Some recent stories of mine up at Your New Reality :

The Most Incredible Air Disaster Survival Story You Will Ever Read

Osama Bin Laden In America

Shit Monster Lives

Iraq PM Declares Victory Over US Occupation

The Moon : One Day, We May Have To Bomb The Hell Out Of It

If Only We Could Mine And Export 'Having A Go'

PM Kevin Rudd gets a decent, fairly serious profile in the US Time Magazine.

It's often interesting to read how American, UK or European media portray Australia in its feature stories. The perspective, obviously, is greatly different from anyone living here, and what may seem common knowledge to us, or to Australian journalists, often seems fascinating to outsiders. It's also curious to read a feature story in corporate media that makes Australia sound so damned triumphant, so successful, with the potential of being a major player on the world stage through the rest of the 21st century.

This Australia? Here? Really?

If Time Magazine is right, Kevin Rudd cuts a much more impressive figure on the world stage than the local media has led us to believe.

Grabs from the Time Story :

As Rudd reveals his foreign exploits, the crowd shifts; attentions wander. The Aboriginal elder who kicked off the event with a traditional welcome ceremony lets his eyelids droop....Rudd, 51, doesn't fit the typical mold of an Australian man of action....Rudd is the consummate globalized citizen....,"(Rudd will) put in a full day in the Parliament and then, because of the time difference, call world leaders way into the night".... Its geographic remoteness notwithstanding, Australia deserves watching.... (Australia) has a chance to show the rest of the world the importance of maintaining good relations with both the new century's superpowers....If Rudd can navigate warm and friendly relations with both the U.S. and China, he will turn out to be a politician of more than local significance.... "I'm in the business of making a difference"....After more than 17 years of sustained growth, Australia is flirting with recession....Rudd comes across as more buttoned-up than many of his predecessors.... In moments of crisis, his emotions resonate.....the global financial crisis underlines how individual countries, even supremely powerful ones, cannot rely on go-it-alone approaches...."I am acutely conscious of what happens when you simply allow things to drift to unrestrained nationalism".... "friends of all, enemy of none"....as a child avoiding work in the cowshed, he would retire to the farthest reaches of the farm with a book on Asian archaeology.....For the better part of two centuries, Australia's self-perception was that of a chunk of the West that unaccountably found itself floating in the South Pacific....Until the 1970s, an exclusionist White Australia Policy kept out most Asian immigrants. But today, around 8% of Australians are of Asian descent...."At last," says the Prime Minister, "we have some decent food to eat"....Some Asian, Middle Eastern and African Australians complain that they are somehow considered less truly Australian than those who came from, say, Italy, Greece or Croatia....the specter of a communist country of 1.3 billion people can spook even close economic partners.....In Taipei, where Rudd studied Mandarin, his home was the wonderfully named Republic of China Anti-Communist Recover the Mainland International Youth Activity Center...in a speech in Mandarin to students at Peking University last year, he infuriated his Chinese government minders by highlighting human-rights abuses in Tibet....can a nation really welcome being economically yoked to China if it also sees Beijing's ambitions as a threat?.... "America has a great history of reinventing itself".... at the dawn of this new century, as a country and a continent unto itself, Australia has to define its security on its own terms...."You can sit around quietly on the global diplomatic circuit and get nowhere," he says, "or you can ball up a few ideas, some of which have some prospects".... Makes you wonder whether Australia couldn't export that having-a-go spirit along with its iron ore, coal and gas. The world might be better for it.

Read The Time Magazine Profile Of Kevin Rudd Here

John Hartigan : The Uastralian iS Stell Aa Qaultiy Newpaper

By Darryl Mason

I'm absolutely loving how many blog posts the speech by News Limited CEO, John Hartigan, is producing for this blog. All that free content courtesy of Harto himself. Brilliant. And all from a speech where he berated bloggers and independent online news sites for taking a free ride on "original content" produced by News Limited.

So many stories already, and I haven't even gotten into all the marvelous data he revealed in his speech about how unprofitable online news is unless you can get people to pay to read it, and I haven't yet listed the carnival of Old Media cliches that peppered his News Limited Still Roolz speech at the National Press Club, broadcast by Sky and the ABC.

So here's John Hartigan explaining why newspapers are not dead, and why people will pay to read quality journalism that is "brilliantly written" and "professionally edited" :

This is not the territory in which aggregator sites or amateur bloggers will do well.

This is the natural terrain of the well-trained, professional, experienced, clever journalist.

Inspiring.

And here's how Hartigan's words were turned into yet another "professionally edited" cross-promotional puff piece weeping defiantly for the future of quality newspapers, in The Australian, all under this gloriously typotastic headline :




Mumbrella, who was dabbed with the smirking flint of Hartigan during his press club speech for being "not wrong for long", tries not to laugh too hard :

So let’s do some role playing. You’re a sub on The Australian.

Your boss has just given a speech about the health of newspapers.

You’ve got to put a headline on the speech.

Do you a) Check the spelling of the word “newspapers” in the headline or b) Not check the spelling of the word “newspapers” in the headline?

Clearly the answer is b). Then again, Hartigan has been sacking journos and sub-editors across News Limited, so...maybe it was an intern's fault.

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When Murdoch Newspapers Do It, It's Journalism, When Bloggers Do It, They're Stealing "Original Content"

By Darryl Mason

John Hartigan, CEO of News Limited, publisher of The Australian, is very upset with independent online news sites like Crikey and Mumbrella because they take "original content" from Murdoch publications and run excerpts of it on their sites, for free. They are using Murdoch content to create content for their websites. They disguise this 'theft', you see, as media commentary, but they're not fooling Hartigan. No way.

Most of the content on these sites is commentary and opinion on media coverage produced by the major outlets.

These sites are covered in links to wire stories or mainstream mastheads. Typically, less than 10% of their content is original reporting.

And they won't survive. Quality, Original Journalism will, says Hartigan :

If you want to attract readers, break stories people want to read.

Give them something they can’t get anywhere else....

Most online news and comment sites don’t generate enough revenue to pay for good journalism.

Good journalism is expensive.

Hartigan is upset with blogs that feed on Murdoch content like Crikey and Mumbrella sometimes do, taking a story published at a News Limited website, like The Daily Telegraph or The Australian, and quoting extensively from it. Filling, say, 90% of a blog post not with original opinion or original journalism, but with heavy, fat slabs cut and pasted from Murdoch journalism that is "expensive", according to Hartigan.

This is wrong, claims Hartigan. Unfair.

But this is just as bizarre as his claim that bloggers don't go to jail, and aren't held accountable for the things they write.

John Hartigan is, of course, full of shit.

The Australian, Daily Telegraph, all News Limited newspapers and websites, rewrite stories published in non-News Limited newspapers and magazines and print them, or post them online, as "original content".

The New York Times gets an exclusive about Saddam Hussein moving forward with plans to launch his own nuclear-missile equipped space station? Some barely heard of young actress admits to a dildo addiction in Vanity Fair? There's a couple of non-Murdoch media originated stories that can be quickly republished as "original content" in all the Murdoch tabloids, from Australia to New York To London and Manchester.

This rewriting, and heavy quoting, of other stories, essay, letters and articles originally published elsewhere, fills Murdoch publications with news, features, breaking news, entertainment, sport and 'WTF' type stories that they never paid for, or spent any more money on 'creating' than it cost for one journalist to quickly lift the best bits and write a few lines like "She revealed to Vanity Fair magazine" or "The New York Times has claimed" to dash some original half sentences around all that furious cutting and pasting, to add 10% original content to the republishing of someone else's work.

This method of taking stories published elsewhere to fill some of that space in its publications is by no means a Murdoch speciality. It's centuries old, and all newspapers, TV news, cable news, magazines, radio stations do it. They feed off each other, and republish each other's work for free, constantly.

Where do you think all the bloggers and the independent online Australian media, now so despised by the heavily populated ranks of the Murdoch executive class, learned how to do it?

As but one example, here's a piece of "original content", as John Hartigan would call it, from The Australian, published shortly after his speech at the National Press Club where he moaned about bloggers taking content from News Limited and using it to fill their own publications.

Cameron Stewart, associate editor of The Australian, takes a 7000 word essay written by Robert Manne and fills more than 90% of a 1700 word story published in his newspaper's print and online with fat slabs of quotes from Manne's essay. Cameron adds the prerequisite "Manne says" and "Manne writes". The essay was published at the independent online magazine The Monthly. The Australian's cut and paste of the Manne essay did not include a link to the full essay.

The Robert Manne essay is, in part, about the tragedy of the bureaucratic responses to the Victorian Fires in Fenruary, where 8 out of 10 phone calls to emergency services from towns like Kingslake and Marysville went unanswered that awful Saturday.

The Australian tastefully titles Cameron's cut and paste effort of this essay on the events that led to the appalling deaths of more than 170 people : 'Manne On Fire'.


The hypocrisy of John Hartigan railing against bloggers and independent online media for doing exactly what his own newspapers do constantly, have done for decades, is hilarious, gagging, mind-frying. You have to have a lot of gall and front to be a Murdoch CEO, obviously.

Try this :

People will pay for it if it is good enough. By good enough I mean that it will have to be: well researched; brilliantly written; perceptive and intelligent; professionally edited; accurate and reliable.

This is not the territory in which aggregator sites or amateur bloggers will do well.

This is the natural terrain of the well-trained, professional, experienced, clever journalist.

Clever journalism obviously also includes building a lengthy story for your online and print newspaper out of a brilliantly written essay originally published elsewhere.

But questions remain.

When News Limited begins charging to read 'prime' or 'premium' content from The Australian online, will we have to pay to read the stories where associate editors rustle up a cutandpaster filled with slabs of other peoples' work? And how much will John Hartigan charge us to read a story in The Australian almost entirely composed of an essay published at its online competitor, The Monthly?

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News Ltd CEO's Idiotic Claim "Bloggers Don't Go To Jail" Becomes International News



By Darryl Mason

Raw Story has picked up on the absurd, misinformed claims about bloggers aired yesterday by News Limited CEO, John Hartigan :

The difference, he says, between professionals and amateurs is that bloggers don’t go to jail for their work – they simply aren’t held accountable like real reporters.

This is now running as a major headline story on Raw Story, which pulls more online readers than many Murdoch news sites. So this must be particularly irritating.



Raw Story corrects the News Limited CEO for his ignorance:

Even in America, bloggers have been jailed for various reasons.

It is amusing to see that John Hartigan, who seemed so angry that bloggers and independent news sites were using Murdoch journalists' work as "free content" has now provided so much more "free content" for those independent news sites and bloggers.

This story, and all the other "free content" stories to be found in Hartigan's speech about Why Bloggers Are Shit, will now start taking flight through that despised blogosphere, and provide a feast of "free content" for independent online media.

UPDATE : Hartigan's attack on bloggers and stunning disinformation that bloggers don't go to jail, and are not held accountable, has been cut from the column-stuffing reprints of his speech, here and here, running in today's copies of The Australian.

John Hartigan : Blogs Are Shit And My Bloggers Are Too Scared To Tell Me I'm Full Of It

By Darryl Mason

Yesterday, I wrote about the 'Blogs Are Shit' speech by News Limited CEO, John Hartigan. News Limited has dozens of blogs across its websites and online newspapers, including very popular blogs by Piers Akerman, Tim Blair and The Professional Idiot. Here's a reminder of what Hartigan had to say :

"Then there are the bloggers. In return for their free content, we pretty much get what we've paid for. Something of such little intellectual value as to be barely discernible from massive ignorance."

"It could be said the blogosphere is all eyeballs and no insights."

"Blogs, and a large number of comment sites, specialise in political extremism and personal vilification. Radical sweeping statements without evidence are common."

Yeah, he sounds like a fucking wanker, and Mumbrella and Pure Poison have already returned some fire, but what about reactions from some of News Limited's own bloggers? Bloggers who, amongst their ranks, pull in more than 4 million hits a month to News Limited websites? Surely Hartigan's snarky, smirking, dismissive anti-blog rant must have ruffled a few feathers amongst News Limited bloggers?

Here's The Professional Idiot's reaction to his boss labelling his '1 million hits a month!' blog "barely discernible from massive ignorance" :

He’s also confident that our own internet sites and blogs...can beat off the challenge of other blogs and news aggregators...

Err, right, Hartigan was talking about those "other blogs", was he?

Not in the speech transcript released to the media by Hartigan, or in the double-teleprompter speech he gave at the National Press Club yesterday.

John Hartigan said bloggers were full of "radical sweeping statements without evidence", and the Professional Idiot deemed his words "informed and provocative".

Even when John Hartigan spits in The Professional Idiot's face, insults his many readers who devote many hours to writing comments and providing free content for News Limited, he still curtsies and puckers up.

Surely Tim Blair, at the Daily Telegraph, will have the guts and self-respect to take Hartigan to task for dissing a blog like his that pulls more than 600,000 hits a month for News Limited?

Go hard, Tim, tear the boss the new one he deserves :



Oh.

Tim Blair pretends he hasn't heard or read his boss's complete dismissal of the Australian blogosphere and all the years he spent blogging and giving the new medium some spark and fire.

So if you're the CEO of News Limited and you pay your 'Tell It Like It Is' bloggers enough, you can not only buy their silence on Rupert Murdoch's promotion of corporate greenism, carbon taxes and global warming fearmongery (even in The Simpsons), but you can give a speech to a roomful of professional journalists and call your own bloggers' work meaningless shit in front of them all and your bloggers won't dare raise the slightest harsh word in their own defence. Or their readers defence.

How fucking embarrassing.

How shameful.


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Murdoch Boss Viciously Attacks Murdoch Bloggers For "Political Extremism" And "Radical Sweeping Statements"

By Darryl Mason

This is shocking. Digitally nervous News Limited CEO John Hartigan has launched a brutal, vicious attack on bloggers, all bloggers, including his own Herald Sun and Daily Telegraph bloggers : Piers Akerman, Tim Blair and Andrew Bolt :

"Then there are the bloggers. In return for their free content, we pretty much get what we've paid for. Something of such little intellectual value as to be barely discernible from massive ignorance."

"Bloggers don't go to jail for their work. They simply aren't held accountable like real reporters....It could be said the blogosphere is all eyeballs and no insights."

"In the blogosphere, of course, the mainstream media is always found wanting. It really is time this myth was blown apart."

Tim Blair and Andrew Bolt's boss has obviously been keeping an eye on their blogs for a while now :

"Blogs, and a large number of comment sites, specialise in political extremism and personal vilification. Radical sweeping statements without evidence are common."

That's a bit hardcore, isn't it? Doesn't Hartigan know how much traffic blogs that specialise in personal vilification and political extremism generate for News Limited?

After using most of an hour of a live ABC TV broadcast to pump and hype the success of the Murdoch media online, News Limited CEO John Hartigan didn't have time to explain how New Limited lawyers acting for two journalists have tried to shut down independent blogs; desired to find out anonymous blogggers' real names; demanded payments for "immeasurable hurt" allegedly caused by bloggers to News Limited journalists, all fit into his high-profile 'Right To Know' campaign to protect sources, shield whistleblowers and demand greater freedom for the media.

Maybe next time.


Note : Seeing as John Hartigan didn't single out certain bloggers for criticism, we have to assume that when he says "And there are the bloggers" he is referring to all bloggers, including Akerman, Blair and Bolt.

He Said 'Mate' But He Meant 'Messiah'

The Professional Idiot goes to Israel and comes home with a fever :

Peter Costello was in Jerusalem last week, just a few metres from where Christ rose from the dead, when he heard a voice.

"Mate," it said.

"Mate, ya gotta take over the leadership."

It was just another tourist who'd recognised the former treasurer as the Messiah....

The Professional Idiot closes his declaration of religiously-fevered brolove for Peter Costello with an Old Testament translation of what the tourist said, but didn't :

...even more would have added their voices to the one Costello heard a few days later by the hill of Golgotha.

Peter, rise again. Your people await their Messiah.

The Professional Idiot is now beyond parody.

Jeremy Clarkson Defends Hapless Druid Hippies Against Police State UK

Hairy people in a field in England after midnight, trying to have some fun, and forge a link with their ancient cultural past, are harassed by the relentless buzzing of the unmanned spy planes that the people of Iraq and Afghanistan now know all too well. Spy planes circling religious ritualists in a field.

When powerful, influential writers like Jeremy Clarkson start taking the sides of hairy, dope-smoking old Druid hippies against the constant WTF? impositions of a rapidly expanding British police state, it's clear the cops have gone too far, for just about all Brits :

Last week (the Druids) were at Stonehenge to mark the summer solstice. Apparently, 36,500 poor souls got up in the middle of the night and were dragged by their beliefs and their little Citroëns to a field in Wiltshire where they were forced by custom to mark the disappointingly cloudy dawn by chanting and pretending to be King Arthur.

....I have every sympathy with these people and I wish them well. I like having hippies in the world. They bring a richness and a calm, and while they like to wear hoods, they do not beat up old ladies.

What in the name of whatever god you hold dear were the police doing using an unmanned spy drone to fly around, taking pictures of these people as they swayed gently in stillness of morning?

I can see why the army might need a spy drone in Afghanistan. But how on earth could the Wiltshire constabulary justify the purchase of such a thing? To catch crop circlists? It’s the most absurd thing I’ve ever heard.

Why send sniffer dogs to their annual summer get-together? We know there will have been some dope and we know, because they’d stayed up all night, that some of the morris men will have got some marching powder up their schnozzers. But if it’s busts they’re after, Plod would probably have had a higher success rate if they’d had a snout about in their own locker rooms.

Read it all, it's excellent, and Clarkson's riff about saluting magpies is hilarious.

Yes, The Sky Is Blue

Australia's most boring columnist states the bleeding obvious as only he can :



You may soon be called upon to donate to ensure sufficient emergency "new blood" supplies are available for The Liberal Party, because plenty of blood will spill, as surreal discussions break out over in Canberra about whether it should be Christopher Pyne or Joe Hockey who will replace Malcolm Turnbull as opposition leader.

It may be time for Brendan "I've Never Voted Liberal In My Life!!?!" Nelson to rise phoenix-like, hell, make that Howard-like, from the ashes of the Old Liberals and reclaim the big chair so Rudd can giggle up to and right through a federal election.

Gerard Henderson can't deny three appalling polls for the Liberals, all published on the same day, all but declaring that The Greens could become the 'two', in a two-party political system, if the Liberals don't get it together and finish cleaning house of the remaining old geezers the Liberals major donors wanted to fuck off last year.

Gerard, probably still shattered that Elizabeth Murdoch was right when she said John Howard destroyed the Liberal Party, cannot muster much enthusiasm to froth about Turnbull and dumps his usual dreary analysis, designed to lull all readers into believing that politics is mostly boring, and cuts loose, for the intro at least :

To suffer a significant downturn in one opinion poll might be due to chance, a statistical discrepancy or whatever.

Yes, Gerard Henderson really did just toss off "or whatever".

He should have gone for "or, like, whatever."

Gerard must be reading blogs. He must have noticed that bloggers who can't be arsed going too deep into the details can easily throw out "whatever" when they run out things to say about the subject under analysis, and nobody usually complains. Maybe Gerard thought, 'Well, why can't I get away with that, too?'

Yeah, whatever.

UPDATE : Gerard Henderson, Howard Hater :

Howard failed as prime minister to do what he said he would do - oversee an orderly transition of leadership in the way the Liberal Party founder, Robert Menzies, did in 1966.

If Howard had stepped down in early 2006 he would have been succeeded by Costello, when Labor was led by Kim Beazley. The ALP may or may not have replaced Beazley with Rudd. If Costello happened to win in 2007, there would be no problem now.

Except for the Global Financial Crisis.

A surreal and nightmarish illustration from Michael Mucci for a Paul Sheehan story in the Sydney Morning Herald :



Forget the story, look at the demonic apparation that is Anthony Albanese finishing off Turnbull's throat. That'll take a few days to wipe from the memory.

See That Shark? Watch Me Jump It

Meanwhile, The Great 'Rudd Shields Swan Over Fake Email (GRSFEC)' Conspiracy Theory Takes Shape

By Darryl Mason

After a consistently entertaining and dramatic week in politics in which utes and emails came to feature together for the first time in newspaper headlines. The Daily Telegraph's Piers Akerman straps on his water skis and submits his claim for monumental irrelevancy,

The last weeks of the winter session have been more damaging to the Rudd Labor Government than the Coalition, no matter how you slice it.

The first polls after the solid week of Utegate headlines, hysteria and claims of snarky conspiracy, show the opposite of what Akerman effervescently claims, and the damage inside the Liberal true believer ranks seems intense :

Malcolm Turnbull has paid for his botched attack on Prime Minister Kevin Rudd, with more than half of voters believing he was deceitful about a now-notorious fake email. Even among committed Coalition voters, nearly a third believe he has been deceitful and another 10 per cent say he has been dishonest.

A Galaxy poll taken at the weekend has revealed the Opposition Leader's integrity has taken a hammering, revealing a rump of only 7 per cent of voters who think he was "open and honest" during the affair.

If it turns out that Turnbull was speaking, mostly, honestly throughout his dozens of interviews last week, something else will be needed to explain why so many Australians looked at Turnbull being interviewed on TV and thought, 'Oh, this guy is so full of shit.'

Malcolm Turnbull was interviewed by the AFP ("The Feds" for American readers) on Sunday, and Labor keeps hammering that Turnbull has something to hide. Something big. Maybe even a little dark, sinister.

Those kinds of vague claims crack deep into our culture's love-hate mistrust of politicians. We love corrupt politicians in novels and TV shows, the bastards, but we hate them in real life, those bastards.

And A Politician Who Has Something To Hide From The Feds feeds our political thriller fiction-fuelled desire to see corrupt politicians flayed publicly and prosecuted rigorously, regardless of who they are.

So Lindsay Tanner goes for a gushing head wound :

"Clearly, he's not going to provide his computer records to the federal police," Mr Tanner told the Nine Network.

"Given the nature of the potential crimes we're dealing with here, that is appalling. He should be making all assistance available to the federal police in order that they can determine whether any serious crimes have been committed and pursue them accordingly if they have been."

Brutal. And damn hard to shake off, even if the AFP interrupted Masterchef for ten minutes to announce that Malcolm Turnbull was in the clear and there was no reason to doubt his honesty on anything ute or e-mail related anymore. Even then, there would be plenty of Australians wandering around muttering, "Malcolm Turnbull? Dodgy prick."


Piers Akerman asked his readers the following question :

....did anyone really believe someone within Treasury would be sending faked emails?

Commenters responded to his call for exploration of a larger conspiracy involving Rudd & Swan and reasonably high-tech fakery and so was crafted a conspiracy theory swollen with potentially thrilling drama, tech-treachery and possible falls from power that makes you want to shout "I Want To See This Movie! (or at least read the book)', even if the theory doesn't turn out, in the end, to be actual reality. Some of these comments from Akerman's blog have been slightly
edited :

Michael A replied to lethal
Sun 28 Jun 09 (06:26am)

It is very interesting that the AFP were able to tell everyone the email was a fake almost immediately but have still not enlightened us as to the origins of the email. Was this all a Labor setup?

Angry God replied to lethal
Sun 28 Jun 09 (12:06pm)

As far as I understand computers and managed networks such as government systems, they facts are that the original email would contain data known as the MAC addreess. This is a unique number (that can be spoofed if you know what you are doing). The managed network locks these MAC addresses to the network switch.

A resonable investigator would have been able to identify the originating computer in a few seconds if they were competant. We assume that they are competant and as such we know that the AFP knows which computer initiated the modified (read fake) email.

In a managed network the spoofing of a MAC address within an email will be highlighted as a security breach. So either no spoofing of the MAC address occured or the email was sent from an outside of government network computer.

The AFP will know this info. It will be interesting where the fake comes from as it will be identified by this method.

Ann replied to lethal
Sun 28 Jun 09 (12:24pm)

The cursory search of PMO and Treasury computers by Rudd lackeys found no evidence of email so Rudd shrieks “It’s a fake”. Yet AFP take five minutes to find it was generated on a Treasury computer, sent to Grech home computer then deleted from Treasury computer.

samantha replied to lethal
Sun 28 Jun 09 (02:41pm)

For me, there are two really big questions that need to be answered. WHO in Treasury devised the email, and for what purpose?

Sammi replied to lethal
Sun 28 Jun 09 (03:03pm)

The Treasury generated email was created to catch their leak and it was made as juicy as possible to make sure it would be passed on to the Opposition and used, hence Rudd knew about it before it re-emerged. It also served the double purpose of covering up the copious email trail created by Swan and Co while attempting to secure a loan for Rudd’s mate.

It's a very interesting theory. And no-one showed up to try and dispel it, for many hours on Sunday.

Unlike the Liberal Party staffers who haunt News Limited blogs, do the Labor Party staffers who zip around online, posting anonymous comments on blogs as they run interference, dispensing disinformation, countering accusations, get the whole the weekend off?

Piers Akerman, for what's it worth, is convinced the Great Rudd & Swan Fake Email Scandal still has plenty of drama to be played out :

...the hard evidence still shows that Swan did more in his attempt to assist Rudd’s car-dealer mate, John Grant, than he did for any other car dealer in the nation.

That is indisputable.

Treasury officials, operating on clear instructions from Swan’s office, went to extraordinary lengths on Grant’s behalf.

We'll see. But it would be no great surprise if Rudd and Swan produce something that gets them off the hook. Rudd promised to "mess with their heads" when he became Labor Party leader, and it doesn't look like he has given that strategy even a week off since.

Being the mind-bogglingly biased Liberal Party flunkie and junkie that he is, Akerman wants his readers to believe that whatever happens, it's Not Yet Over for Malcolm Turnbull. Akerman has to rally the team for the man who said that John Howard broke Australia's heart. Akerman knows Turnbull is shedding support faster than Brendan Nelson railing against whatever, but he has to pump for Turnbull. And throw in something conspiratorial about the Greens as well.

This is what Akerman does for a living.

But I'm not convinced that even if Wayne Swan was seized by the AFP and sent in chains to the SuperMax for a solid water-boarding session to finally get him to answer e-mail and ute related questions that happen to be those very "Not The Right Questions" he has refused to answer so far, that Malcolm Turnbull would still be able to effectively change the clearly very real belief amongst so many voters that he is brimming with bullshit and a craptastic liar as well.

Australians love great liars.

It was long part of our oral storytelling tradition to try and spin the wildest yarns, and any brave and bold attempt to pass off a story mostly comprised of obvious fiction was always admired, even if the teller couldn't carry the tale convincingly.

But we can't respect nor tolerate bad liars. And Malcolm Turnbull, like Swan, is a bottom shelf liar.

Turnbull thinks he is a rare brandy, but he is a harsh house spirit scotch when it comes to effectively bullshitting the Australian public. His face is a billboard screaming, "Don't listen to my words, look at my eyes, see? even I don't believe what I'm saying, why should you?"

Joe Hockey loometh.

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Bigger Than Jesus, Iran And Michael Jackson

By Darryl Mason

For a few hours tonight, tens of millions of Twitter users in dozens of countries looked at the Trending Topics sidebar and, in a global moment of mass questioning, thought "Who The Fuck Is Rove?"



Whoever he is, for a few hours on Twitter he was bigger than the Iran Election and Michael Jackson. Quite an accomplishment, for an Australian TV show.

Rove McManus of Rove Live became one of only a few TV hosts from anywhere in the world to land in the Trending Topics, and perhaps only Jon Stewart has only also ever reached the top spot. Which is sort of like having a number one worldwide hit single that all but nobody has heard on the radio, for just an hour or two, before quickly fading into general global obscurity.

How did Rove become a topic of even greater discussion amongst Twitter users than the Iran Election and Michael Jackson?

There was a certain amount of manipulation from Rove, urging the viewers of his TV show to get onto Twitter and use the term 'Twitter Time'. Plus, Rove McManus already has 50,000 people following him on Twitter. If a good slab of them are watching his show, already discussing what he's up to as he broadcasts his show, who he's interviewing, and they tag their Twitter posts with #rove, then Rove is clearly a subject of much discussion and comment volume, so into the Trending Topics list he goes.

The fact that he also interviewed Sasha-Borat Cohen, in the guise of Bruno, helped enormously. Viewers twooting along while they watched Rove do the interview discussed Bruno's fantastically obscene knitted fashion choices. Mentioning 'Bruno' in their Twitter comments meant that a few million somewhere else in the world who were searching Twitter for news about the Bruno movie found comments by Rove twooters mentioning the interview. It would seem a few tens of thousands of them then commented that there is a fantastic Bruno interview on some Australian TV show called Rove. Some of the comments echoed a refrain : Why Can't I Watch This Now On YouTube?

So Rove started being mentioned in probably a few hundred thousand Twitter comments, in just one hour, because of the Bruno association.

I'm not quite sure if this actually means that more people were twalking about Rove at the same time then they were about Michael Jackson, but Rove's name appeared in more posts on Twitter, for an hour or two, including all those who picked up on the phrase 'Twitter Time' and asked, What Is Twitter Time? and Who The Fuck Is Rove?

Rove's name became word associated with Bruno and Twitter and Twitter Time. Bruno was already in the Trending Topics on Twitter before the Rove interview aired tonight, and so as Rove viewers twooted about how fucking insane Bruno was, or how funny his knitted penis was, Twitter users interested in Bruno who weren't watching the interview as it was being broadcast (because they weren't near a TV or lived in a country other than Australia) passed on the news about Bruno to all the people who followed them. A chain reaction of interest spreads, and Rove's name is carried along. Rove then becomes known as a name to the millions who were already twooting about Bruno and what his new movie will be like, and as soon as Rove reached the Trending Topics, because of the volume of twoots containing the word 'Rove'. And so, having reached the bottom of the Trending Topics list, the volume increased when people began asking 'Who The Fuck Is Rove?' as many tend to do when they see a name or word in the Trending Topics they are unfamiliar with. They don't go for a Google, they just ask the people who follow them, 'Who Is This? What Does This Mean?'

If that doesn't make a whole lot of sense, I've been using Twitter for a few months and I'm still trying to get my head around it. There's not a whole lot to learn, you read comments, you post your own, you follow people, people follow you, but there's a gigatlantic-sized mountain to think about, particularly how Twitter is beginning to become the sort of actual real-time globally shared conversation that many pre-internet visionaries imagined would one day become a part of our digital reality.

While Rove may be hitting sixes using Twitter to promote the name 'Rove', he failed to capitalise on a brief worldwide interest in who he was, and what had happened on his show tonight that furnaced up so much discussion.

The interview with Borat's distant relative Bruno was not available anywhere online, hours after the show aired. In this age of Instant Online Everything, this ranks as something close to criminal. Why not share it all but immediately with those who missed it, or lived in the many countries where Rove is not screened, but where people were asking 'Who The Fuck Is Rove?'

The Bruno interview may be up today, or tomorrow, on YouTube, but that all so brief moment of worldwide Twitter interest passes quickly. I'm sure the interview will become extremely popular on YouTube and will rack up a few hundred thousand hits in four or five days. But here was an opportunity for someone from Rove to whip that clip onto YouTube as soon as it aired, get the link onto Twitter, and watch as five million around the world in just a few hours flooded in to watch the Rove & Bruno YouTube, thanks to the Twitter heads-up.

They didn't do it, so the above is just speculation. But it certainly seems like a scenario that could have happened, had the clip gone up straight away.

Because Kevin Rudd also appeared on Rove tonight, straight after the Bruno interview, and joined the Rove and Bruno and Twitter Time related discussions, our prime minister leapt into the Trending Topics as well. I didn't move fast enough to screengrab that.

Again, by midnight, hours after the show aired, the Rove interview of Kevin Rudd is still not up on YouTube, or any site that can be linked to. The international Twitterfolk who saw 'Kevin Rudd' in the Trending Topics and no longer bother with Googling, were asking their followers 'Who The Fuck Is Kevin Rudd?'

In these days of Instant Everything, not being able to immediately watch something that aired on TV but was missed, feels like you've been slighted.

Cheated.

What the fuck do you mean I can't watch this thing I heard about on Twitter right now online? Why is there no link? And what is this word 'Wait' word you keep using?

It just feels so very 20th century.

Correction : I know the estimates of overall Twitter users is too high. About eight million online at any one time, across the world is probably closer, but I'll go look for some detailed estimates of Twitter traffic.

.

Warning, Generation X Nostalgia Equals Maximum Hype

By Darryl Mason

"Generation X grew up the day Michael Jackson died."

Expect to hear that line a lot in the coming weeks and months, as a new Generation X meme takes hold in the mainstream media. Next Sundays mind-misting newspapers with likely be filled with columnists waffling on about the nostalgia trip Jackson has inspired in Generation Xers.

So let me get in first.

Michael Jackson is dead and millions of people in their 30s and early 40s who grew up with Michael Jackson filling the charts year in and year out with massive hits, are now now hearing some of his best songs again for the first time in a decade or more, and the songs are acting as memory triggers. Powerful ones.

Seeing 'Dont Stop Till You Get Enough' at 1am on Rage was like briefly time-travelling back to the room I was in when I first saw it. Vivid. Not just remembering the TV I watched it on, but the whole room, the people in it, the events of those days and how it felt as a kid to hear a song like that for the first time.

For thousands of others who caught that clip on Rage, or one of the dozen other Jackson clips, it propelled them back into memories of jumping around with incomprehensible, now, energy and excitement, or reminded them of the chidhood bedroom they had almost forgotten they once lived in for years, or some totally forgotten high school disco, or a more memorable first disco with actual bar.

If you were a kid in the 1970s and early 1980s, and you were addicted to Countdown, or Sounds, of if you listened to any of the big radio stations, you heard and saw a lot of Michael Jackson.

Every new single, and every new 'Wow, how'd they do that?!' video, was an event. With sometimes excruitiatingly long periods of Hype before you finally got to see feast your eyes on what Jackson had come up with next. It was extremely easy to get suckered into believing that whatever was coming from Michael Jackson was going to change your life and you had to be right there to see it when it was first screened on TV.

A generation becoming suddenly nostalgic is like a pipeline opening up. A lot of other memories start spraying around once that gateway to childhood has been cracked open. And a lot of other mostly forgotten music from the late 70s and early 80s will leap into your mind on the back of hearing Jackson singing Rock With You on the radio for the first time in two decades.

And with those musical memories come the mini-memory vids of the friends you shared that music with, the people around you then, the clothes you wore, the things you believed, the dreams you wanted to turn into bright and shining realities.

We will soon be told by every media entity with a heartbeat that Generation X Is Becoming Nostalgic.

It's about fucking time.

The Baby Boomers have dominated us for too long with their mostly shudder-awful musical nostalgia. Seriously, the fucking Eagles are still being played on Australian commercial radio stations. What else can you say but WTF?

For Generation Xers, The Eagles were the shit our parents listened to. The Eagles fucking pissed us off three and a half decades ago, and just the fact The Eagles are still getting played on morning, afternoon and evening radio, is enough to make most of us want to scream, "Oh fuck no, not again!"

I have little doubt that much of the current road rage can be linked to the number of times Hotel California and Take It Easy get played during morning and evening commutes. Hotel fucking California anathesises Baby Boomers, but it fill Generation Xers with fury.

And why is that up until a few days ago, all but none of the commercial radio stations played any Michael Jackson at all?



The Boomers are laughing at us, you know that, don't you?

John Farnham will never fucking retire, and will eventually be replaced by a robot or clone, or both. The Baby Boomers are going to live into their 120s, the ones that can afford it anyway. Boomer music, movies, TV and cultural memories and icons will clutter commerical TV and radio for decades more to come. This is why so many of us under 50s go online, where the influence and interests of Boomers is less suffocating, far less constant.

Generation X needs its own Nostalgia takeover of the mass media.

How many more times must any person hear so much plap and flappily crap Boomer generation songs that weren't even hits when they were first releasd, on mind-screamingly constant rotation, on so many fucking stations, all at the same time.

Take It Easy....for fuck's sake. What kind of message is that for a generation?

Only the idiots of the Boomer generation embraced the mass-media branded idiom of 'Turn On, Tune In, Drop Out,' though plenty in their ranks used it as excuse to bail on society, or hit cruise control into the next decade or three.

Ray Manzareck, of The Doors, had a better philosophy, 'Turn On, Tune In, TAKE OVER'.

Few Boomers thought that was a good idea.

And they grew to find The Eagles far more pleasing, less challenging, than the raucousness of The Doors. Boomers love that commercial radio anathetises then with Hotel California on a daily basis, when they should be getting blitzed by The Doors and The Ramones and Iggy Pop and The Sex Pistols.

This has to end.

Generation X must remove the horror of Baby Boomer Easy Listening Light Rock from all commercial radio stations.

It must become a crime to broadcast The Eagles and John Farnham to the public, outside of sound spill from nursing homes.

At least when we go into the nursing homes, we'll be listening to Nirvana.

Maybe some Michael Jackson.

Don't Stop Till You Get Enough, maybe Rock With You. Eat It and Bad are out, because it's impossible to watch the Jackson videos now without seeing Weird Al Yankovich's versions layered over the top.

Miranda Devine Embraces "The New Niceness" After Rallying For Greenies To Be Hung In Public

By Darry Mason

Yes, Miranda Devine is going to be Nice now.

Big viewerships for mostly fictional reality TV shows tell her that Australians, those who watch MasterChef anyway, don't want Nasty anymore. They want Nice.

This change for Miranda Devine comes only a couple of months after she decided, while the charred corpses and ash-only remains of more than 170 Australians still lay amongst the devastation of the Victoria Fires, that "It is not arsonists who should be hanging from lamp-posts but greenies."

Miranda "Nice Now" Devine :

Television programmers have discovered the public flicked the switch to "nice" about six months ago, favouring shows which are full of sweetness and light - such as MasterChef, Random Acts Of Kindness and Packed To The Rafters - and rejecting mean, vicious shows, such as Gordon Ramsay's surprise flop Hell's Kitchen or the Chaser's "Make A Realistic Wish" shtick.

The Chaser pulled more than one million viewers last week, up against the State of Origin, for fuck's sake.

And if you think there is any way in the world to link Gordon fucking Ramsay and The Chaser, well, you may as well be wearing a t-shirt declaring "I Am Full Of Shit".

Miranda Devine thinks Kevin Rudd is Nice. So is Wayne Swann. Julia Gillard, too, is Nice.

Malcolm Turnbull isn't Nice, she says, and she'd know, having said the following about Australian survivors of the appalling Cyclone Larry in Far North Queensland, in 2006 :

"...much as we will miss their avocados and bananas on our supermarket shelves, we can live without their whingeing."

The "whingers" who she was referring to were mostly young mothers who had been standing in the wind and rain for three days trying to get food and nappies for their babies. They dared to yell at a few journalists and complained that John Howard wasn't doing enough to help them. John Howard understood. Miranda Devine did not :

Five minutes after the cyclone hit, locals were whingeing that "they" haven't come and fixed it for them. Do they not have their own arms and legs?

Now here's some more Miranda "Nice Now" Devine :

Parliamentarians would be wise to follow the next political trend just launched by the US President, Barack Obama - a low-key Prince of Nice - not to follow the 24-hour news cycle. It is a revolutionary concept, and only Obama, with his authority and iconic status, could dare try.

Interrogated by reporters this week about why he waited several days to condemn the violence in Iran he replied: "I know everybody here is on a 24-hour news cycle. I'm not, OK?"

Wow! What a liberating idea for a political leader, not to be enslaved by an endless circus of TV and radio appearances, punctuated by jabbering doorstops. No more treadmill of Radio National Breakfast, Sunrise, 2GB, 3AW, AM, Sky News, The World Today, PM, network evening news programs, The 7.30 Report, Lateline, with and media-monitoring services and the internet's perpetual deadline breathing down your neck all day and night.

She has also started to quote politicians in Alan Ramsay-sized chunks, to pad out the space between the meaningless guff in her column.

This from Miranda "Nice Now" Devine to finish :

How liberating to have time free, instead, to actually think about the important business of running a country, rather than delegating it to unelected public servants. Why didn't someone think of that before?

That's not an ender for a newspaper column, that's not even a bad Letter To Editor. Hell, it's not even shitty blog post quality. It's the kind of pap someone mutters to you late at night at a party that causes you to wander away, if only to stare at a fish tank.

The problem is if people really do want Nice now, and there sure are plenty of Baby Boomer-focused stories trying to be reassuring that Generation Y are actually quite nice, Miranda "Nice Now" Devine has trouble doing Nice.

But maybe she has no choice but to try.

On Friday, she had to suffer the indignity of having the following published in the Sydney Morning Herald, despite the Press Council deciding that her advice to hang greenies from lamposts in revenge for the Victoria Fires was not any kind of hate speech they'd ever heard of :

The article presented, in strong terms, Ms Devine's view that poor forest management practices resulting from "the power of green ideology" were a key driver in the scale and ferocity of the Victorian bushfires that devastated a number of communities and caused large-scale loss of life.

The complainants asserted that the article breached a number of Press Council principles. They described the piece, which was headlined "Green ideas must take blame for deaths", as a highly derogatory polemic capable of inciting some people "to threaten, or even commit, acts of hatred or violence". They took particular exception to the hyperbolic suggestion that politicians seeking to divert attention from themselves could offer a new target for a lynch mob: "It is not arsonists who should be hanging from lamp-posts but greenies."

The Herald acknowledged concerns about some of the language in Ms Devine's column and expressed regret at any offence taken.

In its defence the newspaper claimed that the hyperbole employed by Ms Devine was part of her "robust, lively and sometimes provocative" writing style.

"Lively and sometimes provocative."

And yet, and so, Miranda "Nice Now" Devine was born.

Probably.

Flashbackery : Miranda Devine's column where she raged against the people of the cyclone-shattered people of Innisfail for daring to tell John Howard to Fuck Off when he came to pay a visit, stirred up the local papers of Far North Queensland, and she was poignantly corrected, along with being relentlessly lampooned as a rich Sydney sider, sitting around sippiing Moet while immigrant gardeners worked on the hedges, who had no idea of what they lived through, and what they were trying to rebuild from.

Miranda Devine became, and remains, to the readers of the Townsville Bulletin 'Moet' Miranda.

Townsville Bulletin editor, John Andersen :

But, if they wanted to complain, so what? They'd just been through hell. They were despairing. They were in varying degrees of shock, but not one of them played the blame game. They were just glad to be alive. Maybe if Miranda had gone to Innisfail and spoken to some of the people who had been 'Larried' she might have taken a different view.

But, gee, why would you leave Cremorne (Miranda's hometown) where you can sip on Moet and watch it on the telly?"

Moet Miranda. This nickname absolutely irritated her enough to write the following classic screed in just one of the comments section filled with hilarious mockery at the Townsville Bulletin, back then :

"Your poor excuse for a journalist, John Andersen, has invented facts and verballed me in his column, `Low blow from Sydney'. I do not live in Cremorne. Nor do I have a maid. I did not use the word `hillbilly' to refer to North Queenslanders. And Laotians in Sydney are not consigned to`trimming the hedges and washing the socks of the rich'.

"He has concocted a bizarre fantasy that Sydney is peopled exclusively by wealthy people and their immigrant servants, and that I sit around drinking Moet for a living. This fiction appears to have been accepted as truth by some of your more gullible readers. I don't think inventing facts is any more acceptable for journalists in Townsville than it is in Sydney so I expect a correction."

The Townsville Bulletin never published a correction, and editor John Andersen was still laughing about the whole thing months later.

Don't Try And Justify It, Just Admit You Fell Hook, Line And Sinker For A Prank Precisely Aimed At Twitter-Sourcing Media Exactly Like You

Richard Wilkins says it himself, "I haven't had time to check it out."

Well, why in fuck did you report it as fact?



They read about Jeff Goldblum's supposed death a few minutes before on the same place I read about it : Twitter.

The reason why this hoax worked, for an embarrassingly large amount of media around the world, is because the hoaxer had the sense to make the short fake report read like something off Reuters, and included the phrase "New Zealand police have confirmed"....

That was good enough for the producers of the Today Show, and Richard Wilkins.

The backtrack and retraction about ten minutes later was even more humiliating.

Conroy's Net Filter Will Block Access To E-Bay And Amazon

By Darryl Mason

If That Net Censor Guy, Stephen Conroy, wants to stop all Australians from visiting websites that sell games that are not allowed by law to be sold in Australian shops, Stephen Conroy will have no choice but to block web access to both Amazon and E-Bay, which ship thousands of R18+ games to Australian gamers every month.

Asher Moses :

The Federal Government has now set its sights on gamers, promising to use its internet censorship regime to block websites hosting and selling video games that are not suitable for 15 year olds.

Australia is the only developed country without an R18+ classification for games, meaning any titles that do not meet the MA15+ standard - such as those with excessive violence or sexual content - are simply banned from sale by the Classification Board, unless they are modified to remove the offending content.

So far, this has only applied to local bricks-and-mortar stores selling physical copies of games, but a spokesman for Senator Conroy confirmed that under the filtering plan, it will be extended to downloadable games, flash-based web games and sites which sell physical copies of games that do not meet the MA15+ standard.

Sites like Amazon and E-Bay.

That should go down well.

The average age of an Australian gamer is 30 years old.

Conroy should be careful. He doesn't want to get millions of Australian gamers and daily internet users offside anymore than he already has, particularly if an election is drawing near.

If the Rudd government doesn't already know this, they should, but they don't want to make internet censorship and the way they constantly fuck with gamers into election issues, because they can easily be made into Big Election Issues, particularly for Labor voters in their 30s and 40s.

The Greens already know this.

Likewise, Labor has to be careful in their plans to crack down on so-called online piracy and peer to peer file sharing. Cutting off the internet access of, or pursuing prosecutions against, some 40 year old single mother who downloads a digital copy of an album she has already brought on vinyl and/or CD will be the kind of Big Ugly that no-one in Labor wants to find themselves associated with.

They won't even have to go that far. There's a few hundred thousand Australians who regularly use file-sharing sites like The Pirate Bay, and they will be extremely displeased if there comes a day when they visit those sites (to download games that they're not allowed to buy in Australia) and they find that Stephen Conroy has blocked their access. Everyone will know very, very quickly that the Rudd government is responsible.

An independent running in the early 2010 federal election fighting against internet censorship and for the rights of gamers and file sharers, might find themselves a particularly large and surprising number of former Labor voters giving them the big tick.

That's if The Greens, by then, aren't already all over those fundamental issues of digital reality rights. And they probably will be.

Wallabies Love Tasmanian Opium, So Do The Deer And Sheep

By Darryl Mason

Across Australia today, many thousands of illegal and legal opiate admirers and junkies will read this story and mutter "lucky wallabies" :

Wallabies are breaking into Tasmania's poppy fields and getting high.

The strange occurrence that was revealed in a State Government Budget Estimates hearing, has also solved what some growers say has spurred a campfire legend about mysterious crop circles that appear in northern Tasmania's poppy paddocks.

In true X-Files-style, Attorney-General Lara Giddings said the drugged out wallabies had been found hopping around in circles squashing the poppies, creating the formations – and hence solving the mystery.

Don't be distracted by this talk of crop circles. They've got a serious smack wallaby problem on their hands, and word of the free supply of very magic flowers is spreading amongst other animal communities :

Tasmanian Alkaloids field operations manager Rick Rockliff said wildlife and livestock that ate the poppies were known to "act weird" including deer in the state's highlands and sheep.

"...as growers we try our best to try and stop this sort of consumption particularly by livestock due to concerns about the contamination of the meat.

Wait a second, there might be a decent new market ready to open up for opium-marinated lamb. Somebody call the Agriculture Minister.

"....there has been a steady increase in the number of wild animals and that is where we are having difficulty keeping them off our land."

Uh Oh. They have got a serious problem.

How do you protect thousands of acres of opium crops from wave after wave of wallaby, sheep and deer, driven mad by nerve-stripping opium withdrawals, purely fixated on the irresistible pods they know they must immediately consume. How do you stop that?

They're going to need bigger fences.

Tasmanians should be aware of crazed cold turkeying fauna leaping through the bedroom window and heading for the jewelry collection.

UPDATE : The AdelaideNow site has to win some sort of award for giving this internationally popular story this brilliant headline :

The Chas(er)tened

By Darryl Mason

They complain when you go too far, and they complain when you don't go far enough :



Here's the Herald Sun's Chaser specialist Colin Vickery asking the "burning question" :

Has The Chaser team gone soft? That's the burning question after last night's edition of The War on Everything.

The Chaser boys - Andrew Hansen, Chas Licciardello, Julian Morrow, Craig Reucassel and Chris Taylor - looked tentative after being thrown off air by the ABC for two weeks.

He wasn't watching too closely, perhaps distracted by the State Of Origin :

A much-publicised dig at the Moran family didn’t make it to air.

The Moran family dig did air, it was fast and close to the start.

So where does The Chaser go from here? The world has changed a lot in the two years since the team’s last series. Reliable Chaser targets John Howard and George Bush are long gone.

Fear and cynicism have been replaced by a renewed sense of hope and positivity.

Masterchef Australia is held up by Vickery as an example of Australia's "renewed sense of hope and positivity", in the mostly fictional lands of reality TV at least.

A clearly chastened Chaser took aim at some easy targets in last night’s show in an obvious attempt to ensure there was no repeat of the firestorm of protest that came after their Make A Realistic Wish Foundation sketch.

The Herald Sun, and all the online Murdoch tabloids, including The Australia, quite profitably whipped up much of that "Firestorm Of Protest" with a series of Colin Vickery stories that delivered hundreds of thousands of extra page views and thousands of comments over the three or four days they managed to keep the Chaser Makes Fun Of Dying Children sensation alive.

The Murdoch media, like Fairfax, don't just forget about The Chaser because they're not doing anything controversial when stories about them pull so many readers to the news sites. Chaser stories can be almost constantly counted on to feature in the Top Ten Most Read Today lists.

All through the past few years, controversies whipped up, sometimes furiously, by the Murdoch media has resulted in literally hundreds of Chaser stories being published across the Herald Sun, Daily Telegraph, The Australian, the Adelaide Advertiser and the Courier Mail, in print and online. This list of stories from the past two years or so would have generated many millions of page views and tens of thousands of comments. Massive traffic, monumental. And profitable.

You usually need to fake stories about Pauline Hanson getting her tits out to pull those numbers.

The Chaser delivers bigger profit as free content to the Murdoch online media than it delivers to the show's creators and producers through DVD sales.

When you're onto a good thing, Rupert Murdoch would expect you to milk the fucker for everything you can get.

So Colin Vickery had no choice, he had to come up with something Chaser-related.

Even as something as damp and 'aaaahh, whatever' as asking if The Chaser has "finally gone soft".

UPDATE : Herald Sun readers notice the obvious schizophrenia, 95% of commenters point out the blinding hypocrisy.


The Chasers' Wingdings message from last night's very fast, very tight, very fit show has been decoded :

If you actually bothered to translate this you are :

a) clearly unemployed

b) clearly a nerd

c) clearly disappointed by now that it's nothing controversial.

It was familiar of The Simpsons episode where a fast-scrolling list of official apologies from the producers of Kent Brockman's Eye On Springfield whips by. It required hitting slo-mo on the non-digital video recorder when it was originally aired back in the non-YouTube 1990s to catch all the apologies, such as these :

The nerds on the Internet are not geeks.

Our universities are not "hotbeds" of anything.

Cats do not eventually turn into dogs.

The "Bug" on your TV screen can see into your home.

Our viewers are not pathetic sexless food tubes.

In amongst those apologies was this line :

If You're Reading This, You Have No Life

Last night The Chaser dared to air another skit videod on location outside The Vatican. This, like the messasge blimp, featured controversial material.

However, you won't hear representatives of The Catholic Church trying to tear in The Chaser this time. Because to do so means critics and the professionally outraged will have to acknowledge what the piece was about.

The Catholic Church has added 'Excessive Wealth' to its expanded list of The Seven Deadly Sins. So The Chaser asked passing Vatican priests to pray for those suffering from Excessive Wealth, like The Catholic Church, which we learned through the prayers pulls an astounding $15 billion in revenue from Australia each year and $4 trillion from around the world.

You can catch the latest Chaser episode here, including the highlight Ray Martin's Small Talk, where Tim Flannery and Phillip Ruddock convene to discuss, well, not very much at all. I wanted to see more of this small talk, I think I could take about fifteen minutes of it, just before bed.

Who knew Ray Martin could parody himself so effortlessly?

The Chaser's bit about the 'Rudd Safe House', where shattered, trembling ex-staffers of the prime minister can recover and heal safely was good, but they still have a long way to go in getting at Kevin Rudd in the sometimes near hallucinatory ways they got at John Howard in 2006 and 2007 :

....the Chasers, a constant thorn in the then prime minister's side as the election approached. Some of their ambushes of his early morning power walks rose to the level of performance art - one involved a silver Delorean sports car, a mad professor and the promise to take Mr Howard "back to the future" so that he could retire gracefully rather than be forced out by the voters.

The BBC has picked The Chaser to air before the well-matched and already popular Flight Of The Conchords. Getting picked up by the BBC is still a kind of comedy nirvana :

The BBC signed a deal to screen a special six-episode compilation of highlights from The Chaser's War On Everything 2006 and 2007 seasons.

The show is already screening in America, Japan, New Zealand, Finland, Norway, Denmark, Belgium, Poland, Israel and even Mongolia...