Weird Scenes Inside The Murdoch News Mines

By Darryl Mason

News Limited executive editor (does that mean he just gets a nicer chair?) Alan Howes explains how the Murdoch tabloids act as "the watchdog" of modern politics (Headline : Taking A Rude Joy In Kicking The Watchdog) in this lovely piece of corporate propaganda, distributed widely, of course, across the Digital Rupert media landscape :

NEWSPAPERS easily make friends and enemies.

The friends are mostly readers, and mostly voiceless, but for the role a newspaper can play in representing their interests. The enemies are almost always powerful.

A key function of a thinking newspaper, like ours, is to snap at the heels of our elected governments and their appointed officials.

Yeah, woof woof, we get it.

That puts you onside with readers - whose only chance of directly expressing an opinion might come every election.

Unless they can write letters, protest, stage boycotts, type in comments on a multitude of news blogs and 'comment now' news stories, make phone calls to radio stations begging for talkbackers to call in, attend local political events where politicians are present, or use Twitter, Facebook and e-mail. Just how many housebound, illiterate readers with no access to modern communications or electricity do Murdoch tabloids have?

Alan Howe is one of those believers in The Right To Know. Except when it comes to knowing too much about the Murdoch media.

More than a few of them have been calling for an inquiry into Australia's media. If that threat sounds familiar, it should: We had the Norris Inquiry in 1981, a Working Party into Print Media Ownership in 1990 and, later, the Print Media Inquiry that spanned two years.

There's only been three inquiries into the Australian media in three decades? Only three? Is that all?

Perhaps Alan Howe is quietly terrified that many of his newspapers' readers would like to see the 2012 media inquiry televised, like the WaterGate hearings, particularly if a string of Australian celebrities and former politicians are willing to speak out on how their privacy was violated.

And to prove that the biggest bitches in the media have, in fact, always been male tabloid newspaper editors, Alan Howe takes on his critics :

Victorian Labor backbencher Steve Gibbons (who is he?)...

...dangerously thoughtless Greens Senator Christine Milne...

We should all be concerned about thoughtless dangerousness, too.

... NSW Labor MP John Murphy (doesn't ring a bell)

Oh, snap Alan. You nasty.

And of former Murdoch-league media mogul and competitor Conrad Black, News Limited executive editor Alan Howe has this to say :

Ironically, sodomy is no doubt often on the menu at Florida's Coleman Correctional Complex, where (Conrad Black) returns next month to serve out the rest of his sentence for fraud and obstruction of justice.

Prison rape is what Murdoch critics deserve, apparently.

Anyway, watchdogs.

Two of Australia's keenest Murdoch tabloid watchdogs gleefully discuss the new hairstyle of the former NSW premier :






Andrew Bolt :

Letting her hair down in Opposition. Well, letting someone’s hair down.

As they say, me-ow.

Just form a knitting circle or something.