It took three years but the SMH finally got its revenge on Clementine Ford – kind of | The Weekly Beast

At the Sydney Morning Herald and the Age, it seems, revenge is a dish best served cold.

Three years after the former feminist columnist Clementine Ford walked away from her column and accused the Herald of losing its independence, an interview with the author was spiked after it had been written by an Age journalist, published online and printed in Saturday's Spectrum.

On Thursday the interview Kerrie O'Brien conducted over lunch with Ford about her new book How We Love appeared online, complete with a photo of the $300 lunch tab. The hard copy of the article was ready to go too, as it is printed ahead of the news section. But soon the online story had disappeared and that particular page in Spectrum was torn up and re-printed.

Tory Maguire, the executive editor of the Herald and the Age, confirmed the story had been pulled at the 11th hour.

"Clementine Ford spent years making vile and personal attacks on the journalists and editors of the Sydney Morning Herald and the Age after the mastheads stopped publishing her column," Maguire told Weekly Beast. "I had knocked back a pitch for an interview with her but there was a breakdown in communication and it was commissioned and published in error. I have pulled it from Spectrum and taken it down out of respect for my team."

The animosity was sparked by Ford's harsh criticism of the Herald on Twitter, and in an article for Schwarz Media's the Saturday Paper. Ford was angered by getting an official warning from her editor for calling Scott Morrison a "fucking disgrace" on social media and said she quit because of the "cultural shift" at the newspapers, which are now owned by Nine Entertainment.

She went on to write that "the change in political culture at Fairfax began long before the television network set its sights on establishing a newspaper presence".