The Orstrahyun Hails The Murdoch 'Death To Free Information' Movement

By Darryl Mason

Rupert Murdoch's News.com.au 'heralds' the end of Free News. Yeah, go away free information. How we hate you.




I'm as reluctant as The Professional Idiot and Tim "Immeasurable Hurt" Blair are to announce that soon you will have to pay to read this blog.

But you will.

I'm sorry, but days of Free Information are gone now.

Wake up to yourself. You know it's true. Rupert said so. Yes, he lost a couple of billion dollars, but so what? He's the Sun King.

Like Rupert's 'quality journalism', you will soon have to pay to read this blog.

Or I will no longer be able to bring infrequently posted, vaguely coherent, content before your eyeballs.

It's that simple.

So here's how The Orstrahyun 'You Will Pay!' business model will work :

1) I will data-mine any and all personal information I can find out about you, then I'll find out where you live.

2) I will turn up at your front door expecting a decent dinner (no vegan shit) at least twice a year. "My family's asleep" and "who the fuck are you?" will not be acceptable excuses for non-honourance of our verbital food-for-blog-stuff contract.

3) After dinner, you will only be allowed to show me holiday photos of places I haven't been, and you will accept that I can shout "Oh, Boring!" whenever I want to.

4) You will have to supply drinks before and after the dinner. You don't have to come on all flash. This is not a shakedown. Woodstock Bourbon & Cola in a can is fine, but if you're rich, you will be expected to break out the Wild Turkey Special Blend.

Death to Free News (And Blogs)!


And don't miss this. The Inquisitr has an hilarious story where a media buyer claims Murdoch is preparing to sue Google and Yahoo because their search engines drive traffic to Murdoch media sites. The bastards!


UPDATE : Only hours after Rupert Murdoch announces he wants to have a go at foolishly attempting to destroy the link-based free-sharing New Media culture by locking his content behind pay walls, Reuters announces that not only do they want independent bloggers, like me, to link to their news stories, they are also happy for bloggers to excerpt their news stories and build new content from it. As long as we all play fair.

Of course, compared to the bloated executive excesses of Murdoch's News, Reuters is a lean and mean operation. But they aren't taking a chance by encouraging bloggers to link to and share their content. They don't have a choice. Murdoch thinks he can still Own The News. He becomes more like Mister Burns every year.

Rupert Murdoch still doesn't get it. Reuters gets it.

So on day one of the New Murdoch 'You Will Pay!' Digital Media Reality, the legend of 20th century Old Media goes and gets trumped by Reuters, who clearly understand the way it has to be.

What a monumental fuckarama the rollout of Murdoch's 'You Will Pay!' new media devolution promises to be. It's a shame so many Australian employees will lose their jobs as the awful reality of Murdoch mega fail sinks in.

UPDATE : Success! My 'You Must Pay!' proposal to readers of The Ostrahyun is already showing results only a few hours after launching. I've now received twelve invitations to dinner via comments, Twitter (@darrylmason) and e-mail, in Sydney, Brisbane, Wyong, Adelaide, Cronulla, Melbourne, Baja California, Boston and Exeter, England. There was, however, a general reluctance to supply bourbon with the meals, but regardless....

I was wrong. The 'You Must Pay' system clearly works. Go for it, Rupert!


.

Journalism : It's This Close To Being Totally Gay

David Penberthy, editor of The Punch, the new Rupert Murdoch media aggregator site, describes a working day at the coalface of modern journalism :

The working day in journalism has so many pockets of variety and reflection that it’s almost too effeminate to describe - coffee runs with colleagues, flicking through magazines, clicking away on websites from here and abroad, going to the roof with a cuppa and a red pen to work on a draft.

Flicking through magazines and having cuppas in the sun is the hardcore pace of modern Murdoch tabloid journalism?

Sounds more like professional blogging.

And this even more frank admission :

Journalists have a saying which is actually more of a truism - that the job is so much fun you would do it for free.

I wouldn't say that truism too loud around Rupert, he's looking for all the free journalists he can get right now.

Rupert Murdoch thinks free journalists and free writers will save his worldwide media empire. Free writers and charging people to read them.

That's the new business model.

Some Things Are More Important Than A Pandemic

By Darryl Mason

The biggest story in the United States today is the "imminent" pandemic of Swine Flu/Pork Fever/Frankenstein Flu/H1N1/Bacon Lung. Right?

Wrong.

At least, it's not at KFSN-TV in Fresno California :



The very popular video of a 61 year old Californian cannabis grower standing out front of a courthouse, unpacking, weighing and then repacking the twelve pounds of medicine (to check it was all there) that has just been returned to him by police, by order of a judge, can be viewed here.

More on that story and America's news obsession with cannabis stories here.


As I mentioned yesterday, while Bacon Lung, or Pork Throat (it is an upper respiratory virus) is at the top of the evening news, as the World Health Organisation raises its pandemic alert level from 5 to 6, the Australian media is having a hard time selling this story to a mostly skeptical public. There are still no deaths in Australia from it, there is no celebrity connection to it, yet, and outside of colourful heat scans of airport arrivees, and I Am Legend-like projections of what life will be like during and after a full-blown influenza pandemic, the rest of the visual story of what's actually going on is not very exciting to watch.

At all.

And readers of online daily newspapers in Australia couldn't be less interested. For now.


(click to enlarge)

Outside of The Australian, not one pre-pandemic or H1N1 influenza-related story makes the Most Popular Stories lists in the Murdoch online tabloids. In Sydney's Daily Telegraph, what may be one of the biggest story in a generation doesn't even rate in the Top Ten most viewed :



Readers of the Fairfax online newspapers are only slightly more interested, and only because Hugh Jackman's cancelled a premiere for his new movie in Mexico :


(click to enlarge)

All the Australian media would get more readers clicking on swine flu headlines if they called it Pork Throat. Or Bacon Lung. Or Year Long Sex Celebrity Weight Loss Alien Flu.

Public disinterest will change if an 'Oh, Fuck! Pandemic!' leads to the cancellation of the State Of Origin, of course, or if any of the following becomes reality :

* Belinda Neil returns from Mexico with Mad Pig Brain Fever, causing her to rant about "demon babies" and the poor service of wine bar restuarants in Mexico.

* International cricket players wind up on a slab.

* Long dead Osama Bin Laden announces in a "new video" that Al Qaeda bioweapons specialists released the virus to end the Allah-insulting American lust for deep-fried bacon.

* Barry Hall goes into 'voluntary' home isolation, coughing blood.

* The entire casts of Neighbours and Home & Away decide to do some "location shooting" on a remote, uninhabited island in the WhitSundays for the next six months.

* Mel & Kochie start broadcasting their morning show from the top of a 100 foot tower, surrounded by a moat of fire, in a remote Queensland rain forest.

* The Footy Show hosts appear in biosuits, or in glass bubbles.

* Federal parliament decides to "temporarily relocate" to a huge sealed plastic dome on top of Uluru.

* It turns out that 10% of all H1N1 victims are likely to turn into brain-hungry zombies.


US Vice President Says New Flu So Dangerous He's Already Warned His Family To Stay Out Of Planes, Trains And Automobiles - But When Did He Warn Them?


.

More Syndication, Less Investigation

The Australian newspaper announces that boss Rupert Murdoch is preparing to cull hundreds of journalists across his media empire.

Well, they didn't announce that, but they did announce this, which is pretty much the same thing :

News Corporation has created a new unit to share content and resources across the vast media empire.

"Our focus moving forward is twofold: to enable our digital businesses to flourish as individual entities and to bolster the digital strategies of our core media properties by treating them as central to, and not separate from, the enterprise," Murdoch said.

"The creation of a new unit designed to share valuable news content and harness the power of News Corporation's vast editorial resources is vital to our success as a global media entity."

This is not a news story. This is a Murdoch mission control press release. Less journalists will be generating more content which will be shared more widely across Murdoch media entities worldwide. More Australian Murdoch journalists will be marched away from their desks by security guards in the next few months. But you probably won't read about that in The Australian.

Seriously, What Are They Smoking?

By Darryl Mason

Who knows, maybe soon there will be a new pharmaceutical to treat this fresh, mostly unexplained and extremely dodgy sounding "syndrome" :

There is mounting evidence to support the existence of a new syndrome afflicting heavy cannabis users, after the world's first cases were found in South Australia.

Of course.

The condition "cannabinoid hyperemesis" was first identified in a group of about 20 heavy drug users in the Adelaide hills in 2004, and a new case has emerged this time in the US.

The syndrome is characterised by nausea, stomach pain and bouts of vomiting - ill effects which, oddly, sufferers say they get some relief from by having a hot shower or bath.

"Cannabinoid hyperemesis" is a terribly shit name for anything. If they want this new "syndrome" to seize the public imagination, and make those who use cannabis for medicinal purposes shift back to pharmaceuticals from paranoid fear that the next long slow sweet numbing inhale, or next crunchy bite of a delicious cannabis-rich Anzac biscuit, might turn them into people from the hills outside Adelaide, then they've got to come up with a truly catchy name.

ShowerHolic Screaming Dope Disease (SHSDD)

Toxic Pot Shower Shock Syndrome (TPSS)

Adelaide Hills Mindfuck Freakout Disorder (AHMF)

Something like that. But better.

In the US case, the sufferer had been smoking marijuana daily and in heavy doses for six years. This eventually led to bouts of vomiting lasting two to three hours daily, and this was worse after meals.

As with South Australian cases, the young man initially turned to "compulsive hot bathing behaviour" to relieve the symptoms but he was not cured until he gave up smoking cannabis altogether.

The cure is a simple one. Stop smoking so much fucking pot if it's fucking with your head and driving you to act like an insane vomiting death-wish crazed lobster.

Adelaide-based drug expert and emergency ward doctor, Dr David Caldicott, said he had seen three cases of the illness and it was possibly also under-reported by sufferers.

Possibly under-reported? There's only four known cases of it mentioned in medical literature, after widespread cannabis usage across the Middle East, China, Mexico, North America, for thousands of years. For twice the length of Christianity, cannabis has been used, and abused, and yet nobody has ever written, or reported, the symptoms of this new "syndrome" before. Unless the consumption of bong or bucket water is involved.

"We're probably seeing the tip of the iceberg in the emergency departments, it's probably far more common but far milder (in the broader community)," he said.

Little was known about how cumulative cannabis use could lead to vomiting...

Cannabis poisoned by toxic chemicals in grow rooms pushed to maximum output? Too much tobacco in the mix? Unchanged bong water that resembles watery peat moss?

Cannabis is used by hundreds of thousands of Australians, and hundreds of millions of people around the world. Daily. Where are the deaths? AIDS and cancer patients use cannabis to stop nausea, to fight the urge to vomit and to calm stomach complaints. These three benefits from absorbing cannabis are amongst the most frequently cited reasons why so many American medicinal cannabis users moved away from gut-burning pharmaceuticals to one of the world's most common weeds. It stops you feeling like you're going to vomit everything inside not nailed down.

That this new excitedly, hopefully, promoted cannabis-related "syndrome" is manifesting in heavy users the exact opposite of the well known, medically recognised, very real benefits of cannabis is utterly bizarre. And likely not true. At least in the 'syndrome" being linked to cannabis. Toxic doses of THC are all but impossible to ingest, short of drinking a wine barrel of hash oil without stopping for a nine cheeses pizza.

Whatever is going on, "cannabinoid hyperemesis" sounds downright nasty :

"Grown men, screaming in pain, sweating profusely, vomiting every 30 seconds and demanding to be allowed to use the shower. It's a very dramatic presentation."

Unfortunately it's not on YouTube.

The Daily Telegraph, and the evening tabloid TV shows, must be greatly anticipating an explosion in Crazy Sweating Screaming Projectile Vomiting Toxic Pot Syndrome (CSSPVTPS). None of them have been hooking hard into Australia's most popular natural, curiously illegal, drug recently, probably because so many of their reporters, writers and producers are themselves infrequent users of cannabis, and other drugs, and are secretly wanting to do positive, non-attack stories on pot smoking in nursing homes and terminal illness wards, and know the drug is the least dangerous, and least domestically destructive, of all those consumed recreationally by Australians.

Then again, perhaps this new, mega-cannabis consuming "syndrome" is real, dangerous and spreading.

If so, the cannabis consumed by those suffering twice a minute vomiting might turn out to be spiked with something toxic, and hallucinatory. Cannabis dosed with enough DMT would make anybody (particularly someone who didn't know they were about to get higher than God) vomit like a gushing tap, sweat profusely and demand immediate communion with healing, calming water.

If these alleged syndrome sufferers are also having mind-electrifying religious visions, then DMT spiking is likely the cause.

But still....

Smoking vast quantities of Adelaide hydro every day for endless years, probably punched from festy buckets, would turn even Tommy Chong into a gibbering freak convinced that only by immediate immersion in hot water can he stop from involuntarily puking out his lower intestine.

News.com.au : Cannabis Users 'Suffering New Syndrome'

Teenagers All Fked Up On Drugs & Booze....Well, A Few Are

I Want To Know, But You Don't Have To Tell Me That

By Darryl Mason

There is sometimes a bit of wisdom to be found amongst the usual anti-Muslim frothing, bizarre Rudd-related conspiracy theories and Howard/Costello worship at The Professional Idiot's.

This from NC :

...the public doesn’t have a right to know and you would be surprised how many don’t want to know. The “public” has no rights over the private lives of individuals, they are just that “PRIVATE”.

The death of a person may be news, the grief of their friends and family is not. Who decided it was news worthy to shove a microphone in the face of a grieving mother and ask ‘How does it feel’, pity the response of “how do you think moron” is edited out.

For too long we in Australia have been fed a steady diet of gossip and been told it is news. The opinions of journalists are reported as news rather than opinion, worse still journalists interviewing journalists about events rather than getting the news from the source. Sloppy, lazy and trashy reporting, too many so called journalists don’t do their homework before interviews and display their ignorance the moment they open their mouths asking inane questions

I don’t care which Hollywood star is sleeping with whom, its not news, neither is asking so jetlagged starlet or sports person, “how do you like Australia” the minute they get off the plane.

It’s not news, it’s not informative - its gossip, but far too often its lead item on the TV news or on the front page.

All of this is exactly why so many Australians are turning away from the dead tree media, soaking up news instead from blogs and alternative news sites.

Rupert Murdoch's Australian media are reeling from the gratuitously tasteless fake photo scandal surrounding Pauline "That's Not My Belly Button" Hanson.

And so they should.

Many of the non-blog Murdoch news sites had to stop accepting comments because the vast majority of commenters were heavily slamming The Daily/Sunday Telegraph and Herald Sun for propagating so much creepy shit, and invading Hanson's privacy in a deeply disturbing way.

Will they learn anything from it?

Only if the damages they have to pay out cost more than the profits made from running the non-story across its front pages and all over its online 'news' sites.

You want to know why corporate tabloid media is dying? This is why. The pap and crap doesn't distract the public like it once did, this is why newspapers like The Sunday Telegraph are so desperate they will pay $15,000 to a dying man, with a very vague memory, for photos that kind of look like Pauline Hanson might have at 20, but are probably from an Eastern Europe porn/dating site.

And on old photos that some may wish have disappeared forever, here's an interesting rumour bouncing back from New York : Murdoch owns MySpace, and every drunken party photo some kid puts up there gets copied, named, tagged and filed away. Why? Just in case that partying kid becomes someone famous and decides to delete their MySpace profile and photos, the Murdoch media will always have copies of those photos that may, one day, cause much regret.

If anyone from the Murdoch media is willing to deny the above, in full, I will be more than happy to update with a correction, or clarification.

Murdoch Corporate Bosses Are Proud They Educated Billions On Climate Change Threat By Info-Dosing The Simpsons

By Darryl Mason

A very, very interesting Green Corporate video from ex-Australian Rupert Murdoch's News corporation, detailing how Fox has been purposely seeding its most popular TV shows, and in particular its highest rating cartoon shows like The Simpsons, The Family Guy and King Of The Hill, with what local Murdoch employees (the Herald Sun's) Andrew Bolt and (the Daily Telegraph's) Tim Blair would normally call "glorbal warmening" and "the most superstitious pagan faith of all".

TCFTV's Climate Change Commitment Video



Some of the key quotes from the vid, with deciphering of corporate speak in italics, in brackets, in the style of Andrew Bolt and Tim Blair :

"What could we do on a practical level to start making a difference (how can we get some taxpayer-funded action on this climate change scam)?"

"The biggest thing we've done is inserting messages about the environment into some of our content (he means TV shows like The Simspons, they're scaring our children and nieces with hysterical claims about a warming that does not exist)."

"The lifeblood of our company is the quality of our TV shows, and we would have accomplished nothing if we compromised that quality (they're sneaky bastards, these Nazi-Green Corporate Socialists)."

"....the most powerful way we could communicate the commitment on behalf of our company (corporate greenism), was to change the practices within the production (how many flights do you take? Huh? Huh?), as well as work in a message about global warming (that actually stopped in 1998), about environmental changes (the world's environment has been changing for billions of years, it has nothing to do with us), about empowering people to take responsibilities (they want to take away your plastic shopping bags and make you live in a dimly lit house and eat cold lentils)."

And how closely Murdoch's executives echo the declaration of their boss Rupert, when he pledged to turn his most popular TV shows into climate change education tools, back in June 2007 :

"We need to reach (our audience) in a sustained way. To weave this issue into our content-- make it dramatic, make it vivid, even sometimes make it fun. We want to inspire people to change their behavior.

"The challenge is to revolutionize the message.

"We need to do what our company does best: make this issue exciting. Tell the story in a new way.

"...we can change the way the public thinks about these issues..."

I never realised just how much I'd learned about the dire threats of global warming-induced climate change simply by reading The Daily Telegraph, watching Fox News and enjoying immensely, globally, popular entertainments like The Simpsons and 24.

The last word in the Murdoch Green Corporate video about how the most influential and powerful media company in the world has educated billions of people about the dire, catastrophic threats of climate change goes to an Al Gore clip from The Simpsons :

"Finally I get to save the Earth with deadly lasers instead of deadly slide shows."

In other climate change related news, a new blog has been launched called The Daily Degree.

I didn't know if Tim Blair, associate editor of the Daily Telegraph (a newspaper that seems to running many more Climate Change Is Humanity's Doom-type stories these days), was aware that there's a new blog pumping 'glorbal warmening' propaganda, because he normally loves to tear apart such blogs and mock their claims of climate change posing catastrophic threats, so I sent him an e-mail to give him a heads up on the new blog. Here's my e-mail :

Hey Tim,

I've found an hilarious new Climate Change blog for you to hammer and shred. And it's not one of those puny blogs run by one hairy old greenie with a few hundred deluded visitors, it's a big fat corporate blog. In fact, it's a new blog from the biggest and most powerful distributor of Global Warming/Climate Change propaganda in the world today.

I look forward to your witty, cutting takedown of these crazed warmenistas.

http://gei.newscorp.com/daily-degree/

Don't forget to include a 'hat tip' to me for the link if you use it.

Then again, you probably already got the memo from HQ, didn't you?

I was going to e-mail Andrew Bolt to tell him that there was yet another big money Corporate Green blog trying to pump the "the most superstitious pagan faith of all" and going on about hybrid cars and saving energy, and renewable and Green Energy initiatives that Bolt has said will "cost jobs" and destroy industries, and how this Corporate Greenism blog tells us we should ride a bicycle to work and take our own bags with us when we go shopping. You know, the usual mad claims exposed by Blair & Bolt that try to turn us all into eco-responsible, hairy, smelly, fat old hippes.

But seeing as Bolt has a number of helpers, I knew there was no way he was going to miss the launching of a major new Corporate Green blog like The Daily Degree. He doesn't need me to alert him to blogs like that.

I'm sure Bolt's attacks and comprehensive debunking of the claims made on The Daily Degree blog are all coming soon. No doubt, Tim Blair is writing up his takedown of The Daily Degree as you read this.

If past efforts are anything to go, Bolt & Blair should both be hammering The Daily Degree any moment now...because the fact they work for the same company that now admits to being the most powerful and most influential distributor of "glorbal warmening propaganda", by subtly inserting what Bolt & Blair call eco-hysteria into our favourite TV shows, won't influence their scathing criticism of a blog like The Daily Degree not one little bit.

Unless they're both total fucking hypocrites.

Not So "Funny", Now...

In August, The Daily Telegraph's Tim Blair thought events following the sacking of more than 500 staffers and journalists from The Age and the Sydney Morning Herald was "fun" and "hilarious".

(Sacked staffers are) having a little rally in Sydney tomorrow morning, in case you’re wondering about an apparent increase in the city’s homeless population. Sing along, comrades!

Blair was particularly excited about the sacking of a highly paid Herald columnist.

But how many laughs will Blair get out of the fact that his boss Rupert Murdoch is about to start sacking some of Blair's own friends and fellow staffers, along with a savage culling of his barnyard of highly paid columnists?

Announcing a 30-per-cent fall in first-quarter profit yesterday, the media magnate, 77, said the company would step up cost cutting and "manage down" staff numbers where appropriate.

Asked about his newspapers in Britain and Australia, where News publishes The Australian, The Daily Telegraph and The Courier-Mail, Mr Murdoch told analysts: "You will see even leaner operations in both those places. I'm not prepared to say how many people - I know, but I don't want the headlines - but expect across-the-board cuts."

News shares fell 21 per cent yesterday, posting their biggest losses since December 1990, after the company said its operating earnings would fall as much as 15 per cent in 2008-09.

"Did you get fired, pal?"

"No, of course not. I was managed down."

Bridgit at Grods explains here why Murdoch's Sackapalooza Festival exposes The Rupe's first Boyen lecture on Australia's future as :

"...a masterly concoction of cloying nationalistic cliches and paternalistic bullshit."

There's an interesting rumour coming from media friends in the US that Murdoch will follow the example of a growing number of American newspapers and will take at least one of his own Australian newspapers out of printed circulation, to become an online only production with greatly reduced staff numbers, by next February or March.

I'll predict The Australian will get the chop from daily printed editions to become a more lavish, more expensive weekend newspaper, maybe with two magazines and a weekly free DVD.

It seems impossible to think that actual newspapers could eventually disappear, but without classified advertising, most newspapers can't afford to keep going, unless they raise circulations and cover prices and shred staff numbers.

The more newspapers rely on simply printing up Reuters and Associated Press wire stories and running syndicated op-eds, as the Sydney Morning Herald now does incessantly, instead of having actual reporters reporting on real local news, the more newspapers will die. The more reporters they sack, the less individual and local those daily newspapers will become and the less reasons there will be for readers to buy those papers. It does sound like doom.

For me at least, the daily newspaper is already all but non-existent, unless there's a long train ride to be...rodden. I've read most of the next day's paper online by about 2am. From the age of about 12 to only recently, I brought newspapers every single day, without fail. The idea of letting a whole day pass without picking up a newspaper was thought blasphemy, and downright wrong. But I can't say I even noticed when a full week had passed without having picked up a weekday newspaper along with lunch, or the evening bread and milk run.

But losing the weekend newspapers, that actual bundle of magazines and supplements and wind-catching broadsheet pages, will be devastating, and will forever change the fabric of lazy Saturday mornings, particularly those Saturday mornings spent sipping lattes at a paperback-sized, heavily leaning, curb-side table at an achingly fashionable Newtown coffee shop after a big night 'reading Miranda Devine'.

The New Anti-Americanism : Obama Win Is A "Victory For Stupidity"

By Darryl Mason

It's only been 48 hours, but the rise in Australia of the new anti-Americanism, now that Barack Obama has won the White House, by millions of votes instead of just a few hundred, has been swift, shocking and sickening.

And the worst of this vile new anti-Americanism comes from the Murdoch media.

Tens of millions of Americans voted to end the nation-gutting eight year rule of Republicans in the White House, but Australia's finest conservative, Liberal minds can't stop talking about the colour of Obama's skin. Obama didn't win, they tell us, because he had more popular policies and ideas, he only won because he is black, and "many, many Americans" only voted for him because they were stricken with whitey guilt.

Evil Pagan Lefties hated the Bush administration, that much is clear, but these anti-American extremists in the Murdoch media are claiming the majority of Americans are so dim, so deluded, they only voted for Obama because he is black, like them, or black enough to assuage white man guilt for building a nation off the broken backs of millions of African slaves.

America is now, claims one Murdoch dancing bear, "a racist nation".

Another claims Obama's win is a "victory for stupidity".

Seriously, this is how fucked up Murdoch's ballistic-bile-brethren have become months before Obama takes his seat behind that beautiful old desk in the West Wing. No doubt, their anti-American extremism will grow only more bitter and twisted.

One of the worst of these new anti-American extremists is The Australian columnist, Janet Albrechtsen. It should come as no great surprise that this anti-American sits on the ABC board.

Here Janet suffers a hilarious but disturbing downward spiral of the brain. She starts by making up headlines for an event that didn't happen :

Had Republican John McCain beaten the odds and been elected the 44th US President today, the sure-fire headline would have been “America is a racist nation”...

Now, I’m sure there are many Americans who did not vote for Obama because he is black. Some may well live in Wasilla. Hockey-mom Palin may well have encouraged them to turn out to vote for McCain. But let me run this by you. If it’s racism when an American refuses to vote for Obama because he is black, surely it is also racism when an American votes for Obama because he is black. And can anyone deny that plenty of Americans did just that when they voted for him?

Yes, they can deny that. They voted for a Democrat who wants to end the Iraq War and provide health care to the poor, for starters.

...let’s not for a second be so deluded – or hypocritical – as to imagine that race was not a reason why many, many Americans voted for him.

That must be it. They successfully fought the irresistable urge to return the Republican Party to power, while more than 90% of Americans say the country was headed in the wrong direction, just because Obama's dad was from Kenya? You're insane!

...in the meantime let me be the first to say...that this election result confirms that the US is still, in part, a racist nation.

Maybe through your hate-blinded, anti-American eyes, Janet, but the rest of us saw millions of grinning young Americans, of all religions and races, dancing in the streets of their hometowns, together, united, and so damn happy.

The Professional Idiot remains obsessed, as usual, with the colour of a man's skin. November 5 :

The Democrats are offering the cool, young black guy promising change - the African American whose mere election will heal the country’s racial wounds. The man whose age, colour and African heritage suggests he’s of a new century, a new order.

A black president. Fantastic. Now can we all get over this colour thing?

Sure. Can you?

No.

November 5 (later) :

America has elected its first black president.

If you are really looking for a race-based vote, how can anyone avoid the black vote in this election?

No. No. No. No.

November 7 :

Some 95 per cent of black voters backed the black guy against McCain...

True, looking black, he didn’t need to say more...

The Daily Telegraph's Piers Akerman claims Obama's big win is "a victory for stupidity." :

Without a white woman contesting the party’s nomination, it seems unlikely a black man would have won the party’s vote.

Though Obama’s Republican opponent, war hero and former PoW and US Senator John McCain, has not raised race as an issue, the Democrats have used it to engender a sense of guilt in white Americans who harbour doubts about Obama’s capacity as the leader of the free world. Not to support Obama raises the question of whether that decision has a racist undertone...

Then there was the Daily Telegraph's Tim Blair trying to claim, on ABC's Insiders, that the only reason Barack Obama could pull 100,000 people to a speech was because he had "The Rolling Stones" opening for him, which never happened.

How shocking and crushing it must be for these new anti-American extremists to actually realise that 100,000 "Victory For Stupidity" Americans could gather to hear a political speech because they were interested in...politics?

Maybe they preferred it when Americans didn't pay enough attention to national politics so that George W. Bush could get 'elected' twice? Because Americans sure seem to be paying attention now, don't they?

Seriously, all of you Murdoch-sponsored anti-American extremists need to GET SOME HELP.

Iran! Hitler! Genocide! Iran! Hitler! Genocide! Iran! Hitler! Genocide!

Murdoch Media Pumps Incredible Pro-Iran War Propaganda

When you own 70% of Australia's city newspapers, and a fat market share of online news, you can shamelessly promote the next war that will earn you another few hundred million dollars via increased readership.

Smell the classic Murdoch stench of propaganda!


From here :

An Israeli Cabinet minister involved in the operation to kidnap Nazi mastermind Adolf Eichmann says the same tactic could be used to bring Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad to trial.

Rafi Eitan said Mr Ahmadinejad, who is aggressively pursuring nuclear technology and has repeatedly called for Israel to be wiped off the map, had to be brought for trial in The Hague.

"A man like Ahmadinejad who threatens genocide has to be brought for trial in The Hague," Mr Eitan said.

Asked if kidnapping was acceptable, Mr Eitan told the Associated Press: "Yes. Any way to bring him for trial in The Hague is a possibility.

"All options are open in terms of how he should be brought."

Mr Eitan, a former spy who is now a member of Israel's inner cabinet of ministers with security responsibilities, said he was expressing his own opinion.

Mr Eitan, 81, helped kidnap Eichmann from Argentina in 1960. Eichmann was tried and executed in Israel for carrying out Adolf Hitler's "final solution" to kill European Jews.

The Murdoch media fails to mention that Eitan was involved in the recruitment of at one least spy, who was jailed for stealing secrets from the United States government and military.

This trash also gets a run in The Australian, the supposed newspaper of record in these lands.

It's obvious the Murdoch media backs War On Iran over its nuclear energy programs, that only the United States and Israel ceaselessly claim are being used to create nuclear weapons.

It's nothing new. The pro-Iran war lobbyists and media regurgitators have been at this "Try DinnerJacket For Genocide" shriek since mid-2006.

Here's how Benjamin Netanyahu hysterically launched the "Iran = Genocide" media psy-op back then :

"We must cry Gevalt before the entire world. In 1938, Hitler didn't say he wanted to destroy [the Jews]; Ahmadinejad is saying clearly that this is his intention, and we aren't even shouting. At least call it a crime against humanity. We must make the world see that the issue here is a program for genocide."

The claim that the Iranian president declared he wanted to "wipe Israel off the map", thereby promising genocide against Jewish and Arab Israelis alike, has been thoroughly discredited, countless times.

It is the Pro-War crowd's version of the anti-Bush crowd's "plastic turkey".

And yet it appears in the Australian Murdoch media endlessly.

It's called propaganda, but it's also called Preparation, so if our allies Terror From The Sky bombs start killing thousands of Iranians while they're busy watching DVDs of The Sopranos and bopping along listening to Lil' Wayne on their iPods, you won't be too shocked, or surprised.

"Why are they killing Iranians?"

"Oh, I read about that in the Daily Telegraph. Iran's got nukes and want to wipe out Israel like Hitler or something."

This kind of 'journalism' is a fucking crime against humanity.

"We Can Change The Way The Public Thinks..."

Rupert Murdoch Admits He Does Tell His Newspapers Who To Back And What To Print

By Darryl Mason


Okay, prepare yourselves, and try not to be too shocked by this revelation :

Rupert Murdoch has admitted to a parliamentary inquiry (in the UK) that he has "editorial control" over which party The Sun and News of the World back in a general election and what line the papers take on Europe.

Mr Murdoch's comments were revealed in the minutes from evidence he gave behind closed doors on 17 September in New York, during the committee's inquiry into media ownership.

But the News Corporation chairman said he took a different approach with The Times and The Sunday Times. While he often asked what those papers were doing, he never instructed them or interfered, he said.

The minute stated: "For The Sun and News of the World he explained that he is a 'traditional proprietor'. He exercises editorial control on major issues – like which party to back in a general election or policy on Europe

Which raises the obvious question, how many of the 70% of all Australian newspapers that Rupert Murdoch controls does he instruct to back or attack chosen politicians, political parties or political causes?

Is the Sydney Daily Telegraph as editorially independent of Murdoch's influence as the London Sunday Times?

Or can The Australian newspaper claim that honor?

Was the Herald Sun free to back Howard over Rudd in the elections? Or was the Herald Sun's pro-Howard line more for reasons of 'balance'?

Perhaps the UK parliamentary enquiry revelations explain why Murdoch blogger Andrew Bolt (whose blog features on the main news.com.au portal, as well as the Herald Sun and Courier Mail websites, reaching hundreds of thousands of Australian online readers) was so enthusiastically pumping the fact that, just before the election, the Sydney Daily Telegraph backed Rudd, while the Herald Sun did not, and why Bolt was earlier so vehemently denying that Murdoch's papers went hard after Howard when he refused to step down.

Murdoch's revelation of purposeful editorial control should not be a revelation to readers of The Orstrahyun blog.

As regular readers would remember, Murdoch clearly admitted, back in June during his climate change awakening, that not only did he instruct his newspapers to push a certain reality that he favoured, but he could also muster the entire forces of his internet, newspaper, cable and TV empire to push his belief systems onto the world and change not only what they believed, but how they behaved.

Here's Rupert Murdoch explaining how this would be done on the issue of 'waking up' his readers to the reality of climate change :

"We need to reach (our audience) in a sustained way. To weave this issue into our content-- make it dramatic, make it vivid, even sometimes make it fun. We want to inspire people to change their behavior.

"The challenge is to revolutionize the message.

"We need to do what our company does best: make this issue exciting. Tell the story in a new way.

"Now... there are limits to how far we can push this issue in our content."

"...we can change the way the public thinks about these issues..."

Within weeks of Rupert explaining how effectively his vast media empire can wage a psychological war on its viewers and readers to influence their beliefs and behaviour, most of his dozens of Australian city and suburban newspapers became champions of fighting climate change, launching special liftouts, dedicated websites and awareness campaigns over the next few months, under such Al Gore mantras as 'Saving Planet Earth'.


UPDATE : On September 10, 2001, John Howard had a long, private dinner with Rupert Murdoch in Washington, DC. Howard was suffering some of the worst poll numbers of his career, and the Liberal Party was scoring its worst poll ratings since the mid-1970s. But Tampa was heating up the front pages back home, and 9/11 was about to shock the nation.

Murdoch allowed himself to be interviewed by the media when he exited the restaurant with Howard, in scenes that were repeated in early 2007, in New York City, with then Labor prime ministerial hopeful Kevin Rudd.

From an ABC Radio report on the Howard-Murdoch 2001 dinner :

For two hours the two men sat alone in the upmarket Oxidental Grill deep in conversation. At 10:00pm local time they emerged and Mr Murdoch was asked by waiting journalists who'd win the next election.

RUPERT MURDOCH: No, we never discussed it.

REPORTER: Do you think Mr Howard deserves a third term in Office, Mr Murdoch?

RUPERT MURDOCH: Mm?

REPORTER: Do you think the Prime Minister deserves a third term in Office?

RUPERT MURDOCH: It doesn't matter what I think. You ask my editors.

REPORTER: Mr Murdoch, how do you think Kim Beazley would go as Prime Minister?

RUPERT MURDOCH: It would be very interesting.

REPORTER: Were they productive discussions with Mr Murdoch?

JOHN HOWARD: Well, we had a pleasant dinner.

REPORTER: Did you talk politics?

JOHN HOWARD: We talked everything.

MARK WILLACY: There's little doubt about that, given Rupert Murdoch's interest in media policy and the extraordinary influence of his Australian print empire. His response when asked if John Howard deserved a third term is well worth another listen:

RUPERT MURDOCH: It doesn't matter what I think. You ask my editors.

Rupert Murdoch was far more forthcoming on Kevin Rudd when he was asked by a journalist in early 2001 whether or not he thought the contender would make a good prime minister. The reply then was, "Oh, I'm sure..." Big smile.


A note we received yesterday, from a person who claimed to be a former staffer in John Howard's office, said that it was common gossip within many government departments that when John Howard refused to hand over the leadership to Peter Costello at the end of 2006, Rupert Murdoch was less than happy. And that editors of at least two Murdoch Australian city papers, likewise, were less than happy.

The self-claimed former Howard staffer said that when Rupert Murdoch publicly appeared with Kevin Rudd in New York City in April, 2007, laughing and grinning after a long meeting at the News Corp. headquarters, and then dinner together, a climate of doom descended amongst many in the prime minister's department. The belief was that Murdoch had given Kevin Rudd the Big Tick, particularly after the "Oh, I'm sure" quote was aired, which meant Howard was probably finished.

The Sydney Daily Telegraph soon became very obvious champions of Kevin Rudd, and Howard suffered a sustained stream of extremely negative Daily Telegraph front pages, featuring large photos showing Howard looking old, stressed and confused.

But then again, one city newspaper doesn't win an election. Does it?


"We want to inspire people to change their behavior....The challenge is to revolutionize the message...We need to do what our company does best: make this issue exciting. Tell the story in a new way...we can change the way the public thinks..."