Ruby Hamad

The problem with not writing in the media anymore is that I just put all my thoughts on Twitter now and without even the benefit of drafts and rewrites.

Please, just stop falling back on the "don't pick on a female journo because it's sexist" temptation and look at the whole picture. Look at it, take in its ugliness and then demand an explanation and some sort of consequence for the guilty parties.

Journalists are the buffer, the mediators, between us and power. Their job is not to just repeat what the powers tell them - their job is hold power to account and someone needs to explain to me how the #Husar story does this in any way, shape, or form.

When I tweeted my issues with the Aziz Ansri story, I got called anti-feminist & women-hating & all the rest of it. But this is the kind of thing I was worried about - how easy it would be to just straight up lie about someone & get it published if we accepted lazy journalism.

We can't trust on any level any parliament that has these people in it and we cannot trust a media that protects them.

The gravity of the claims themselves and the importance of not failing survivors of sexual assault and DV means journalists should be more, not less, stringent. This is such a catastrophic failure and such a scandal on so many levels.

And here's another disturbing thing that I've yet to see any focus on - the claim of flashing was said to occur in the presence of Clare's son. That's not just harassment, that would constitute a child sex offence. How do we reconcile such a damning lie? The damage it's done?

This is how movements get appropriated against the very people they are meant to help. This is what happens when we get lazy. Allegations, if published at all, should be published with the emphasis on the fact they are allegations & MeToo or no, journalists are obliged to verify.

They all acted while we are still immersed in a climate of 'believe survivors' & story after story of actual sexual misconduct was coming to light. They knew they had a defence for publication that we had to accept. And they used it to bring down a woman- herself a survivor of DV

I am gonna keep repeating this be this is exactly what I was trying to warn about and got ostracised for . Not only did the ALP members lie to the journalist. Not only did the journalist rush to publish. But both the ALP & the journo did all this in the wake of #MeToo.

Yeah, no shit.https://twitter.com/mivoicetoo/status/1028448397336793088 …

The most frustrating thing is there are mountains of research into media practices and processes that can tell you exactly why this #Husar thing is so messed up & how to avoid such bad practice in the future but for some reason there is a gulf bw the academy & the industry.