Grate Scott .... Please

THOSE public spirited youngsters at Our Say have gained much attention of late, courtesy of Andrew Bolt, who alerted his readers to The Sunday Age's request that readers submit questions about global warming. The query leading the tally is written in a sceptic's ink, so it will be fun to watch the paper's team of crack warmists squirm and wriggle. If you haven't voted and can be bothered registering, you should do so.

And while inspecting the Our Say site, do have a look at the second issue, which is soliciting questions for Australia's Media Leaders -- the ABC's Mark Scott and Fairfax CEO Greg Hywood. Crikey's Sophie Black will also be turning up for the discussion, but will probably nod off if she has been reading her own site. Perhaps Scott can wake her up with the offer of a shower scene in Crownies, an offer made in the context of the commercials' market failure to show enough young, firm women wearing nought but soap suds or filmy bits of nothing.

A modest citizen is seeking Scott's guidance, and so far his question has garnered only seven votes. Reproduced below, it would seem worthy of much more support than that.

How can you produce get-ya-gear-off rubbish like Crownies and bill the Australian taxpayer for the dubious pleasure of turning it off? Do you enjoy Crownies? if so, should a low-brow vulgarian be running the national broadcaster? And finally, some career advice. Does Fred Hilmer have any openings for additional godsons. I, too, would like to scoot up the Fairfax hierarchy and then switch to an ABC gig auditioning Crownies nymphettes. Any advice?

It would not require too many votes to see that question zoom to the top of the list, a status that conveys a special prize, as the poster will be invited to join Scott, Hywood and the snoozin' Soph' on Our Say's online panel. Now that could be tremendous fun!

Visitors to Our Say may also post their own questions, and surely a few readers would wish to know why Hywood continues to inflict on Melbourne a paper written primarily for the tight little knot of green leftards who produce it?

So pop over if you have a chance and cast a vote or seven. Just remember not to use salty language. While that is just fine on Hungry Beast et al, Scott might be offended if the ABC's favourite vulgarities were to be directed at him.

How To Smear, ABC Style

THE arrogance at the ABC, it beggars belief.

 

The ABC’s Jeremy Thompson (above) went out of his way to do a number on Vaclav Klaus, as Andrew Bolt  and Correllio explain, but don’t expect a correction or apology. With this bloke even a blush would seem out of the question. Here’s how the sort of journalist Christine Milne admires describes his responsibility to truth:

@jthommo101 Jeremy Thompson

Fantastic ABC defo course run by legal eagle Lynette - now we know how to defend the indefensible.

There is a lot of that indefensible stuff at the ABC.

Control, It's Grist For The Milne

ABOUT the time Q&A’s audience was bagging the editor of Hobart’s Mercury for not denouncing his employer on the front page of a determinately provincial publication, the urge to switch off the telly became almost irresistible. Almost. Was it the perverse pleasure to be mined from outrage that kept the screen alive, or that the dregs of a nice drop and their bottle were not worth carrying all the way out to the study? Probably the latter, so the Monday night ritual of pap and piety and ex cathedra pronouncements was allowed to continue its drone and whine from the corner of the livingroom. The bottle died and, soon after, so did the box. The web had won the battle for attention once again, as it increasingly does, and the ABC lost another viewer to its omniscient rival.

The nastiest notes from Tony Jones’ orchestration of imbalance were still echoing on the stroll through the garden, fresh bottle in paw. So, too, the irritation that surges almost every Monday night. Why had Jones felt it necessary to introduce that poor editor as “a Murdoch editor” and to do so almost with a wink? How could he permit that lisping pommy pistil-fiddler to thunder so, mostly about the magnificence of his own, planet-loving moral worth? And when the creature from the green lagoon reviled The Australian for leading simple souls astray, why did Jones not pull her up, point out that the Gillard Gouge is genuinely unpopular and that Rupert Murdoch, even at the height of his wicked powers, could have fanned no more than a small front of such a fire?

Because he is Tony Jones and it is their ABC, that is the simple answer. After yet another Monday festival of sneer and bias, a parade that begins with 7.30, runs often through Australian Story, and builds to its preachy climax with Four Corners, Media Watch and the Q&A, the conclusion that the fix is in is undeniable.

And last night, as the Billabong’s computer fired up, so did a sense of rueful astonishment.  How did the rather appealing idea of an honest, inoffensive national broadcaster metastisise into such an ugly growth. Every Monday sees the pillorying of the unfashionable. On other nights, much the same via other vehicles. Mark Scott, the media mogul who needs not turn a profit, swears his ABC is a “market failure broadcaster”, that it plugs a gap the commercials will not fill. How then to explain Crownies?  Young hornbags shedding their gear to the accompaniment of a clunky script, it’s a concept quite thoroughly explored, one would have thought, by Seven, Nine and Ten (not to mention cable’s cavalcade of tits and teeth.)

 

Somehow it happened, the transformation from Mr Squiggle to Mr Straight Party Line. At televisionau.com, a site devoted to the history of Oz viewing and its ephemera, the buffs have very kindly collected images of what they call “classic TV Guides”, and last night, after Christine Milne’s use of the ABC pulpit to promise that “hate media” would soon be examined, judged and regulated, it seemed worthwhile to turn back time and take a quick look at the ABC of three decades past.  The entry for July 29, 1981, isn’t relevant because all stations’ schedules were dominated by live coverage of Princess Di’s wedding, but a facsimile page from May speaks to how much things have changed, to the mission creep that would see Bellbird, if it were to re-made today, devoted to Joe Turner’s wind generator, Olive’s hunza pie and the local rag’s crusade for carbon justice. Can anyone doubt that John Quinney would be a big polluter, not to mention a cross-burning foe of the sweet family of Muslim refugees modern scriptwriters would feel obliged to introduce and extol?

Back in 1981, apart from an afternoon news broadcast at one o’clock, the daytime schedule was devoted entirely to kiddie fare and educational programming. By 7pm, it was the nightly news, followed by Big Country, then documentaries and imported drama, with another 40 minutes of current affairs before the evening tailed off with the lightweight laughs of Three’s Company.

Now look at the today’s ABC. Having been awarded a dedicated cable channel to mind Australia’s children, it has stacked the early mornings with japanimation -- second-rate superheroes smacking each other around without pause or plot. Again, what is it about such shows that does not replicate the commercials’ offerrings?  After that, lots of stuff like this.

On the web, for semi-grownups there is the Drum, where the ABC feels obliged to replicate the piffle that Eric Beecher serves up at Crikey. Again, where is the market failure? Beecher mines a profit from morons, and good luck to him, for that is the way markets work. But at the Drum, there is not the excuse of profit, only green left ideology leavened with the odd quisling entry by a token writer from the right. As the late Alene Composta demonstrated, no opinion is too ridiculous for the Drum, so long as it appears to originate on the left.

You could on and on about the ABC – not least the the way in which, say, the Q&A guest roster  reads like a list of those invited to a family gathering. The whining Anna Rose, of the Children’s Climate Crusade, gets a seat on the panel; she is the lovemate of Simon “Shakedown” Sheikh, who also gets his frequent dollop of government-guaranteed exposure. An Australian convert to Islam, Susan Carland (on last week’s Q&A), is introduced as a sociologist; more relevant, one suspects, is that she is the spouse of the ABC’s (and SBS) favourite tame Muslim Waleed Aly. Those unofficial networks of friends and mates and lovers, you get the impression they carry an awesome weight with ABC bookers.

It would be nice to shrug off the ABC’s advocacy of its employees’ personal views. As the web demonstrates, there are more alternative sources of information and opinion than in 1981, so if you can stomach the ABC’s pushing one side of the political divide while largely ignoring the other, it is, or should be, no big deal.

But then, chillingly, you hear Christine Milne’s vow to bring dissident opinions to heel, even when they represent bodies of opinion far larger and much stronger than that of the other-worldly 15-odd percent who supported her party at the last poll.  And she will, too. Make no mistake about the shamelessness of your typical crypto-fascist.

It would be nice if the ABC could be restored to the wholesome inoffensiveness of entertainments like Blue Hills and the Argonauts, but that can never happen. As an institution it has been colonized by the tawdry, the vulgar and the true believer, often all at the same time.

There is only one way to fix the ABC and that is to defund it. As Tony Abbott and his handlers count the days until this staggering government falls at the next election, whenever that might be, he should keep a running tally of Aunty’s outrages. John Howard had the spine only for fiddling at the edges. Abbott needs to punch out the ABC’s lights. And then he must drive a stake through its irredeemable heart.

You Don't Say

IT happens to all sane people. You will be at a social function or even a family gathering, for we cannot choose our relatives, when your interlocutor, someone with whom you may not agree but who has seemed until then reasonably rational, quite suddenly says something so staggeringly unhinged that it requires a genuine effort not to gasp. This is not just a predilection of leftoid types, for the remark that strikes like a slap can come from any quarter. It might be, say, global warming that is the topic, and all parties will be sipping drinks and agreeing that it is a con and a scam, and that the only beneficiaries will be brokers, bankers and taxmen. Then it comes, the shocker. Did you know, the envoy from another planet will ask, that the entire climate change swindle is masterminded by the Duke of Edinburgh, who is also the world’s biggest drug dealer? You make excuses and sidle away, perhaps even attaching yourself to a knot of astrology women, bicycle fetishists or folks who profess to believe that “Julia” really does have something to offer and can still restore her standing in the polls. Almost as mad, it’s true, but the left’s lunacies most often have the benefit of familiarity, so experience tells you not to be swallowing liquid when the big, dumb moment comes, as it inevitably does.

There is no protection from the involuntary nasal spray – not today, anyway -- at The Failed Estate, the blog of a former journalist, Mr Denmore, who cants very heavily to port. Quite a good writer and source of sometimes original thinking, Denmore’s site is worth the irregular visit, and his latest post seemed for the first few paragraphs to have justified the click. It is about university journalism courses and how all those youngsters, thousands of them, are signing up with no real hope of landing jobs in a diseased and dying industry. This might have been the springboard for all sorts of commentary – the observation, perhaps, that the kids now swotting their settled climate science will be even more hard-pressed to land gigs, given how quickly the CO2 is going out of that little bubble.

But Denmore’s point is about the business he has left, and he encourages hopes of meaty thoughts by noting the Himalayan decline of Fairfax stock and why News Ltd shareholders have nothing to dance about either. Fair enough and all very well and good – until he outlines his vision of a transformed media landscape. Put down your drinks, keep a straight face and heed the cure for modern media ills:

Given the total saturation of our commercial airwaves by right-wing shockjocks and shouters, it seems hard to believe there is no room for a progressive news-based network in this country. Perhaps Eric Beecher should buy the Fairfax network and fashion a radio version of Crikey?

Can you imagine what 3AW would sound like with the Crikey! crew behind the microphones? Jeremy Sear for brekkie, Guy Rundle for lunch and a long, long snooze in the afternoon with Margaret Simons. And at night, what about the Lavatoreous Prods giving “informed commentary on news and public issues”?

No mention of the Duke of Edinburgh, it’s true, but the company of astrology women suddenly seems quite inviting – especially when you get to the thread's comments, where there is universal agreement that the ABC, raped and perverted by John Howard & Co., is now just another corporatist mouthpiece of the evil right. (sample comment: “I agree re Crikey radio. I also think Crikey TV is quite feasible, once the NBN is built, which is why Rupert was trying to demolish it”).

It is not just that some people have strange opinions, it is that they somehow contrive to manufacture goals and business plans from the whole cloth of favoured fantasies. As the carbon tax and it's rejection demonstrates, that will always be the shocking bit.

Drive Time with Guy Rundle indeed!