Julie Szego was a star masthead writer at The Age newspaper in Australia, until, earlier this month, she was told that her services were no longer required, after 25 years of writing for them. It happens, right? Things move on, new writers are hired. But covering a range of issues –including feminism, state education, parenting and immigration, as well as other topics lapped up by a broad swathe of The Age’s soft left, middle ground readers.
Previously a lawyer, she started writing for The Age in her thirties, working as a staffer for 12 years before taking voluntary redundancy. “Two years later, I was delighted to be invited back to be a columnist, fortnightly and for the last two years, weekly.”
“In the last few years, I was probably a bit more of a dissenting feminist voice,” Szego tells me when we speak. “I tended to take an unorthodox position on things like the cult of female fragility, puritanism in the workplace, and some aspects of excessive moments in the #MeToo movement.”
Feminist journalists, household names, being sacrificed at the altar of extreme transgender ideology. Journalism is supposed to be about truth telling on the mainstream media a platform for a myriad of ideas, opinions and debates. But it would appear that Szego joins a long and growing list of women pushed out of newspapers for daring to state facts and stand up for the rights of women.
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