Lies and denial, the day after the Hanson nudes
Any hope of this spectacle going off quietly into the night have been dashed with the contradictory public statements from Pauline Hanson herself and former campaign manager Richard Rae.
Pauline Hanson: furious
“Let me say, the photographs are not of me,” Ms Hanson said.
“I have started legal proceedings – I am fighting this and I have had enough. This always happens right on election time and it is terribly embarrassing.
But Rae has also made a statement today with the Daily Telegraph quoting;
The man behind One Nation’s 2001 federal election tilt today admitted the flame-haired former fish and chip shop owner first told him about the snaps 10 years ago.
“She didn’t care then, and she doesn’t care now,” Mr Rae said from his Marrickville home.
“She sat across from me at this table when I asked her, ‘I’m doing your campaign. Are there going to be any surprises? Is there anything I should worry about?’
“And she said, `No. There are photographs. I don’t care about them’. I said, ‘If you don’t care then I don’t care’.”
Sounds to me like somebody is lying. A former self-confessed shock-jock campaign manager or a candidate laying it all out on the line for Saturday’s election, who’s taking odds?
Update 16/03/09 12:54pm:
The Daily Telegraph have since removed the Rae story and have redirected all their links to a Hanson denial article. I don’t have the entire article saved to show save for my direct quote above, but here is a google search referencing the now deleted article to prove it existed.
Update 16/03/09: 4:04pm:
The media have hit back claiming the photos are authentic. Arjun Ramachandran from the Age writes;
The Telegraph’s editor Neil Breen today maintained the photos were authentic, even though he admitted there were holes in the story given by the man News Ltd paid $15,000 to for the pictures
“She is a woman who plays the game, she’ll go on about the media and how she’s going to do something about the media,” he said.
Mr Breen admitted there were “bits and pieces” of Mr Johnson’s story that didn’t add up, but said he had “absolutely no doubt” the pictures were authentic.
“I knew on Saturday when I had those photos … that if I published something like that and they were wrong then I’m in huge trouble,” he said.
“We put the images through a thing called Photoshop … I had those photos stripped back as far as you could strip them back, and had our experts looking at them.
“You can see changes in the pixels … if they’ve been doctored.”
Has anyone told the Daily Telegraph considered that whilst the photos might undoctored, they might not be of Hanson herself?
And what’s with the quote ‘a thing called photoshop’, what are we the great uneducated mass? Photoshop is a graphics program, just because you zoomed in and didn’t notice anything dodgy doesn’t mean you’re suddenly an “expert” or that you stripped anything back as far as it went. These days babies are zooming in on photos on their ipods before they’ve even left the womb.
If knowing about the zoom function is enough to get you a job as an expert at the Telegraph that might just explain why this has turned out into such a mess in the first place.
Journalistic integrity – how far can you zoom in?
Update 16/03/09 10:30pm:
The reason nobody heard from Jack Johnson for so long is that he’d probably signed his story exclusively to Today Tonight. He appeared on the show and from the sounds of it, the entire thing is looking more like a hoax.
Mr Johnson said his memory was hazy from chemotherapy he has endured for the past 12 years in his battle against bone caner.
“I don’t know a lot of stuff that happened back in those days,” he said.
“I believe it’s you (Hanson),” he said.
“If it’s not, I am deadset sorry. But I still believe, in myself, it’s you. But I can’t prove that.
“They’re real.
Mr. Johnson does raise one sensible question though;
“In my heart of hearts, I believe it’s Pauline Hanson. But what if I’m wrong?”
I know here at OzSoapbox I haven’t really helped and for that reason I’d like to apologise to Mrs. Hanson. I’m going to leave this and the original posts up though as I the information contained within is a brilliant example of just how messy and sticky the media can get when they get rolled by a random (Johnson in this case).
In the Today Tonight interview (which hasn’t been released online at time of publication or i’d link it), Jack Johnson appeared pixelated. Seems he’s got no problem exposing other people but when it comes to his own privacy all of a sudden he’s Captain Vanity.
In my opinion if he has deceived the nation, unwillingly or not, the least he could have done was looked us in the eye face to face and apologised.
Update 17/03/09 5:54pm:
Pauline Hanson has released a photo to Channel 9 showing exactly what she looked like at 19. I think at this stage it’s safe to put this whole saga to rest as a confirmed fake, no word on whether heads are going to roll at the Telegraph yet.
Hanson's photo released to the media with Jack Johnson's photo inset.
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