Tuesday, May 04, 2010

Edgy twitter comments cost columnist her newspaper gig

The Age contributor Catherine Deveny has "talked" herself out of a job:



Acid-tongued comedian Catherine Deveny has been sacked by The Age following a fierce public backlash greeted her vicious attacks on stars on Logies night.

The Age's editor-In-chief, Paul Ramadge, said tonight that Deveny would no longer write for the Melbourne broadsheet.

"We are appreciative of the columns Catherine has written for The Age over several years but the views she has expressed recently on Twitter are not in keeping with the standards we set at The Age," Ramadge said.



Desperate to be funny Deveny pushed the edginess thing just a bit too far:



Deveny drew the most criticism for writing that she hoped 11-year-old TV star Bindi Irwin "gets laid'' and that former TV host Rove McManus' wife Tasma "didn't die too'' - referring to the loss of his first wife, Belinda Emmett, to cancer in 2006.



The public may not know what's funny but knows what it dislikes.

6 Comments:

Anonymous Barry said...

Good example of career advice on social networks. You can't just sya whatever you want because in the end it is all public and you never know who is watching!

3:35 AM  
Anonymous Nic said...

Deveny was a walking, talking example of hypocracy in action. Imagine a white male saying half of what she says and imagine the reaction from the same group who defend her.

7:53 AM  
Anonymous Dan Lewis said...

The real question is why she fit in at The Age for so long. Ditto Michael Leunig (Loonig) and several others.

She is merely the symptom of a newspaper completely out of touch.

1:26 PM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

Jeremy's spirited defence of her today basically amounted to the suggestion that what people post online shouldn't affect their real world employment prospects.

He must be concerned about who might one day read his blog output. Given that Deveny was sacked for off-colour comments about children, Scott Bridges should be particularly concerned.

5:27 PM  
Anonymous Nic said...

Anonymous, no doubt Jeremy had the same spirited defence of the Young-Lib who allegedly made a remark about Obama and a monkey?

10:01 AM  
Anonymous J.M. Heinrichs said...

"He must be concerned about who might one day read his blog output."
No, he's concerned about getting people to read his blog: if Jeremy was accused of solicitation, would there be evidence to try him?

Cheers

12:29 PM  

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