Is anyone thinking at Fairfax?

A disturbing revelation from today's edition of The Age:

Former Howard government minister Amanda Vanstone writes regularly for The Age.

Vanstone's article today was 1,000 words of supercilious nonsense.  Last week's effort was simply offensive to anyone who values clear thinking.  Of all the poor choices of columnists to invite as regular contributors to the opinion pages of The Age, this is surely scraping the bottom of a very shallow barrel indeed.  Things were better when the harpy-in-residence was Catherine Deveny.  For all her post-everything ranting, at least she had a basic consistency, and through that, credibility.  Her redeeming feature was the capacity to engage and entertain, even when you disagreed with every sentiment she poured forth.  Vanstone is a serial offender on the one cardinal sin that counts most highly in public life.  Her writing is dull, boring, inconsistent and brazenly incoherent.  Two things come to mind from this: the Queen of Hearts (another large-ish lady) who could believe ten incompatible things before breakfast, and that old saying about remaining silent while being thought a fool.

The Age has been undertaking a slow generational turnover of opinion columnists.  Kenneth Davidson has gone down to once-a-month after thirty years as a weekly presence.  Tony Wright, Shaun Carney and Katherine Murphy have assumed greater prominence in the last couple of years, and Michelle Grattan continues to offer her witty and incisive commentary on federal politics in columns long and short.  Tim Colebatch easily remains the most readable economics reporter in the country.  These are highly credible people whose writing exudes an authority that makes The Age worth reading.  Go and see the list of columnists to see why the choice of Vanstone as a regular columnist is really perverse and -- sad to say -- ultimately repellent to thoughtful readers.

Perhaps this is the signal for thinking people to give up any residual pretense at interest in the print media if this is the mark of editorial decision-making on The Age.  If it is going to publish pseudo-sociological hogwash from members of Institute for Public Affairs and the vacuous ramblings of ex-Tory ministers such as Vanstone and Peter Costello (just one of these categories would be more than enough), then clearly it's time to start reading something else.  If their presence is an effort at self-regulation to introduce some notion of editorial impartiality, then it's a foolish way of going about it.  Given that Bernard Keane has shown Julie Bishop to have committed plagiarism on at least one occasion -- or is it now two or three times? -- a corrupt notion of fairness and balance clearly prevails on the conservative side of politics.  Bishop keeps a blog for Fairfax.  Far be it from me to suggest that this might be a problem, but the question is begged: surely having a known plagiarist on the books puts a taint on their editorial judgment.  With these sorts of people hijacking the opinion fora, why should The Age be trusted to offer credible and balanced reporting of important issues in the news pages?

The simple answer is in the circulation numbers.  They are plummeting because of cheap drivel like this.  The Age actively forfeits any claim to be a serious media player when it publishes the sad and ideological outpourings of post-power politicians.  What a pity nobody on the Fairfax board seems to see it.