It was too late for our morning rival, The West, to cover it, so as a newspaper we had it to ourselves.

Most people probably heard the news first on the radio, but in those relatively literary times people still turned to a tangible printed product to get the most authoritative version.

PRISONERS

We put it on the front page, obviously. I can’t remember the headline or the wording of the story, but I’ve never forgotten the image of the Wall being chipped apart by its former prisoners and the story’s euphoric tone. The edition sold extremely well.

Almost everyone in Australia at the time knew tyranny when they saw it. The Soviet government locked its own citizens within its borders and dictated most aspects of life, including what you could think, where you worked, how much money you earned (not much) and what you could spend it on (even less).

We knew our readers would rejoice in the death of the scourge that had benighted the entire post war era.

Compare that to the coverage this week of the story revealing the Australian Government had recently adopted its own Soviet-style censorship tactics. There wasn’t any.

The Australian Government has given $67m of taxpayers’ money to “support Australian news outlets to keep journalists employed and produce news that informs and educates”.

In a properly free society, the consumers decide what news they want to read or watch.

But in a twist that even a blind man in a cave saw coming, the media outlets Labor decided were worthy of taxpayer largesse invariably sympathise with its own underlying beliefs.

The media that reinforces that Western Civilisation is evil, Pauline Hanson is a hick, life on Earth is about to be destroyed by climate, and that the only solutions to all these problems is to borrow billions of dollars, flood Australia with unassimilated peasants from Third World dumps and cede power to unelected globalists.

Of course, the companies caught up in this scandal – Nine ($16m), Seven ($11m), regional newspaper company Australian Community Media ($6m), The Conversation ($1m) and others – didn’t touch the story with a bargepole.

Curiously, neither did their rivals, News Corp and The Guardian, who weren’t eligible for the grants because they are foreign owned.

MANIPULATION

Either they thought that the government’s blatant and costly media manipulation was of no interest to their taxpaying readers (who in The Guardian’s case are probably a minority anyway) or they kept schtum in the hope that the government will throw its net wider next time.

It probably will, too.

We saw during COVID how easily even foreign-owned companies can be coerced into telling readers to comply with the government’s Soviet-style orders to stay indoors and get involuntarily jabbed with an experimental medicine that – again, like the Soviets did in the gulags – wound up killing hundreds, if not thousands, of citizens.

Not one of the corporations that recently received a grant from the government raised so much as an eyebrow during the fake pandemic and subsequent vaccine rollout.

Perhaps the grants are a reward for past loyalty and obedience. They are certainly a down payment on future compliance.

The Labor Party has just released the draft platform for its forthcoming national conference. It includes this benign-sounding resolution: “Labor will consider changes to regulation of media across all media to avoid bias and ensure the existing regulator ACMA has the appropriate tools to act to prevent media bias.”

Stalin was more direct, describing the media as a “collective propagandist, agitator and organiser”, but the policy is essentially the same, and the media knows it.

The media industry is now more intimately connected to government than to its readers.

In hindsight, it’s arguable that the formerly symbiotic relationship between the media and its audience peaked on November 10, 1989, the day communism fell.

COMPLACENT

Not only did the West, in the absence of an overt threat, subsequently become complacent, but the media’s business model was demolished by the internet.

Even if publications were conscious of the inherent fragility of our civilisation (they weren’t), their ability to make revenue from it virtually disappeared overnight.

In desperation, many of them have gone cap in hand to the government, the very institution they are meant to scrutinise from arm’s length.

This new, more dynamic arrangement leads to some amusing contradictions, if nothing else.

The logo of The Sydney Morning Herald and The Age, for example, is “Independent. Always”, which is now laughable since they shared in Nine’s $16m government bonus.

The media is now so compromised that even the supposedly independent upstarts are in on the grift.

In the 10 years since it was established, news company Michael West Media has frequently criticised mainstream media companies for audaciously hoovering up taxpayers’ money to finance their invariably greedy or nefarious purposes.