Fairfax bosses are either racists or cowards. Or maybe both.

In July 2014, Mike Carlton wrote an article describing Israel’s war on the civilians of Gaza.

“The images from Gaza are searing, a gallery of death and horror”, he wrote. “A dishevelled Palestinian man cries out in agony, his blood-soaked little brother dead in his arms. On a filthy hospital bed a boy of perhaps five or six screams for his father, his head and body lacerated by shrapnel. A teenage girl lies on a torn stretcher, her limbs awry, her face and torso blackened like a burnt steak.”

It was not only a courageous article, it was truthful. None of the facts in Carlton’s article were called into question. But a week later he was out of a job.

Carlton was suspended (he subsequently resigned) supposedly because of the harsh terms he used in reply to a few of the deluge of hate emails he received. He told someone who called him a “filthy piece of Jew-hating Nazi slime” to “fuck off”.

Although Sheehan has been forced to publish a humiliating apology, he has not lost his job.

The real reason management came for him was obvious and has never been seriously challenged. His description of Israel’s war on Gaza as “fascist” (actually, his endorsement of the use of this term by dissident Jewish Israeli Gideon Levy) enraged the Australian Israel lobby, which launched a relentless campaign demanding Carlton’s head.

To reiterate, Carlton was not accused of any errors of fact in his article. His crime was to speak out against Israeli war crimes, and for this he was branded a racist and hounded out of his job.

Fast forward to today.

Fairfax columnist Paul Sheehan published an article last week purporting to expose a horrific gang rape of “Louise”, an off-duty nurse, by a group of Muslim men. It described in graphic detail how they broke her bones in 79 places, raped her (orally, vaginally and anally), cut her throat, urinated in her mouth, knocked her teeth out and left her for dead.

Almost as shocking as the account of the rape was the fact that neither the hospital she was admitted to nor the police did anything to investigate.

This amazing story, according to Sheehan, was proof that “we will never know the scale of the rape epidemic in Sydney” – an “epidemic” that he directly claims was the root cause of the Cronulla riot.

What we now know is that this entire story was, as Monthly writer Richard Cooke described it, “a tissue of lies”.

Hospital staff had no record of Louise or anyone like her, in spite of the fact she claimed to have spent months in hospital. Video surfaced of the woman Sheehan interviewed telling a version of this story at a Reclaim Australia rally.

And when tracked down by Cooke, the woman Sheehan had interviewed as “Louise” said, “I think that Paul Sheehan wrote that story of Louise with a little bit of self-service. He’s writing a book. And what better way than to try and advertise it with a story like this”.

It was a journalistic screw-up of truly epic proportions, something far beyond what would end the career of a cadet journalist. And Sheehan is meant to be a senior columnist at one of Australia’s biggest newspapers.

But although Sheehan has been forced to publish a humiliating apology, he has not lost his job. In fact, an edited version of his article is still on the Sydney Morning Herald site – along with the endless vile racist comments that his allegations inevitably provoked.

So let’s summarise. One journalist writes a factually unimpeachable article about a state that has committed war crimes, and loses his job under a torrent of allegations that he is an anti-Semite, accusations for which there is not a shred of evidence.

A second journalist, who has made a career out of Muslim-bashing rants, writes an inflammatory story slandering the Muslim community that 10 minutes of investigation could expose as a pack of lies. He keeps his job.

What conclusions can possibly be drawn from these incidents about Fairfax management? Do they share Sheehan’s vile racist views? Or are they such cowards that they can stand by a celebrity journalist who attacks Muslims, the number one scapegoats of Australian politics, but are happy to hang another out to dry for the crime of offending the powerful and politically connected Israel lobby? Maybe it’s both.