 What can you say about Murdoch employed journalists they're more often than not obsequious to those in power there quite likely to be willing to misrepresent ethnic minorities people of diverse sexualities and people of working class origins if it will please their bosses and if it will sell newspapers apparently also they can't imagine what it would be like to work for an organization that wasn't owned and funded by a billionaire this became apparent on the weekend when Mike Graham who is probably the most obnoxious host at the most obnoxious outlet that Murdoch currently owns in this country talk radio he ended up taking a jab at Ash Sarkar demanding to know how we fund the top quality journalism they weren't his words we produce here at Navarra media now he tweeted Ash still won't reveal who bankrolls the ghastly Navarra media shills but at least Twitter is waking up to her nastiness obviously then lots of lots of you who are on Twitter responded to let him know that actually it's not a it's not a mystery who funds Navarra media it's you our viewers our supporters and to that he didn't respond very well so he tweeted great to see your kind supporters wishing me dead you absolute horror show of a woman keep shilling those pounds out of the idiots and how do you think it's all going to turn out for your rabble now obviously don't wish the guy dead you know if you were in the comments but what's interesting to hear is that while Mike Graham likes to complain about anonymous people appearing in his Twitter mentions he's not such a stranger to being obnoxious racist vindictive you know an awful human being himself but he's not an anonymous troll he's a well paid Murdoch stooge Ash I want to get you you know because you were directly involved in this and also you've got a bit of a history with Mike Graham all his fault I cannot stand him I have been in the same room as him once before it was it was one of those ones that it's like really I had to go at him at the end of it he didn't respond very well Ash can you talk a bit about Mike Graham what's the background here I've never met the guy um I have had no direct interactions with him whatsoever and he first came to my attention when he was sort of popping up in my mentions a while ago um to call me a man um you know referring to me as a man to calling me you know I mean Jones's boyfriend I think and then also on you know one of his like live streams live streams you know referring to me as that bloke with a moustache repeated stuff and it kind of encourages um a lot of that stuff from his followers and you know I'm not going to get into you know whether or not you know I look like a man or feminine enough for Mike Graham I can only assume uh that he's calling me a man because he has no idea what it's like to be one um you know he's a puerile child you know trapped uh you know in a decaying skin suit um you know it's really quite sad he has this history of sort of you know late night acting and then he likes to shift the goalposts so first he starts out with you know being very aggressive and then you know when some of my followers are saying you know don't say that in some cases which I don't condone you know saying horrible things um you know he's sort of woe is me the death of civility in politics your mob your rabble and then when people are like hang on haven't you just been you know harassing this woman of colour and calling her a man and saying she's got a moustache and he'll be like aha but the shadowy funding issue um so it's a way of sort of you know dancing around um a central gravitational force which is I think a kind of pathological aversion and obsession right you know when I dislike people that much and you know I am motivated by very powerful forms of hatred Rita Aura she's everywhere I don't rate her um I don't actually spend that much time talking to her about her appearance though I just go you know what I would prefer to live in a world where Rita Aura wasn't you're 70 foot tall and you know made of CGI on adverts all the time I'm just gonna remove that from my field of vision Mike Graham doesn't doesn't cope with things in the same way um instead he likes to go in these sort of you know late night twitter tirades um aimed at either uh my appearance or my organisation or the behaviour of my followers um of those three things the thing that I find hilarious is his targeting of novara media because it's pretty simple who funds us um it's you guys it's our viewers and it seems to me that he is glitching in his brain a bit because on the one hand he wants to insist that we're marginal we're small we don't matter we're irrelevant and then on the other hand he can't imagine us coming out with the kind of output that we do of the quality that we do um of the you know uh frequency that we do um on a tight budget now the very simple solution to this is that you know we're we're a moderately successful and upwardly mobile um independent media organisation we've got a funding model which is pretty simple to understand which is people who like our content pay for it but it's going out there anyway um we don't necessarily have the kind of you know meteoric growth of something like buzzfeed or vice which has been kind of sustained by injections of venture capital but we grow as our audience does um it's a kind of undeniable thing he can't get his head around that so he keeps drawing these inferences about you know there being something on towards about how we're funded whereas it's no mystery man like call off the search pyro it's it's simple he flips as well so he goes from sort of like your followers are being horrible to me and then you're like but you're nasty to them and he's like well then who funds you and then we give him the answer and then he flips again so he's this is his other very notable tweet from i think it was yesterday wasn't it was this weekend he said i break people who come after me mark you wouldn't you wouldn't know what it's like to get death threats insult and let the inspired poison don't be an arse um now he thinks he's in reservoir dogs like this guy can't you can barely read as well but also i mean just to say insults i mean as you say he is someone who is constantly you know to quite a large audience paid for by rupert murdoch sort of calling a younger much more talented journalist than him a man sort of making completely bizarre disgusting comments about people's appearances and now he's complaining about insults it's like he is a small child and i wouldn't care you know i would say like just starve this small child of of attention which i mean is mainly what we do but i do think the fact that these people are in the positions they are because actually the most powerful media baron in this country has well and in america and in australia has given it to them really does tell us something worrying you know you know people say oh you know rupert murdoch he just gives people what they want not really you know what he is doing is actively funding people who bully people um from a different part of the political spectrum to themselves and it's toxic and it it shouldn't really go unchallenged i mean do you think this does go unchallenged ash how how how other people in the media responded to this kind of sort of targeting from the likes of mike graham um well so last time when it was happening i then went on and did a paper review with steven nullan on five live and i didn't expect him to but he brought it up on air and so i think that he was like quite genuinely shocked and disgusted by he offered mike graham an opportunity to come on air and talk about it mike graham didn't want to do it um and so i think that the because of how openly vicious it is you know it puts it puts him beyond the pale but not so much to the extent that there'll be any kind of professional repercussions that i know of um to it i emailed talk radio last time when it was going on to say like is there a way i can file a complaint about this this is on your content um and they never emailed me back but it turns out that somehow i don't know how mike graham got wind of the fact that i'd sent this email so i wonder i've got a lot of questions about this i wonder if that means that he was reprimanded privately and i'd never got a response because they didn't see fit to tell me that the issue that i raised had been actioned in some way or if the person who i'd send the email to essentially uh committed some kind of breach of data protection which is rather than continuing a confidential uh conversation with me and letting me know uh what was going to happen and then moving forward on that basis uh kind of was like oh you know guess what happened today i've got no idea i've got no way of finding that out um which one of those things it was but it's either way interesting in terms of what it indicates about a workplace culture that either complaints aren't taken seriously or they know that certain things are beyond the pale but they don't want to be seen to be responsive particularly when the person raising the issue is someone they'd consider a political opponent like me so i think that that hints at something institutional there that's a problem you know for me it's not about how many blue checks like come out in the cavalry when when i'm getting a load of shit for me that's not the important thing it's about what are the kind of um structural uh factors at play that facilitate this kind of behavior from somebody who i assume you know is paid relatively well um you know is given a huge platform um and i don't think takes the responsibilities that come with it particularly seriously you know i have to say i really admire your resilience and perspective on all of this because i i know that you get so much more you know attacks than really anyone else at navara media because well because you're very prominent incredibly talented but also because you're a woman and you because you're from an ethnic minority and what might graham is doing is frankly just racism and misogyny and it's accepted in you know the news international building the most well funded media organization in this country other than the bbc and you can get away with being a prominent radio host whilst being misogynist racist openly it's not even hiding it's not even dog whistle it's just out and out gross bullying and i think the way you handle it is so so admirable but you know something if it was Naomi Campbell calling me ugly i'd feel bad about myself i'd like oh my god that is somebody who knows something about being buff oh my god like you know it's like you know it would be like nigella lawson saying that you're bad at cooking you'd be like fuck like you know something about this and i suck at it when my graham is calling me unattractive okay it's like taking Hannibal Lecter's opinion on vegan cuisine i just don't think necessarily that you're an expert in the field