor, as every now and again you’ll find one so moronic you have to laugh. And after awhile, I noticed a disturbing trend. Younes, in a truly stupefying display of double standards, would enthusiastically publish letters by any bigoted, rednecked, ignorant fascist with a bug up his ass, promptly ignoring the blatant overtones of racism, religious discrimination or obvious paranoid psychosis. I read some letters that offended ME, and I don’t get offended by anything. The Advertiser gleefully published letters that would offend anyone who thinks humanity has made any sort of social progress since 1500 A.D.
But my piece on drug reform? Forget it.

Exhibit A – Stuart Kidd. I don’t know who he is or what kind of balls-to-the-wall suicide-cult Jesus freak upbringing he must have endured to make him the man he is today; all I know is that his views are terrifying. He writes the Advertiser on too regular a basis for me to isolate one particular letter which best embodies his utter madness, but his central themes are always the same. He attacks the hedonistic lifestyle of drugs, alcohol and promiscuous sex that today’s young people are indulging in, claiming that society’s move away from traditional Christian values is to blame. He suggests that regular attendance at church and compulsory military service will right every wrong with the nation’s youth. In fact, he attacks every facet of modern society with a fanatical zeal usually reserved for suicide bombers and Nigerian telemarketers. His sense of logic is like a blunt axe. He frequently pens letters that are responding to other letters that have recently appeared in the Advertiser, and his central argument is always a quote from the Bible. He refrains from elaborating on the Almighty’s points of wisdom himself; his essential point is always “because the Good Book says so. QED.” As yet nobody has seen fit to point out that The Good Book’s bearing on modern life may be slightly obscure due to its being written fifteen centuries ago by sheep-herders who thought the world was flat.
Apparently, Younes and her henchmen don’t find that sort of fanatical, mindlessly one-dimensional thinking dangerous or offensive, although it was the very same thoughtless, dogmatic obedience that let Adolf Hitler whip an entire nation into a frenzy of bloodlust and witch-burning. More than anything else, the rants of Kidd and all others like him speak of a total lack of rational thought – a black-and-white list of universal ethics to be torn straight from the pages of some Holy tome and applied without exception to a world full of extenuating circumstances and unpredictable problems, without any thought given to their deeper meaning or implications. Whether you’re Christian, Muslim, Buddhist, Conservative, Liberal, fascist, communist, socialist, that sort of unquestioning dedication is praised and labelled as faith, or at the very least, strength of conviction. I call it blindness. A simple unchanging blanket solution to the complex problems of a world in constant flux. An intelligent neo-Nazi who can produce an articulate rationale for exiling every Jew and non-Caucasian to death camps terrifies me less than people like Stuart Kidd, because it shows a functioning mind. A functioning mind can be reasoned with, proven wrong, made to see errors in its logic. A mind that subscribes to some pre-assembled system of morals, instead of thinking for itself, is capable of anything.
Kidd’s lunacy, and the newspaper’s willingness to share it with the world, leaves one question, which haunts me now as I try to understand the double standards of censorship I’ve been presented with. If I could find a passage from the Bible that seemed to support my opinions in some vague way, would they have been fit for publication? Would they have seemed more defensible, more palatable, more valid? Above all, would I have been seen as a decent man with honourable motivations instead of some irresponsible, drug-crazed, smack-peddling hippie?
I don’t know, but I have my suspicions. After all, Kidd’s opinions amounted to nothing more profound than a sweeping attack on any degenerate too depraved to agree with the bone-rigid way of life set out for him in clear black and white in the pages of the Good Book; but the assumption of righteousness provided by his quoting of the Gospels was good enough for The Bendigo Advertiser, and his remarkable lack of any real sense of morality was roundly ignored. Conclusion: In modern society (at least as far as the Advertiser is concerned) the most intolerant, regressive, uncompassionate, neo-fascist opinion is widely acceptable as long as it seems to be loosely justified by some popular belief; some moral platform so well-established that nobody will question it. Christianity qualifies; compassion toward the victims of drug abuse does not.

Exhibit B: The Cronulla Race Riots. Never in my (admittedly short) life have I seen such a lynch-mob mentality be embraced by so many members of a ‘civilised’ society. In retaliation for a group of Middle Eastern youths severely beating a white lifeguard on a Sydney beach, a bulldozing army of drunken ‘patriots’ cruised the streets attacking anyone of Middle Eastern appearance. The predictable, politically-correct condemnations of this mob action were rife in the press; but so too were the people who did not criticise the action. Some of them, such as radio ‘personality’ Alan Jones, even applauded the mindless thuggery. Newspapers nation-wide fielded angry letters claiming that the immigrants of Sydney’s beachfront were to blame for the farce, because of the history of foreign (mostly Lebanese) gangs roaming the streets and terrorising the inhabitants. As far as I was concerned, any semblance of a real justification went right out the window when I saw the photos of a well-dressed young Lebanese man and his girlfriend ducking away from a mob of shirtless beer-gutted yobbos, covering their heads in a vain attempt to ward off the cans and other missiles flung at them viciously by the cheering pack. I could try to explain what made this occurrence so patently wrong, but why should I have to tell you that the sky is blue?
Younes lashed out with a careful editorial, speaking with disdain of the ‘racist’, ‘un-Australian’ behaviour of the mobs. Not all her readership agreed with her though. The Advertiser, ever the advocate of the right to free speech, courageously published xenophobic letters that painted an imaginary Middle-Eastern face on the very real delinquency issue in every big city.
Any legally sane adult trying to justify anything those mobs did strikes me as being somewhere short of tolerance, somewhere far short of sensible. If the letter-writers and their families had been severely beaten in the street for being white, I wonder how they would have felt about the same logic being applied in reverse – the unprovoked attack being justified by an immigrant mob’s frustration at white criminals.
The Advertiser’s publication of the yokel’s xenophobic raving adds a new and intriguing layer to my understanding of their censorship policy. They do not hesitate to publish any opinion that calls for changes to the law; issues like duck hunting, speed limits, and the sentences for various crimes are all debated fiercely in the Addy’s pages. Mere ‘controversy’ can’t be what they’re trying to avoid; in these times of political correctness and frivolous lawsuits, what could possibly be more controversial than out-and-out racism? There was not even any real rationale for it; it was just the quacking of the dumb and frustrated, the vein that Pauline Hanson tapped with her One Nation crusade.

cen·sor (s n s r)
1. A person authorized to examine publications, theatrical presentations, films, letters etc., in order to suppress in whole or in part those considered obscene, politically unacceptable etc.
2. Any person who controls or suppresses the behaviour on others, usually on moral grounds.

Conclusion: To decide what is publicly acceptable and what is not, the Advertiser’s staff need to carefully analyse the public destined to read it. Their beliefs and values, likes and dislikes, what would please or outrage them. To decide what they would consider “obscene” or “politically unacceptable”, to filter out anything they might object to “on moral grounds”. And it seems they’ve concluded that blue-collar Australia does not think that condoning racism or lynch-mob behaviour is obscene or immoral, although a letter from a member of the Nazi Youth probably wouldn’t ever see the light of day. However, they decided that an article calling for sensible drug reform was unprintable in the eyes of John Q. Citizen.

Exhibit C: Published on Tuesday January 3rd 2006 under the cheerful title of “Good Old Days Of The 50’s Revisited”, a local hick named John Baines penned a letter which made me so angry I went and punched a cripple. It’s solid gold all the way through, but time and space constraints demand that I give you a chopped-down version here.

‘Believers of multiculturalism say, “Who wants to go back to the 50’s?”
That was the era of assimilation into our Australian way of life.
Petrol eight pence a litre; wages 20 pounds per week average; a new 3-bedroom weatherboard home for 1400 pounds.
Women could walk the streets of Melbourne at midnight unescorted and without fear of being mugged.
Drugs were hardly heard of, work was everywhere, no need for the dole.
There was not a sign of terrorism or threat.
You believers in multiculturalism can have your terror- and drug-infested world of today. Give me the good old days of assimilation in the 50’s.
John Baines’

I won’t linger too long on this one as his themes of xenophobia and isolationism are basically the same as Exhibit B. What’s remarkable is the way that old John has said “well, let’s call a spade a spade”, come right out and just said – “Blame it on the immigrants!” There’s not really anything ambiguous about this letter – there’s only one way to take it and by God it’s ugly. His argument is that immigrants caused all Australia’s social problems; his logic is nonexistent.
The lack of logic is my focus here. Look at it this way:
Elvis Presley started his recording career in the 50’s, signed on by RCA after appearing on Milton Berle’s Texaco Star Theatre and being nicknamed ‘Elvis The Pelvis’. What if I wrote a letter to the Advertiser claiming that Elvis caused all the problems of the world? “Petrol prices were low, there was no unemployment, and there was no terrorism before that damned Elvis Presley showed up. You rock ‘n rollers have destroyed society!” The logic is identical – there’s no cause-and-effect relationship demonstrated there, but assimilation (and Elvis) just happened to pop up at the same time that John Baines (the great sage and philosopher) marked the beginning of society’s moral decline.
Would the Advertiser publish the letter? I honestly don’t know. It would obviously have to have been written by a madman, but that alone doesn’t mean it would be too hot to handle. Christ, it would be too nonsensical to offend even the Elvis fans. If it wasn’t published, though, it would be because the concept is so dumb that Younes would assume someone playing a retarded prank. The fact that Baines’ letter doesn’t really make any sense either apparently didn’t occur to her.
Conclusion: Racism doesn’t even need to be justified – as long as it doesn’t come right out and call for the building of concentration camps, it’s good enough for the Addy. An article proposing drug reform, no matter how eloquent it may be, cannot be tolerated. I may be a bottomless pit of sarcasm, but words fail me as I try to understand how anyone could think that argument has a leg to stand on.

So what do I take away from all this? What’s my Final Conclusion? I don’t have one. Whilst racism is roundly condemned (“it’s UN-AUSTRALIAN I tells ya!”) it seems than when the cross-burners in white sheets want to speak their point of view, we can sit there and stroke our beards and say “yes, hmm, I don’t agree but I can see where you’re coming from.” Some kid points out flaws in an ineffectual drug strategy and we’ll stick our fingers in our ears and sing Advance Australia Fair.
Does it make sense? No. In fact I’d say it’s a good old-fashioned punch to the face of free speech, not to mention multiculturalism. I believe in that old saying, “you can judge a country by its prisoners”, and I also believe that you can judge the country’s press – and the ideals it is purveying to its citizens – by the material they don’t want them to see. The possibility that our press might rather expose us to racism and prejudice than to alternative approaches to a taboo subject is a scary one indeed.

Want to join Rib Magazine's e-mail list? Contact us