'Award Winning Blogger' Fired For Fantasising About Kevin And The Strippers
How much is too far for a controversial blogger employed by a major Australian news corporation?
Jack Marx, of the 'The Daily Truth', found out yesterday when he posted a fantasy piece about what Australia's 'Next Prime Minister', Kevin Rudd, might have experienced during his drunken visit to a New York City lap-dancing club back in 2003.
In case you missed the news, back in 2003, a pissed up Kevin Rudd was shepherded into Scores, a New York strip club, and. errr. sports bar, by Col Allan, a particularly gruesome master of sleaze from the Rupert Murdoch tabloid stable. Rudd was in town for a UN conference. He went to dinner with New York Post editor Allan, who then suggested they go somewhere else for a few more drinks. Allan took Rudd to the strip club. Live gridiron on the big screens, and strippers manning the poles onstage.
Rudd now claims he was too hammered to remember anything about what happened in the 'nightclub', but he remembered enough to call his wife the next morning and apologise before word got back to her.
Jack Marx's semi-porno description of Rudd watching a pole dancer in action was only up on his Fairfax blog for a few hours, at most. The post was pulled, his entire blog de-linked from the front page websites of the Sydney Morning Herald the Melbourne Age and Marx was sent a brief e-mail telling him he was sacked.
Marx claims he was eating lunch with his family at the time, and enjoying his birthday :
“Blogs should run close to the wire,” Marx said. “The post was totally harmless.”You can read the post that got banned, and Marx sacked, in full here.
The blog post was a mildly mocking, and hardly shocking, description of Rudd attempting to grope a stripper in the middle of her routine and being rejected. We'll take a guess the editors weren't happy with most of it. But they shouldn't have been the least bit surprised at what Marx dished up.
He spent most of the 1990s with the sleaziest of tabloid media before soft-porning newsagents shelves with tits-and-cars-and-aftershave mags like Ralph.
Seriously. What did did his editors think Jack Marx was going to write about when all of Sunday was filled with the story of what Kevin Rudd did or didn't do, or could and could not remember about what he did or didn't do, in that New York strippers paradise back in 2003?
It was a Jack Marx goldmine : New York City, a leading politician, a strip club, booze, lapdancers, alcohol-induced blackouts, Christianity, memory loss...of course he was going to cut loose.
We'll take a wild guess that it was this paragraph that got Marx canned, and pronto :
...an erection would have creaked to life in the trousers of the future Australian Opposition leader.And this bit :
Back at his hotel room, the shadow foreign affairs minister would have laid in the dark, thinking. He would have smelled her, felt her lingering touch still upon him, like that of some phantasmic seductress. Perhaps, if he were lying face down, he'd have begun a gentle humping, his pillow underneath as kapok mistress.And undoubtably this :
Or perhaps, with closed eyes to the heavens, deliverance would have been at hand. Whether sleep came down before ecstasy we will never know.
Did Jack Marx know in the back of his mind that this post would get him fired? Probably. Did he care? Probably not.
Considering the huge amount of coverage various News Limited websites and newspapers have already given this story, it's a fair bet he has already been offered a new blog position in the News.com.au stable.
For the moment at least, you can access Jack Marx' 'Daily Truth' archive here. If you've got a couple of hours spare, and you're not a regular reader, you might want to go browsing and save the stories that catch your interest now. They might be hard to find in a few days. It's a mixed bag, but there's some brilliant work to be found in that archive, particularly on matters Australia, and tales of Australian history.
It will prove to be interesting to see the reaction to Marx's sacking from Fairfax by the key bloggers and columnists at News.com.au - Fairfax's key online rival in media news and the MSM blogstream. No doubt they will express outrage, and plenty of it, that all those 'Lefties' couldn't handle such things being said about Saint Kevin.
But there will be plenty said about whether or not Kevin Rudd, or his media keepers, raged to Fairfax about the Marx post, and pushed them to pull it and can him and his blog.
It's Fairfax's loss. Marx was easily their most popular blogger, and a good slice of his audience will follow him wherever he goes. Plus they lose all that online ad revenue his blog generated, and will be made to look like a bunch of wimps, who still can't understand that blogs are not columns, and bloggers are not responsible columnists. Not the real bloggers anyway.
News.com.au is happy to run Marx's post on Rudd And The Strippers, in full on their site today, as part of the story of how this 'Award Winning Blogger' was sacked. They're happy to run what Fairfax canned because it allows News.com.au to take some solid shots at Fairfax, their chief online rival.
But if Marx was blogging for News.com.au, would he have been allowed to run the post, as it's published today, and not have it canned, even if Rudd's people tried to pour on the pressure?
Of course not.
News.com.au has censored its own bloggers in the past, and for far less than what Marx wrote.
It's another example of why the truly outrageous bloggers should never expect to find a secure home with the mainstream media. At least, not a truly free home where they can write what they like, which was the entire reason why political and social satire blogs became so popular in the first place.
In the words of Jack Marx' online boss, "...this was just the latest in a long line of indiscretions."
Yeah, but that's one of the key reasons why Jack Marx was so popular and brought so much traffic to Fairfax's site.
Like I said, it's Fairfax's loss, and presumably News.com.au's gain...if they don't try and keep Marx on a tight leash, that is.
Podcast Interview With Jack Marx On Being Sacked For "Indiscretions"
