‘I’d rather see a church burn,’ is my usual response to a glass of wine getting knocked over. So if the wine in question was a famous shiraz, and the surface it fell on happened to be my dove-grey living room carpet, as happened recently, you might think I’d be tempted to use even stronger language. To reprise that heart-rending Hindenburg witness’s ‘Oh the humanity!’ for example, or Mr Kurtz’s less nuanced ‘The horror! The horror!’ But I managed to restrain myself. Partly because it was only a few hours prior to opening the bottle that I’d learnt of the death of Mikhail Gorbachev, and partly because I was immediately struck by the extraordinary resemblance of my carpet stain to what was, with the possible exception of Marilyn Monroe’s mole, the most famous birthmark of the 20th century. Back then, getting red wine out of dove-grey wool was deemed about as easy as getting cane toads out of Queensland. But according to the tradie I spoke to the morning after my accident, the science of stain removal is far from settled and my hermitage homage to the man who ended the Cold War can now be expunged in half an hour and for about $150 – which is less than I paid for the bottle. I’m having second thoughts, though. Thanks to Google and e-bay, the phenomenon of pareidolia – seeing the face of Jesus or Elvis in a slice of toast or cloud formation – has now been monetised. So perhaps I can turn my lower north shore living room into a shrine to perestroika, and charge admission.

The tail wagging the dog is another phenomenon which has gained currency in the digital era. And nowhere more obviously than in news media. The Australian dedicated just half its front page and a couple of op-ed pieces to Gorbachev’s death. Yet two days earlier the closest thing we have to a newspaper of record had dedicated every column inch of its first six pages to the final day of the trial of a man whose only claim to fame was to have been suspected of committing a suburban murder when Gorbachev still had a full head of hair. A week later, when syndicated reports of the great man’s funeral were barely scraping into the Oz’s international pages, the autopsy of the Dawson trial was still getting the full-page treatment, and the front cover ran a picture and profile of the middle-aged couple who now happen to live in the house where poor Lyn Dawson may (or may not) have been killed. Given that Matt Hadley, the journo credited with bringing the trial about, is a long-time Oz employee, it is natural that it feels proprietorial about the story, and to milk it rather more than a rival might. But the fact is it was not Matt Hadley’s dogged detective work and breathless prose which persuaded the wheels of NSW justice to grind slowly into action so much as the decision to create a podcast about the case, the astonishing success of that podcast, and the apparently insatiable public appetite for more of the same. One interpretation of the Australian’s oddly protracted coverage of the Dawson case is that it is merely responding to market forces. A less generous one would be that this once revered oracle of Australian objectivity is now deferring to the authority of the algorithm – and ceding editorial control to subscribers – no less submissively than any clickbait tabloid.

If anything good can be said to have come of the Dawson case it is the embarrassment which it has caused the authorities. Thanks to repeated failures in basic police procedure, not helped by the indifference of local politicians, it took 42 years for Australian law to catch up with Chris Dawson. In their determination to make sure that this never happens again I’ve no doubt our police chiefs and judiciary will leave no stone unturned in the search for inspiring precedent. And they could start with another recently reactivated cold case. One which began, by coincidence, the same year that Mr Gorbachev pulled down that wall, and one which has received almost as much attention in the Australian recently as the Dawson case. But it only took 33 years for Sharia Law to catch up with Salman Rushdie.