Piers Akerman Claims The Intellectually Disabled Are "Incapable Of Understanding Plain English"

Daily Telegraph columnist, and ABC Insiders panelist, Piers Akerman plays the 'You're A Retard' card in reply to commenters who keep pointing out what an enormous liar he is :



Piers Akerman's words :

"...you really should read an article before commenting on it. Unless you have an intellectual disability, and are incapable of understanding plain English."

UPDATE : I have contacted the online Daily Telegraph's editor, Kathy Lipari, to find out why she thinks it is appropriate that a Daily Telegraph columnist can claim that intellectually disabled people are "incapable of understanding plain English."

I will update with her response, when, or if, she responds.

Piers Akerman is a guest on ABC's Insiders this Sunday morning. Why does ABC TV think it is appropriate to include as a panelist on Insiders a columnist who smears the intellectually disabled?

Note : The above headline has been rewritten from earlier today.


.

That Commenter Is A Fake....But His Work Really Helps With The Comment Count

Paul Colgan reveals The Punch has readers who post dozens of comments under as many as 21 fake names. Colgan acknowledges one faker was allowed to keep posting comments at The Punch for at least two days after his japery was uncovered.

He thinks he knows who's responsible :

He’s bald, wears socks with sandals and lives with his mum. He surfs the internet from his bedroom, where on the wall is a pennant hung on an angle commemorating North Melbourne’s 1975 Grand Final win. He eats tinned asparagus and has a haphazard collection of Star Wars action figures in which the prize item is a Millennium Falcon but its radar dish broke off years ago.

The comment faker is, more likely, working out of a Melbourne PR office.

The Punch is certainly not the first News Limited blog to be infected by fake commenters pumping anti-green propaganda, or pro-war talking points.

At least one News Limited blog has even been known to publish comments by the girlfriend of the blogger, writing under an assumed identity, defending his opinions.

Another News Limited blog has knowingly allowed federal politicians to attack their enemies under fake names, and that blog has a particular blind spot for the fake comment work of staffers and advisors of Liberal and National Party politicians, particularly when they're in agreement with the blogger.

So far, no typing cats have yet claimed responsibility for recent comment faking at The Punch.


.

The Harsh Online Reality For The Corporate Media Is That There Simply Isn't Enough Commenters To Go Round

By Darryl Mason

As I've said here before, probably a bit too rudely, this blog doesn't exist for the sake of comments. It doesn't matter to me whether there's 0 comments or 26, the posts will still be written and published.

But what if your online media business model, your basic plan for profitability, relied deathly on having dozens or hundreds of commenters spilling their thoughts and opinions on every story or opinion piece posted on your website?

The Murdoch Online Experience has already launched The Punch, and now, as Mumbrella reports, Fairfax are going to have their shot at creating an online aggregator site for its stable of digital newspapers, with a steady stream of commenters being seen as essential to push those daily hits into the five and six digit page view counts that advertisers like to see.

Unlike The Punch, however, who've made the effort to recruit writers who aren't already writing for other Murdoch media, The National Times is expected to fill itself out with opinion pieces already published elsewhere in Fairfax's digital newspapers.

As usual, I found it easier to put my thoughts together on this while commenting at another blog. So here's the comment I left at Mumbrella :

The Punch has had some interesting columns so far, but nothing that has set fire to the comments boards. It seems overall quite safe and pedestrian. For now at least. Nothing controversial, nothing that you don't already see in mainstream newspaper columns and op-eds. If the aim is too have a "national conversation", the convo has been damn quite with most posts in the past week pulling 0 to 6 but rarely 10 or more comments.If people who visit can't be arsed to comment, why will they want to eventually pay for it?

A huge turnover in comments, in the hundreds for each or most posts, is what The Punch needs to ramp up the hits, obviously. But how are they going to do that? Where is that hardcore crowd of a few hundred who will burn up the boards like they do at Piers Akerman's or Andrew Bolt's blog going to come from? .

The problem, as Fairfax will soon find out, is that there are a limited number of Australians who bother to comment on any story or column or blog post anywhere online, particularly when the content is centred around politics or culture or news events.

Even if you do like to comment on what you're reading, there are so many places to do so elsewhere, from Facebook to YouTube to Twitter to ten thousand more fun to read and riotous blogs elsewhere in the world.

The Punch has discovered that regular commenters for blogs and news sites that aren't stirring up racism and xenophobia and general hate, or raging about Israel and Palestinians, are pretty thin on the ground in Australia.

There might even be as few as three or four thousand in Australia who will write comments on local political/cultural blogs and news sites most days, as a habitt, not including those who are paid to professionally comment by PR companies and political parties.

There's no shortage of places to Have Your Say on Australian blogs and news sites now, but there is most definitely a shortage of normal everyday Australian commenters. The Punch now knows this, the National Times will most likely learn that too, very soon.

There are a few good free ways for corporate media sites like The Punch and National Times to pull quality and volume-high comments to their sites, but why give away good ideas like that?

How To Kill A Lively Conservative Blog Comments Thread - Speak Too Much Truth

By Darryl Mason

Blogs heavy on serious, not satirical, politics need opposing views and opinions in their comments if they want to really rack up those comment numbers. Apparently, this is important.

Groupthink in comments usually mean the threads go cold quickly. If everyone agrees with everyone else, there's not much to discuss, and nobody to insult, smear or defame.

This is why some of the most popular politically-charged blogs in Australia, for example, cannot do without a rabid Obamist Ruddian Green Lefty to pop his/her head up if most of those commenting there think John Howard should have a statue honouring him in every town square and that, one day, a generation of children will grow up believing that George W. Bush is right up there with Washington and Lincoln.

Conservative blogs need stupid Lefties in the comments so the groupthinkers gathered there will have a target to attack and vilify, to make themselves feel better.

This is why the most popular conservative blog in Australia often has Stupid Lefty Comments either written by the blogger, or the moderators, or both, under fake names.

An Allegedly Stupid Lefty stating something as simple as "War Is The Very Definition Of Immaturity"on a War On Iraq related post really fires up those conservative comment threads. For a while anyway. But then if that Allegedly Stupid Lefty starts stating undeniable facts, the groupthink comments quickly die away.

This comment thread at JF Beck's was getting into the 60s, one of the biggest comment counts ever seen on that blog, until I posted the following comment, number 69, which none of the usual suspects over there attempted to counter or even deny. It remains the last comment in the thread (as of this posting) :

"Did you get that theory from the fact that Bush was bragging to journalists in 1999 that he was going to go War On Iraq and finish what his daddy wouldn't, or couldn't?

"If you don't think The Bush administration totally capitalised on the tragedy of 9/11 to sell the Iraq War, you have some reading to do.

"Condi Rice, Bush and Cheney all called 9/11 an "opportunity" after the War On Iraq began."

You also get the feeling from reading all those Anonymous comments at Beck's that nearly all were written by the same, at most, two or three people.

If they stand so firmly by their beliefs and claims, why don't they post their thoughts under their real names?

It's not like they're leaking secret government reports or anything, it's just opinion. But not opinion they believe in enough to put their real names to.

Shut It Down And Burn It Up, He's Onto Us

Tim Andrews, somehow involved with offshore promotions to increase membership to the Young Liberals through conservative T & A uncovers another rotten Lefty conspiracy :

"It is also well-documented that there has been a concerted effort by the left in recent months to publish offensive comments on right-leaning blogs, and then attack the blog for their own comments. I do not intend to give them this opportunity."

This is now the standard boilerplate for all conservative bloggers.

It's not us, it's them.

2009: 'We Have To Know Who You Are' - Mandatory Online ID, Free Speech & Comment Anonymity

We Have To Know Who You Are

By Darryl Mason

There was a can of Dulux paint on a white rectangle stand in the Museum of Contemporary Art. It looked like it had been left there by whoever rolled on the wall's most recent coat of paint. But no.

The Can was Art.

It had a guard.

The crowd gathered in a wing of the MCA to hear, because most couldn't see, a seated debate on Blogging Versus Journalism, with mandatory humming microphone, were hardly likely to start kicking over artworks and trashing installations, but the Can of Paint had its own security guard. Apparently they were worried about the exhibit being "Jostled".

As the afternoon debate wore on, more guards arrived to erect a little security zone around the Can of Paint.

It was hard to concentrate on the debate itself. The action around the Can of Paint was fascinating, sometimes downright hypnotic.

As debater Margo Kingston explained how she had been "broken" by her correspondent work covering the first rise of Pauline Hanson, a gaggle of Japanese tourists walked past the debate and headed for the Can.

They drawn to it, like I was.

One of the younger tourists couldn't resist. He reached for the Can. Two security guards intervened, silently. The tourists left.

The debate continued. Margo Kingston revealed that the Sydney Morning Herald's Paul McGeogh had either got her into journalism or got her into blogging, it might have been both. She said McGeogh was in the room. Which one is he? There's easy a dozen aging men in the room who could pass for McGeogh. I depleted the targets in a visual search of the crowd by only looking for McGeoghs who looked like they seen some of the most goddawful fucking shit no-one could ever imagine in some foreign hell war zone, but there were at least six who could have passed for...there was more action at the Can of Paint.

Another clutter of tourists who were also totally ignorant of the hundred or so people and five debaters they were all quietly listening to, headed for the Dulux. This is the problem of holding a debate in an open, functioning wing of a popular museum dead centre in a major tourist zone.

The atmosphere was all wrong. It was too clinical, the room was too white, all the bloggers should have been standing, it would have been better in a pub, you needed at least one big drink to get through 90 minutes of it. Maybe it needed an element of bingo or something. Every time a debater finished a statement, they called out a number.

And it was all so polite. The heated argument count was zero. Debaters Tim Blair and Antony Lowenstein met before the debate and greeted each other pleasantly.

What? No chair throwing?

I thought there was supposed to be at least half-a-bogan amongst the debaters to get some trouble started, to fire it all up. Alas, no.

It grew increasingly difficult to concentrate on the quiet debate.

I kept getting distracted thinking about what would have happened if Channel Nine and the Murdoch media already had a pay-per-story or video viewing debit system in place, as their owners dream they one day will, all through the hilarious Chk Chk Boom! Suckers!' fakery.

What would happen now the story has been revealed as fake if hundreds of thousands of paying users had coughed about four or five digital dollars each to watch a couple of Clare "Two Wogs Fighting" videos and read a half dozen stories over a few days?

The story wasn't real. Consumers would have paid for fictitious news. How would the media companies repay all they had cheated with this fluff? How often could they get away with it? Would a future where fake news stories are more popular than real ones, and more essentially profitable, come into reality?

If they sell you news and it turns out to be fake, or worse, it turns out they knew at some point before they stopped selling it that the story was not what it seemed, or what was originally pitched through headlines, will everyone who paid actually want a refund, even if its offered? Will they care if the fluff is entertaining and distracting enough?

Debater Tim Blair, of the Daily Telegraph, raised the intensity level of the debate to just above tepid when he took a ridiculous blog killing idea out for a bit of a spin in front of whoever all those people were.

He sounded enthusiastic about the day when all comments on blogs will herald the name of the person who posted it.

In short, the age of anonymous commenting comes to an end, on all blogs, not just his own.

It's a strange thing for someone working at a media organisation that is now relying on the thousands of mostly anonymous-posted comments that appear each day across its blogs, its news stories, to keep the online business model healthy to come out and champion. Online news sites needs comments, lots of them, and most of them are anonymous.

And it was slightly surreal that someone already caught up in a dodgy blog comments-related controversy was actually saying doing away with anonymous commenting would solve many of the problems bloggers face with the comments that sometimes pour into, or out of, their blogs.

Some problems might be solved for Blair with mandatory online ID.

Maybe. Then again, maybe not.

If there was an online equivalent of the photo ID, at a guess, I'd say there'd be about 60% less comments on news stories at all of Murdoch's online media. About the same across most of its blogs, probably 80% less comments overall at Andrew Bolt's, and that's not good news. Heavy comment volumes help pay the bills.

Imagine if all those Liberal Party staffers had to hail Peter Costello and rail against Malcolm Turnbull under their real names?

People thoroughly enjoy anonymous commenting. Obviously. It's why it's so popular.

People love making up a fake online identity and calling themselves a twisted moniker of a childhood superhero or their pet's name, or something ordinary like WB, for example, or something weird but catchy like Startled Rabbit In The Headlights. There usually is no consequence for comments made that are not under your own name.

It becomes a different game altogether in a reality of mandatory online ID when every time you read something at 1am, hammered, and you cut loose at some blog about it, go off, your full name permanently imprinted in online archives above some crazed screed, mostly regrettable virtriol, demented thoughts and nerve-shredding opinions, occasional but plentiful abuse. All of it under your own name, accessible by Google.

Commenting at blogs, and now commenting under certain news stories, is popular because it can be done anonymously, without leaving too much of a trace behind. Take away the anonymity, and the comment counts will plunge, instantly.

Every blogger with a healthy roll call of anonymous commenters knows that.

Anonymity sparks not only creativity, but honesty. People lose passion when what they've got to say has to be said under their own name, forever.

And mandatory online ID would mean that holding fake online identities for the purpose of commenting regularly across blogs you love, and those that really make you swear, out loud, but you can't stop reading, that would no longer be legal.

But why should a thought, a bunch of fascinating facts, a torrent of grinding aggro, or a brain steaming opinion, have to be attached to a person's name or identity anyway?

I'm not sure that most people over 40 comprehend how many in the generation growing up online view the ability to comment anonymously, under an alias, or a festival of fictitious avatars.

They're not hiding. It doesn't matter.

It's not who said That Great Thing that is important anymore, if it ever was at all. The identity can never be fully trusted anyway, so it doesn't matter who posted the comment that makes a hundred other regular commenters at a blog or forum flip out and go nuts..

The only thing that matters is what has been said.

The most wild, but true, fact wins.

The funniest line wins.

The most spectacular leaking of explosive secret government documents wins.

The sharpest observation wins.

The clearest 30 word explanation of the most complex news stories or world events wins.

The most apoplectic but hilarious tirade of abuse wins.

Ideas win.

Not personalities, or even a person, certainly not a name.

It's the words, the ideas, that matter.

Nothing more.

All of that, most of that, it goes when mandatory ID is required to step into blog clubs to air your views, or to even add a mild voice of dissent to the online groupthink roar about the latest shocking news event.

Killing Anonymity Kills Comments.

It's that simple.

Before I left the museum I decided to try and get a photo of the Can of Paint on a White Stand with a Security Guard.

But the Security Guard said no.

I left, I didn't want any trouble.

Who Are All You People? What Are You Doing Here?

Thursday was a very, very good day, so thank you :





Unlike blog's that claim "one million hits a month", this readership came mostly from people who read a couple of stories then left, without leaving a dozen or two dozen comments. The Liberal Party comment crew obviously don't see it as worthwhile to come around spraying comments and insults, and thank fuck for that.

Readers clearly have more important things to do than hang around a blog like this posting comments and checking back a few dozen times a day to see responses to their comments and then posting another comment, then checking back to see who responded to their last comment. If that was happening on a daily basis around these parts, there'd be "one million hits a month", and more.

I appreciate comments, when they come, but it doesn't make any difference to why I do this, and keep doing it. I'm glad readers, like you, don't have the time to post hundreds of comments, you get more time for more worthwhile pursuits and I get a lot more other writing, fiction writing, done.

Some new short stories for the ED Day prequel, covering the 90 days of pandemic waves that lead up to ED Day, will be ready soon, and of course they'll be free to read online.

A Million Typing Cats Locked In A Room Could Eventually Compose The Collected Works Of The Professional Idiot

By Darryl Mason

One of the most relevant questions ever asked by a commenter at The Professional Idiot's :



No-one bothered to reply-comment in the next nine hours to deny such a reality exists, or try to shake Arovet out of his/her apparent belief that The Professional Idiot's blog is perhaps teaming with comments from Liberal Party staffers using false names.

How anybody could ever come to believe such a thing is hard to comprehend.

The Professional Idiot may be an idiot, but he is still professional, and he would never allow his blog comments to be filled up, falsely inflated you might say, by people employed by the Liberal Party, or financial backers of the Liberal Party, to post dozens of comments a week there in a desperate attempt to try and influence public opinion, and ramp up pressure to get rid of Malcolm Turnbull.

The Professional Idiot would surely know if this kind of fakery from Liberal Party staffers and/or PR agencies was happening and would put a stop to it.

He'd have no choice but to take action.

What would Rupert think?

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

The Professional Idiot was interviewed by John Safran on Speaking In Tongues in 2006.

John Safran : Have you ever, like, turned down money or a job based on ideological grounds?

The Professional Idiot : Ahhhhh, no.

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .


Opposition leader Malcolm Turnbull appeared on the Red N' Geen Kerry Report last night, and said some of the exact things ("socialists running this country") that regular commenters at The Professional Idiot have been demanding he say about the Rudd government, for months. You'd think they'd be all cheering, but no.

Bizarrely, The Professional Idiot only quoted the questions of Kerry O'Lefty (probably Pagan, too) O'Brien in this piece on Malolm Turnbull's appearance, and not one single thing the Liberal Party leader had to say. Nothing.

The Professional Idiot has campaigned through his newspaper, blog, morning TV and radio appearances for three Liberal Party leaders in a row (Howard, Nelson and now Turnbull) to end their leaderships.

I ranted on the curious way The Professional Idiot, an avowed conservative, has so successfully seeded chaos and division in the Liberal Party, for years, in this comment at Grods :

Nothing I’ve seen him write or any ’stand’ he’s taken in the past three years has swayed me of the belief that The Professional Idiot’s mission is to destroy the Liberal Party. Or at least, destroy it enough so it can be recast along his ideological lines. With his close friend Peter Costello as leader, obviously.

Every time they do what they are told to do by him, through his columns and blog and TV appearances, and when they start robo-quoting his lines to the media, the Liberal Party falls further into a heap.

The Liberal Party is his plaything, has been since he started campaigning through the Herald Sun for Howard to quit as leader a few months before the election.

The mission isn’t just to seed division amongst the Liberals, but to spread chaos and destruction.

Turnbull is trying hard to bring the Liberals into the 21st century, and The Professional Idiot just hammers away at him, day after day.

Don’t you think it’s interesting that The Professional Idiot, through his broad reach across Australian media, gets in more snarky stings and hammering blows against the Liberal Party (all through the leaderships of Howard, Nelson and Turnbull) than anyone from the Labor Party ever does?

Name just one Peak Lefty multi-media columnist, from The Age, the Sydney Morning Herald, fucking anywhere, that so effectively eats away at the unity and confidence of the Liberal Party like The Professional Idiot does, day after day. Just one.

The Professional Idiot has heaped more praise and admiration on American conservatives like Sarah Palin than any conservative politician in Australia.

Rudd doesn’t give a shit if The Professional Idiot calls him SpinSpinSpin or hopeless or out of his depth or even a liar. It doesn’t make any difference. He rarely says anything about Rudd that most people don’t already think about politicians in general.

Rudd and his media team know that The Professional Idiot is doing far more damage to the Liberal Party than he is to Labor, and they love him for it.

Of course, almost none of the regular commenters at his blog appear to have any inkling, insight or knowledge of any of the above.

Which proves that comment about Liberal Party staffers, or PR flacks hired by Liberal Party backers, filling up the comments at The Professional Idiot's must indeed be false.

If it was true, if, say, 10-20% of the comments at The Professional Idiot's blog were coming from Liberal staffers, or PR flacks, they wouldn't let him get away with his constant attacks on the Liberal Party, would they?

And they certainly wouldn't be campaigning in the comments, a few times a week at least, for The Professional Idiot to get his own TV show on the ABC.

Right?

The Mysteriously Suspicious Case Of The Time Traveling Comment

The Professional Idiot's blog has magical, time-traveling powers....or magical time-traveling commenters.

The Professional Idiot posted his latest story attempting to out federal government global warming sceptics, who he claimed have been "dobbed in" to him by their friends and/or colleagues on Monday, April 27, at 12.12am :



I saw the story about 12.50am, on Monday. It already included one comment :



At 3.15am, the only story of the five The Professional Idiot published between 12.01am and 12.23am that had a comment onscreen was the above. But then, Allan Of South Melbourne did get in early.

Two and a half hours early.

Somehow....




.

Play Nice, Your Comment May Be Archived For Later Use Against You

By Darryl Mason


The Daily Telegraph's Tim Blair warns his readers :

Prepare to be watched...

He should also be telling his regular commenters to prepare to have their comments, all their comments, archived and data-mined at a later date by persons unknown. And not just the comments they leave now, but all the comments they have ever left at a Tim Blair blog.

It seems he's only just discovered that government agencies, including ASIO, monitor Australian blogs, and in particular, the posted comments.

Tim Blair won't tell his readers that the widespread trials and use of such online monitoring technology, and key word recognition programs, became reality during the lead-up to the Iraq War.

The surveillance of Australian blogs is not exactly a new thing. Whatever prime minister Kevin Rudd allows such programs to become, they began in the Howard era.

Blair should tell his readers that he's known for years that all comments at his blog were being monitored, and archived, by government agencies, right through the last four years of the Howard era.

Blair also failed to inform his readers that some of their more violent, or violently insane comments, might come back to haunt them one day, might in fact be used against them, to prosecute or persecute them. That they were written under aliases may make no difference at all in a courtroom.

Rupert Murdoch has already shown that privacy is all but a fiction at MySpace, and his worldwide media empire, presumably also including Tim Blair's blog at the Daily Telegraph, have something of an open agreement with local government agencies to offer what help they legally can to track down someone who has posted threats of violence against politicians, or public figures, at any of Murdoch's online media. Those loudly wishing to kill movie stars and necklace green activists also get red-flagged. Such comments might not make it online, but they are not forgotten, nor do they disappear.

Prolific commenters at blogs, say on a story about Islamic terrorism or why "something must be done" about Rudd, are routinely monitored and followed online by any number of government intelligence agencies and private agencies. They're not just looking for "terrorists" anymore, now they're looking for "extremists".

In March, 2004, Tim Blair enthusiastically promoted ASIO's recruiting of online spies, not perhaps understanding that some of those who signed up would probably be monitoring his own site for threats of violence or "hate speech" a few years later.

The joke is that Blair ever believed such monitoring of online comments would stop at sniffing out possible Islamic terrorists, and not go after those who want Islam banned, or get publicly furious about tens of thousands of Muslims immigrating to Australia.

There's a New Terrorism, of which many millions may already be likely suspects, because the War On Terror was never meant to only stop at nabbing the suicidally jihad-crazed, it was always about introducing laws and widespread surveillance to go after "extremists" (as then President Bush began calling terrorists in 2007).

If you think the definition of "terrorist" is loose in government legislation, try to find examples of behaviour that define you as an "extremist". The word "extremist" has come into common usage by world leaders because "terrorist" was almost too specific.

Depending on where you are in the world, "Extremist"covers religion-crazed church burners and airline bombers, American libertarians and Ron Paul supporters, anti-abortion activists and animal liberationists, anarchists and anti-globalisationists, drug-dealing bikers and Afghanistan-based beheaders, anti-cannabis prohibition marchers and gun-rights patriots.

Unspecified thought crimes will get you flagged, watched and followed across the internet.

Everyone is a potential suspect when the prosecution of thought crimes becomes a policing and crime prevention reality.

As is our reality now.

We Will Be Monitoring You

Andrew Bolt, The Professional Idiot, suddenly realises (again) that some of his commenters might actually be fakes, posting multiple comments under multiple names. What a shock!


(click to enlarge)

Bolt's blog has been japed, sometimes mightily, by multiple identity commenters for years. He never seemed to mind so much when it was Liberal Party staffers doing most of it, mostly to create the illusion of a fiery "debate" that few real people were actually interested in having.

The question is, if Bolt discovered that some of his most prolific commenters were professional comment leavers, would he ban them, or tolerate their contributions to keep those '1 Million Hits A Month' flowing in?

Laugh? I Almost Disemboweled Myself

By Darryl Mason

The Murdoch media "across the board" cutbacks to staff are biting deep into News Limited blogger-luxuries like moderators.

The Herald Sun's Andrew Bolt :

Have your say here.

Apologies in advance, but there may be a delay in moderating today. My eldest son in playing with his band in the country, and I’m not sure if anyone is around today to fill in for me.

Wait a sec...moderate your own blog's comments?

Work on your own blog, on the weekend?

Outrageous!

All those pro-Costello Liberal Party staffers and "PR consultants" trying to fuck with Malcolm Turnbull's leadership via Bolt's chaos-ridden comment boards, trying to wreak further havoc on the party that John Howard all but destroyed, will have to fruitlessly shout into all that online silence and hear no reassuring yowing in return. For a few hours, anyway.

Surely the advertising revenues on a mainstream media blog like Bolt's, heavily cross-promoted through Murdoch media online news sites that attract hundreds of thousands of readers a day, would earn enough to pay somebody else at least something to do the moderating, part-time?

Here's a recent prime space ad from Bolt's "One Million Hits A Month" blog :



That would be "global warming" that Andrew Bolt repeatedly claims "stopped in 1998", the same global warming that he thinks is "the most superstitious pagan faith of all" and is being promoted by "the carbon cult". In the case of the above advertiser on his blog, "the carbon cult" is own employer.

The mentality here, of earning a wage from a company that promotes what you claim is dangerous and will cost lives, is summed up like this : "Hi. These true believers are the new Nazis and it's my job to warn you how terribly dangerous they are. Oh, by the way, I work for them!"

News Limited bloggers don't earn anything from "Hey! We're Really Green, Too!" ads from News Limited. That's not good news for Bolt, or for News Limited.

Why in the world aren't advertisers rushing to flog their wares on a mainstream media blog that is so undeniably popular, at least in Australia? Bolt's a regular taxpayer-soaking guest of the ABC, and is an enthusiastic dancing bear on A Current Affair. As far as bloggers go in Australia, there's few more famous. And no-one wants to advertise there?

Well, no-one except for his own employer, who mocks him with its own massive ads above his posts, pumping News Limited's New Corporate Green campaign to fight global warming that Bolt himself so often proclaims doesn't actually exist.

Does a near total lack of non-News Limited advertisers have something to do with Bolt's feign warning to his regular readers today that much more time will now be spent judiciously culling the more extreme and disturbing comments?

Well, yeah. Of course.

Rupert Murdoch has made it very clear to his shareholders, if not his own staff, that the more highly paid employees, like Howard-era conservative-minded opinionists, are now expected to perform - that is earn decent ad revenue - in the online world. There's no free rides for 'star columnists' anymore. And if News Limited is forced to fill ad space on Bolt's blog with its own ads, then his ad revenue earning performance is less than spectacular. No doubt Rupert himself has already noticed this.

It's like ranting near daily that Scientology is a dangerous cult, and then having Scientologists advertising on your blog. Daily. Actually, it's much worse. Scientology ads would at least pay for the ad space.

Anyway, who needs to hire in moderators? The secret to staying on top of your blog's comments is to not attract so many verbose, intolerant, insult-spewing commenters who need constant monitoring.

Not like here. Right?







Hello?

Is anybody out there?




No? Good. I can go to bed then, and sleep late.

Rupert Murdoch Admits He Tells His Newspapers What To Print

Murdoch Journalist Denies Murdoch Media Conspiracy

Andrew Bolt Announces Boycott Over Corporate "Global Warming Hypcocrisy (sic)"