We tipped many of you off on Thursday and Friday last week about a story being written by the Sunday Herald-Sun about the Police who raped women at Maryborough in country Victoria. We accurately predicted that the story would be run in Sunday’s Herald-Sun on 7 May 2000 and further more noted that while most of the key facts would be straight out of the book Victoria Police Corruption, the journalist would never mention the book by name or its author Raymond Hoser – on direction from senior management.
Well yes, we were right. On page 7 of today’s Sunday Herald-Sun was a full-page story by Sue Hewitt about some of the Maryborough rapes. The story essentially concentrates on the rape/s of Doreen Petrov by a policeman. The officer is not named in the news story – the journalist says she knows the officer’s name but will not print it. Of course she did, she had been told by both Raymond Hoser and the victim, Mrs. Petrov. He was also named in the court proceedings so there was no legal reason why the paper could not print the name. That is unless there is some sort of protection going on.
However the policeman’s name is in the book Victoria Police Corruption. The book, which was tabled in the NSW Parliament nearly a year ago accurately named the officer as Ian (doc) Watson. The book also names the other police rapists and those guilty of associated misconduct.
While it is commendable that at this late stage the newspapers are beginning to report on some of the police corruption they have effectively protected for years (by deliberately not reporting it), it is a pity that the corruption whistleblowers who put their necks on the line to expose it in the first instance, in particular Raymond Hoser, who by printing it all the his books has run the gauntlet of legal proceedings, writs and so forth, are still being vilified by the mainstream Murdoch/Fairfax media. They continue to use his stories and then print them as if they have done the legwork and investigations.
Perhaps it is just a case that the editors of the papers refuse to acknowledge that Raymond Hoser’s ability to research and document Police and other corruption in his books far exceeds that of their own papers, in spite of their overwhelmingly superior financial and economic resources. There may be follow-up stories on the Maryborough matters, as the original story only scratched the story of Chapter 19 of Hoser’s book. If you want to pre-empt the "news" or read into the future’s "news" simply get last year’s book Victoria Police Corruption and get the uncensored facts straight.
By the way, today the Sunday Age ran a sizeable piece about the murder of Jane Thurgood-Dove. Labelled an "exclusive" it trumpeted the "new" information about how the main suspect in the case was a serving Victorian Policeman. That was also reported in Victoria Police Corruption as well, but let’s not ruin their "scoop". We also note that copying of material from Hoser’s books has become a common pastime of both the Herald-Sun and Age newspapers and that one of them (The Age) had to pay Hoser $10,000 damages after Hoser took them to court for copyright violation. Refer to the "smuggled.com" media archive for other plagiarsation cases.
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