If more brands do not pull out of the 2GB Alan Jones advertising, they are enabling violent language towards women to be continuously normalised. Practicing the language of misogyny and violence on-air with no repercussions is a power that Alan Jones should not be afforded.

It’s symptomatic of where we’re at in Australia that the appearance of fascist agitator and Hitler-fan Blair Cottrell on Sky News – an interview that briefly turned ‘Nazi’ into a Twitter trending topic – wasn’t the most significant media boost offered to white nationalism in the last week.

Rosewarne notes that the woman who engages in sex ‘outside of a committed relationship’ may (according to a certain sexist mindset) be thought of as exhibiting a ‘lack of restraint as well as unfeminine greed’. The Other Woman rejects the role of faithful wife, and in doing so, robs another woman of her chance to be a wife.

In a recent interview with ReCode’s Kara Swisher, Mark Zuckerberg explained that the reason Facebook allows conspiracy theorists and, specifically, Holocaust deniers, to disseminate their views on his website is that, ‘At the end of the day, I don’t believe that our platform should take that down because I think there are things that different people get wrong. I don’t think that they’re intentionally getting it wrong.’

There is no doubt that the formation of racist street patrols is newsworthy, however we may never know why Channel Seven felt the need to woo these neo-Fascists with such soft balls. Possibly it was in the interests of keeping them sweet to guarantee that next exclusive interview, maybe it was to keep things interesting for their next awful Underbelly knock-off.

Clicking from source to source, I’m not surprised to find the same detailed descriptions of her clothes over and over. ‘She is believed to be aged in her 20s wearing a black long sleeved top, blue denim shorts and white runners …’ I wonder what I am supposed to deduce from this information.

The site’s slick GIFs and lack of advertisements tells visitors that this is Serious Journalism. Why, then, does the investigation rely upon the tired tropes of ‘Reds under the Beds’ and the ‘Yellow Peril’ to sow fear regarding the influence of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) in Australia?

What these examples demonstrate is that, far from reflecting a politically neutral position, the accusation of politicising something is in itself political, a kind of ‘nothing to see here’ that obfuscates rather than clarifies the true nature of the issue at stake. Not unlike ‘political correctness’ – a term that took off at about the same time – its main utility as a pejorative lies in its virtual meaninglessness, giving its users a way of avoiding a problem they’d rather not confront.

For the first time in Trump’s presidency, large swathes of the liberal press applauded a man they had expended many thousands of spoken and written words denouncing as a neo-fascist bigot and buffoon. The missile strike, according to CNN’s Fareed Zakaria, marked the moment ‘Donald Trump became president of the United States’. Even more absurd examples abounded.

Back in October 2014, there was public outcry when Queensland tabloid the Courier-Mail ran the lurid headlines ‘Monster chef and the she male’ and ‘Ladybody and the butcher’ when covering the case of Mayang Prasetyo, a transgender woman who was murdered by her partner.

On the face of things, this needn’t be fatal to the ABC’s mission as a public sphere broadcaster. The ABC is infamous for its internecine warfare, and its website is a bewildering maze. The national broadcaster can and should do better on certain basic aspects of accessibility and audience engagement. But it is also true that, in terms of its place and importance in the Australian public sphere, the ABC is in rude health.

Under the aegis of Natalie Kestecher and Claudia Taranto, I wrote, voiced and co-produced four short monologues for PocketDocs, three of which might never see the light of day now that this brilliant, diverse, challenging, moving show has been poleaxed. As a freelancer writing for PocketDocs I received a level of support and creative freedom unrivalled by any Australian publication I have had the privilege of writing for.

The particular role of the cartoonist in the 21st century remains difficult to gauge. Whenever (and wherever) the official apparatus of censorship is removed, the debate around civility perhaps becomes even more central. This said, in a globally-connected world, cartoonists are still very much looking for their function.

Of all the improbable things that we are being asked to believe, it seems a growing number of people are settling for the idea that Macedonian teenagers posing as journalists and agents of Vladimir Putin posing as internet commenters swung the US presidential election for Donald Trump. It was fake news who done it, making commentators declare that Mark Zuckerberg could well be the most dangerous person on the planet.

The media construct of Indigenous people as ‘lazy, entitled’ began to emerge during the 1980s, as the mining industry’s publicity campaign against Indigenous land rights came into full force. Media-friendly grabs like ‘the black arm-band view of history’, the ‘surrender Australia policy’, ‘special privileges’ and the ‘Aboriginal Affairs Industry’ crept into the discourse.

More surprising to me than the media’s creation of a salacious narrative designed to keep the meme alive was the level of hateful vitriol levelled at a clueless but fundamentally harmless young man whose alleged crime against humanity was … wearing his overalls backwards and being a ‘hipster’?