I’m not finished asking questions about Daily Tele ‘journo’ Anna Caldwell writing hatchet piece on City of Sydney travel using doctored figures from Angus Taylor. From original article - she had a response from Moore saying the figures were wrong and PUBLISHED ANYWAY! A thread👇🏻 
Recall Anna Caldwell was the one to accuse Shorten of making up stories about his mum - she has form. Let’s go through the steps she went through to write this hatchet piece and get it printed in the propaganda times.
First she gets given the letter from Taylor accusing Moore of climate hypocrisy and decides it has news value. Remember, the doctored travel figures are literally the story. There is no story without them.
She then asks Clover Moore for comment and is told figures are wrong and the City of Sydney spent less than $300k on travel that year. Clearly Moore is the far more credible source on how much her council spent on travel. In a normal world, story should then have been scrapped.
But what does Anna do? She could go back to Taylor and say ‘your figures are being disputed so I’m not writing the piece’. Didn’t do that. She could have used a calculator to work out how much Taylor’s figures would represent on a per staff basis to show they are clearly false.
She didn’t do that either. Despite the credible source refusing to verify the figures, despite the political nature of the Taylor letter, despite the fact the figures were clearly beyond believable, she went ahead and wrote the story. This story is still online.
This is insight into business as usual at Murdoch media outlets. They are not a news outlet, they are a political smear unit working hand-in-hand with Liberal MPs and Ministers to hurt their political rivals, no matter how unethically they have to behave to get the job done. End.
