Hacked? the Age Newspaper Scrambles to Explain ‘die Pell’ Facebook Post

news.com.au
May 21, 2015

http://www.news.com.au/technology/online/hacked-the-age-newspaper-scrambles-to-explain-die-pell-facebook-post/story-fnjwnhzf-1227362702576

The post was up for about an hour. Source: Supplied

FAIRFAX newspaper The Age is scrambling to address how an offensive message directed at Cardinal George Pell was posted from the Melbourne newspaper’s Facebook account.

Around 8am today The Age Facebook page published a post linking to an article about the controversial Catholic figure’s involvement with the Royal Commission into child sexual abuse.

Accompanying a picture of Pell and a link to a story detailing allegations that he bribed a sex abuse victim were the accompanying words “Die Pell”.

The post has since been removed, but was visible on The Age’s Facebook page for around an hour.

Editor-in-Chief Andrew Holden is yet to respond to questions about the post, but told 3AW’s Neil Mitchell he believed it was the work of “a hacker”.

“It’s gone up after 8 (am), we’ve reacted soon after 9 as soon as we were alerted to it ... as soon as we knew, as you would expect we pulled it down straight away.”

Mr Holden said he would be “astonished” if the post was the work of one of his staff.

“At this stage I assume it’s a hacker, but I don’t know absolutely,” he said.

It’s the latest in a list of blunders the editor-in-chief has had to respond to.

A picture of an innocent teenager wrongly identified as a terrorist who stabbed two police officers amounted to one of the largest defamation settlements in Australian media history costing Fairfax $500,000.

An abusive text message aimed at Joe Hockey was also brought up in court when the Treasurer sued the paper over an article headlined “Treasurer for sale”.

Federal Court documents show Mr Holden sent a message to a fellow Fairfax editor over a story involving Hockey’s alleged links to a Liberal fundraising body, the North Sydney Forum, the Herald Sun reported.

“Simplest approach is to dig into NSF. In that story you can run hockey’s claim he knew nothing... Beyond that F**k him,” the text message read.

The Australian’s media diary recently suggested Holden “can’t seem to get through a week without another stuff-up”, after the paper ran a double-page spread on the new Game of Thrones series launch, the day after it ran.

It’s been a month since then.