Ignorance rules the Fairfax media group

When it comes to die-hard republicanism, nothing matches the Fairfax media. Melbourne's daily newspaper The Age managed to totally ignore the visit of TRH The Duke and Duchess of Cambridge in New Zealand. The print edition on Monday contained not a hint that the royal couple had landed in Wellington and had a stylish welcome. No tiny news item, no photo for example of the bare-bottomed member of the Defence Force's kapa haka group, which made it into practically every newspaper around the world. Well, not in Melbourne. The Age kept itself free from all that.

Die Welt, published in Berlin, put
Duchess Catherine on the frontpage

... and so did the Berliner Morgenpost

The Age's anti-royal policy dictated on Wednesday, that no photo of Prince George's first public appearance, his "royal crawl-about", should be seen by the subscribers of Melbourne "quality paper" (former slogan: "If it matters to you, it's in The Age", appropriately abandoned after sacking a good hundred of journalists in the past few years).

Prince George on top of another German newspaper.

Not even the fact that two gays father's had been invited to bring their daughter to meet Prince George did find any mentioning in The Age, otherwise a champion of the gay cause, so the paper claims.

You have to wonder how ideologically blind the editor must be ...

The Daily Mail offers its readers even a supplement with photos from New Zealand.

Royalty sells newspapers, but concerning The Age their republican ideology comes first. No wonder the circulation figures of The Age have been falling for years. It is not only the new media that have to be blamed for disastrous business figures.

On an much higher and massively significant political level was the reception of Ireland's President Michael D Higgins at Windsor Castle about which The Age has remained totally silent.


Mr and Mrs Higgins paid their respect at the Mountbatten memorial in Westminster Abbey. In 1979 Louis Mountbatten, 1st Earl Mountbatten of Burma, one of the earl's twin grandsons, Nicholas, 14, and Paul Maxwell, 15, a local employed as a boat boy, died in the explosion. The Provisional Irish Republican Army (IRA) had planted a bomb in the earl's fishing boat, the Shadow V, at Mullaghmore, County Sligo, in Ireland.