Daily Northern Territory newspaper, the NT News – which has previously run with headlines including ‘Our Dog ate my g-string’, ‘They stole my dog while I was on the bog’, ‘Catnappers shaved my pussy’, ‘Why I stuck a cracker up my clacker’ and ‘Horny ghost haunts house’ – has gone too far in the eyes of the Australian Press Council.
The News-Corp owned paper published a message in its ‘Txt the editor’ section in which the reader said they would prefer “another grand final solution” to the Eurovision Song Contest, which was won by Israel.
The Press Council asked the publication to comment on whether, in the context of Israel’s win, the reference to the “final solution” could be considered an offensive reference to the Holocaust and anti-Semitic.
The phrase ‘final solution’ is generally understood to reference Nazi Germany’s code name for its plan for the genocide of Jewish people during World War II. It also hit the headlines locally recently when Queensland senator Fraser Anning said a plebiscite was “the final solution on the immigration problem” in Australia.
The full text, as published in the NT News on page 11 on 17 May, 2018, said:
I am not happy about the Eurovision winner and I would prefer another grand final solution.
The NT News said the text was not anti-Semitic and was not a reference to the Holocaust. It acknowledged the significance of the phrase, but said in this instance, the reference was to the “grand final” of Eurovision, rather than the Nazi’s “final solution”.
Read the article by Vivienne Kelly, the editor of Mumbrella.