Joe Hildebrand is a columnist for News Limited whose work has appeared in The Daily Telegraph, The Punch, mX, The Australian and he himself has appeared on both ABC News 24's The Drum and Q and A on ABC1.
Joe isn't a journalist in the true sense of the word, his work almost exclusively lives in the world of satire. I think it was Northrop Frye who said that "in satire, irony is militant" in his "Theory of Archtypes"; certainly under the banner of satire, Joe is able to cut closer than a lot of copy written elsewhere within the pages of the media.
Once you strip back the veneer of Joe's writing, you find something which is brutally honest. During the "leadership spill", he mentioned on The Drum that the reason why Julia Gillard was installed as PM in the first place was because she was popular and took the time to stop and mention rational reasoning as to why this was the case. In several episodes of Q and A e's attacked and defended both political parties for policies based on relative merit; that's not to say that you won't find that in the general media conversation but if you're not in a position of direct editorial push on a newspaper or TV/radio station you can actually place serous discussion under the veil of comedy.
I think that that's rare in a political media environment where it seems that the game itself is to score immediate points. Dare I suggest that by being less serious, he's able to write more seriously and competently than Andrew Bolt or David Wroe.
"Whence you place the prizm of satire before the world, society's colours show"
- Samuel Johnson
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