Readership - 2.5 million (April 2014)
www.twitter.com/darrylmason
Tuesday, June 09, 2009
"I Know I Left It Somewhere In The Shed About Five Years Ago..."
By Darryl Mason
The Murdoch media's The Punch is worth checking out, and it will be (to media watchers anyway) fascinating to see how it evolves in the months ahead. It seems to have gotten off to a pretty decent start.
Eventually, if it survives and thrives, The Punch will become a test site for Rupert Murdoch's hilariously ill-fated fantasy to try and get people to pay to read what he hasn't paid anyone to write.
But is there something more suspect going on over there?
A conspiracy-minded friend, now living in England, thinks yes.
"Hey, I checked out that website you sent me the link for." "Rate My Bourbon Vomit Wall Paintings?" I asked. "No, the other one." "The Punch." "Yeah, The Punch." "Yeah? What did you reckon?" "S'Alright. It's a Murdoch thing, isn't it?" "Yeah," I said. "So where's all the tits?" "........what?" "There's no tits. It's Murdoch, and no tits." "This is Australia," I sad. "Rupert's mum doesn't let him run photos of some 18 year old girl's tits in his Australian media." "Oh." "So did you read any of it?" "Yeah, a bit. If it's not going to have tits on it, it needs more sports and movies stuff, somewhere I can say how much fucking arse Terminator 4 sucked." "I think The Punch is supposed to become like the Blog Discussion Of The Nation or something like that.I think they have higher aspirations than running an open thread on 'Terminator 4 : How Much Does This Movie Suck Arse?" "Yeah? Well, good luck to them....There's something else, though. It's weird." "What's that?" I asked. "It made me want to go back to smoking pot." "What the fuck are you talking about?" "The Punch. That website. I looked at it, and I thought, 'Fuck me, I'm suddenly hanging to punch down some brekkie cones'." "I don't think you can blame some website for those thoughts, can you?" "Yeah, I can. Maybe it's subliminal or something, but just after I looked at it, I'm thinking about which geezer at my local might be good to score some hash off and if I still had my old bong kicking around in the shed somewhere."
Ridiculous you say? Perhaps. But what about these screenshots from The Punch?
I put the following question to The Punch editor David Penberthy at Twitter :
I'll update on any replies from 'Penbo'.
"You're Mad, You Bastard"
The first 8 1/2 minutes of the rarely seen 1971 Australian classic Wake In Fright :
The above video is obviously pretty crap quality, but a fully-restored uncut version of Wake In Fright will be screened this month at the Sydney Film Festival, and will hit DVD later in the year.
It's a brutal movie. Beautiful, and ugly as hell as well. For many Australians born in cities in the 1980s, Wake In Fright shows an Australia they are probably not familiar with, probably didn't even know existed. The 7.30 Report has a great story on Wake In Fright and its remarkable restoration. It's a vital piece of Australian cinema history, and it was almost lost forever.
A short vid of claimed UFO footage shot on the weekend in Australia, featured on the front page of YouTube :
Less Kids Killing Themselves? Media Not Interested
This is probably the best piece of Australian news you'll hear today, or this month, and you can think the internet for at least of this good news :
During the past decade the suicide rate among young Australians has almost halved.
It is an extraordinary public health achievement, but one which has received little publicity.
Experts say a massive public education campaign and improvement in the treatment of depression are the key reasons for the success.
Here's how the rise of internet usage amongst teenagers added to the suicides averted :
The Reach Out website now gets 130,000 visits per month from young people.
The website's managers say being online is a big advantage.
"For a young person who suspects things are not OK, they might not know who to turn to or be afraid to talk to someone about it because they are afraid they will be judged," project manager Anna McKenzie said.
"So to be able to simply go online, Google something and have a look without anyone needing to know, that's really invaluable and that's what a lot of young people are doing at Reachout."
The Reach Out website was set up 10 years ago when Australia had one of the highest rates of youth suicide in the western world.
John Howard's decision to tighten gun laws in 1996 is also getting some of the credit, along with better methods of treating depression :
"After the new gun laws were introduced, the rate of gun suicide dropped twice as fast," Sydney University's associate professor Philip Alpers said.
"If you reduce the availability of firearms, especially to impulsive young men, then the number of people dying by gunshot reduces."
Less kids are killing themselves, for a variety of reasons, but the desire to end your life before you end high school appears to still be widespread, with less follow through, however :
"We've just had a national survey of mental health in Australia, rates of illness are as high as they ever were," Professor Hickie said.
"The good thing is that rates of suicide have gone down so we haven't yet dealt with the underlying problem, but we have got better at dealing with one of the worst outcomes."
Here's a damn good piece of news about Australian youth that should hit all the front pages and lead every evening news broadcast. It won't.
What an opportunity for the crumbling Australian mainstream media to put to death the gruesome lie that if "If It Bleeds, It Must Lead" that has so orientated so many journalists to believe that Nobody Wants To Hear Good News.
Turn the fact that the Australian youth suicide rate has HALVED in only ten years into the same kind of surreally hyped headline grabber as the average celebrity-related non-event and see what happens. See how the readers react.
The media may be surprised at just how many people want to hear good news, these days.
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.
"The Application Of A Questioning Mind Is The Best Way To Wisdom And Insight"
In our society, certainty has more cachet than doubt and that is making our public debate shallower than it ought to be. Some of Australia's highest profile commentators act, in public at least, as if they have never experienced a second of self-doubt or ever entertained the thought: "What if I am wrong?" Our age of cable television, talkback radio and blogs seems to have been accompanied by a growing number of people who think their opinions are always right and that anyone who disagrees is not only wrong but worthy of contempt and public ridicule.
* * * * * * * * * * * * * * *
It is a shame that, in today's politics, expressing doubt is taboo. Consider the great thinkers throughout history. Many have been branded heretics for publicly voicing scepticism. Those who have sought truth, whether philosophers or scientists, artists or writers, revolutionaries or explorers, have always begun their quests from a premise of doubt, not certainty. Their questions most often ran counter to the prevailing wisdom or authorities of the day.
Copernicus asked whether the Earth really was at the centre of the universe. Martin Luther asked whether the Catholic Church was the only route to salvation. Thomas Jefferson asked why Americans couldn't govern themselves. Mary Wollstonecraft asked why women shouldn't have equal rights. Nelson Mandela asked why blacks weren't entitled to the same privileges as whites. To elevate certainty over doubt as a mark of intellectual strength flies in the face of historical experience, which has repeatedly shown that the application of a questioning mind is the best way to wisdom and insight.
* * * * * * * * * * * * *
...climate change is an area in which we should allow room for doubt. The weight of scientific and political opinion backs the existence of human-induced climate change. When there is such universal agreement, doubters have an important role to play, both in terms of the science and the policy responses. Constructive sceptics (as opposed to ideological zealots) will be able to force our politicians and scientists to keep testing the evidence and exploring the options. That should lead to better outcomes for all of us.
Why? Because Gordon Ramsay personifies "conservative values".
It's not simply admiration, it's also infatuation :
"...I've fallen for the bloke. My kind of guy completely. More of him and civilisation is safe."
"I like particularly the standards Ramsay upholds...."
"He thinks reason beats irrational sentiment."
"Here's Ramsay coaching millions of Australians into Liberal values and making them seem contemporary."
"Ramsay...is an artist who uses them as tools to create something beautiful from nothing..."
"Make something of yourself, is his message. Test yourself. Find passion. Make a life and, in Ramsay's own passion, his values and his art, he has."
Good God, and then there's this :
"(Gordon Ramsay) creates a noble calling from a job, and a life from a collection of days."
Ramsay also shouts at a lot of women on TV, tries to humiliates them, hurls abuse and invective at women because he doesn't like the way they cook (how very 20th century of him), or more importantly, he doesn't like the way they look at him with eyes that say 'You are a fucking weak, weak man.'
Foul-mouthed chef Gordon Ramsay has shocked a public audience by vilifying high profile Australian journalist Tracy Grimshaw in an obscene, sexist rant.
The putrid tirade, which included references to Grimshaw's looks, sexuality and depictions of her as a pig, shocked audiences who went to see the celebrity chef at the Good Food and Wine Show in Melbourne.
Ramsay told an audience of several thousand people that Grimshaw was "a lesbian"...
When the crowd reacted with gasps, he said: "What? I'm not saying she's a ..."
The phrase that Ramsay used was a highly derogatory term often used to describe lesbians.
Ramsay also showed a picture of a woman - who appeared to be naked - on her hands and knees with the features of a pig and multiple breasts.
"That's Tracy Grimshaw," he told the audience. "I had an interview with her yesterday - holy crap.
"She needs to see Simon Cowell's Botox doctor."
Ramsay even showed his 'art' to children walking by.
Mandy Saunders was at the food expo with her two children and elderly mother.
"I couldn't believe what I was seeing and hearing - it was disgusting," Ms Saunders said.
"The show is meant for families. That was way out of order."
If Channel Nine valued Tracey Grimshaw as a journalist, a quality interviewer, and respected her as the host of their flagship current affairs program, they'd tell Gordon Ramsay to go and fuck himself, forever.
They won't of course.
The honour of Tracey Grimshaw, as a journalist, as a woman, means nothing to this kind of media.
Gordon Ramsay must be absolutely plowing through bags and bags of methamphetamine these days.
Still.
Presumably, that's what he'll end up blaming.
.
This Is Why Supermarkets Don't Put The Eggs With The Milk With The Bacon
This is what supermarkets do. They fuck with your mind and keep moving things so you go in to buy bacon and eggs and while negotiating a maze to find them you end up with a trolley full of shit you had no intention of buying. Indeed as I traipsed through Coles looking for the fucking eggs I did see things that I needed, but through fuck you Coles you’re not getting an extra cent out of me today – though I did grab some orange juice when I went that way in search of eggs.
By the time I was asked at the check out “do you want Flybuys?” and then “would you like to join FlyBuys?” I had given up on life.
Wah did enjoy the eventual breakfast, however.
.
What Is This 'The Left" You Speak So Often Of?
I'm glad you asked.
There has been a lot of talk at The Orstrahyun, over the years, about The Left. Or The Evil Pagan Left. Or The Evil Lefty Green Pagan Nazi CommoObamaist Lefty Lefty Left.
And there has been little, if any, explanation of what this clearly dangerous and volatile entity actually is.
I could write a couple of thousand words on it, that would not be a problem, I could piss on absolute crap to such a gagging word count that when you're reading this on Sunday afternoon (or Monday morning) you will look at "I'm glad you asked" and then scroll down and down and down and see thick paragraph after thick paragraph of twaddle n' glut and think, 'For Fuck's Sake! Get to the fucking point you verbose bastard!'
But I and you don't have to go through any of that now because Grods has done all that for me, and you, so I can just link to this instead.
At 2.45am on a Sunday morning, Wah, of Club Wah, has come up with the best tirade of a definition so far :
"The Left is anyone who is not a fucktard, racist, xenophobic, climate change-denying, homophobic, “pro-life”, ultra-capitalist, neo-conservative, hate-mongering cunt!"
Close and good enough for me.
Saturday, June 06, 2009
The Chaser Is Not "The Media", You Morons
By Darryl Mason
Australia's most boring columnist, Gerard Henderson, has long thought satirical ABC show The Chaser is not comedy television but "The Media".
Incredibly, the editor of The Australian now also thinks The Chaser is "the media". No, really. He does. The editor of The Australian newspaper can't tell the difference between A Current Affair and a comedy show full of made-up nonsense and occasionally cutting social and political satire. He thinks The Chaser, like 2GB or the Sydney Morning Herald or The Australian is part of "The Media"and so therefore must be hammered by the ABC's Media Watch :
For weeks, Media Watch, the in-house organ of the ABC's opinion makers, has bagged management over a broadcast computer system that is slow to settle in. But now presenter Jonathan Holmes and his team have a superior scandal they can chase hard next Monday night - The Chaser's dour and disgraceful sketch that mocked the wishes of dying children and the people who love them.
Then again, maybe it's easy for the editor of The Australian to confuse The Chaser with real "media". After all, The Chaser has covered the Iraq War, and the 'War on Terror', over the years, with a savage honesty that The Australian shied completely away from.
Plus, The Chaser did once have a newspaper.
And so The Chaser caved in, or were likely forced to, and just like The Glass House and The Gruen Transfer before it, the show will now fall under a new regime of increased censorship because people were upset by their reaction to a show that implicitly aims to provoke a reaction in a television era filled with the drab, the unchallenging, the politically correct, the grindingly bland.
The Chaser are clearly not happy about what's happened :
We want to make an apology for a sketch we created called “The Make a Realistic Wish Foundation”.
We’ve just heard from the ABC that they’re suspending the show for 2 weeks. We were keen to keep making the show, so we’re disappointed by the decision, and we don’t agree with it.
But that aside, we’d like to apologise. The piece was a very black sketch. Obviously too black. And we’re really sorry for the significant pain and anger we have caused.
Many people have asked how could we possibly think a sketch like that should go to air. We realize in hindsight that we shouldn’t have done it. We never imagined that the sketch would be taken literally.
We don’t think sick kids are greedy and we don’t think the Make a Wish Foundation deserves anything other than praise. It was meant to be so over-the-top that no one would ever take it seriously.
But we now understand the sketch didn’t come across as intended, and we take full responsibility for that. Now we’ve seen the impact of the piece we wish we’d thought it through better. There was no value in it that justifies the impact it’s clearly had on people whose grief or trauma is so great already. We should have considered that. We got it wrong. We’re sorry.
We'll be making no further comment at this time.
What else is there to say?
The Chaser's audience wanted 'The Boys' to keep pushing the limits of what they may or may not find funny, just how far 'The Boys' would be willing to go, for a laugh or a reaction, or something beyond the reaction most watch television with, a nonchalant 'Eh.'
Now The Chaser has most definitely found out what that limit is.
Dying Children.
Well, at least actors playing dying children.
Not so long ago, Australians could tell the difference.
"We Were Confronted With The Iron Fist Of Middle Class Taste"
The all but lost, extremely loose, 1975 movie 'Pure Shit' gets a long overdue re-release.
Here's the trailer :
For its time, this was a wild movie, raw and dangerous and challenging, unlike most Australian movies today. Even the trailer rings a hell of a lot more true of junkie outlaw reality than anything we saw in two whole series of glammed-up Underbelly.
In an interview with Cinetology, Pure Shit director Bert Deling goes hard on the safe and non-offensive Australian film industry :
"It opens up a couple of interesting questions. It opens up the question of how it is that we have had a film funding organisation in Australia that for last 25 years has continued to make films no one wants to see.
"They are the same 12 or so people who made all this crap in the past that no one wants to see. They get hold of a hundred percent of all the governments’ money. In any other country, that would be considered to be a scandal!
"And you can see what the aim is - these f***ers who may have made two or three features, bland sort of things which get two weeks at some art house cinema here and never sell overseas, they want a big kill. They want to get a big budget film, and they’ll make that and then they’ll disappear, leaving the Australian film industry in a smoking ruin. I just don’t get it. They are going to smash it to pieces."
But Deling holds out hope that the low-budget digital movie revolution will deliver on its promise and potential :
"There’s gotta be something soon, like Pure Shit, where somebody wants to go out and make a film and doesn’t give a flying f*** what the middle class say. And they can do it. You could almost do it on a halfway decent credit card."
"Right across the board we were confronted with the iron fist of middle class taste, and they’re the men and women who’ve been running the film industry. That’s why we get the sorts of films that we do – because they know what they’re gonna get. They’ve read the script, they know the director, they know the actors who’ve been cast. The film that they get is the film they wanted. And so they and their friends get to see a film they think is perfect, but nobody else does and no one wants to go!"
Go Hard Gerard Busts Another Evil Big Lefty Media Conspiracy
Or Not
By Darryl Mason
Australia's most boring columnist, Gerard Henderson, sniffs out yet another Big Left media conspiracy, one that has unfolded in suspicious silence, up until now.
For Gerard Henderson, a journalist with The Australian, Amanda Meade, initially appears to be in cahoots with God knows who else in the Big Left media ranks to conceal from Gerard Henderson the exact age of the 7.30 Report's Kerry O'Brien.
Gerard Henderson doesn't think birthdates published on Wikipedia or printed in those new-fangled print newspapers, are to be trusted. Google? Don't make Gerard laugh. For him, the only volume of biographical record is one that most people would be surprised to hear is still actually being published.
It's time for Go Hard Gerard to confront this awful Big Lefty conspiracy. It's time for his infamously bland and whiney e-mails to start flowing :
Email From Gerard Henderson To Amanda Meade - 3 June 2009
Amanda
I would be grateful if you would advise precisely where Mr O’Brien’s date of birth is on the public record.
Kerry O’Brien does not cite a date of birth in his entry in Who’s Who in Australia. Moreover, the biographical details about Kerry O’Brien on the 7.30 Report’s website do not record either his age or the fact that he once worked for Gough Whitlam. So I ask: Where on the “public record” is there reference to Mr O’Brien’s age? Here’s hoping for a prompt response.
Best wishes
Gerard Henderson
* * * * *
Email From Amanda Meade To Gerard Henderson - 3 June 2009
Article attached: “Milestones for the host we trust the most” - by Amanda Meade in The Australian 15 June 2006.
* * * * *
Email From Gerard Henderson To Amanda Meade - 3 June 2009
For someone who lectures others about journalistic standards, I am genuinely surprised that you regard Wikipedia as an authoritative source on the public record. It is nothing of the kind.
If Mr O’Brien wanted others to know his age he would put it in his Who’s Who entry (which he prepares) or arrange to have this material placed on the 7.30 Report website.
Gerard Henderson
* * * * *
Email From Amanda Meade To Gerard Henderson - 3 June 2009
Gerard
I did not rely on Wikipeda for my information, I simply point it out to you as one source. O’Brien told me his birth date in the interview, and I [sic] it is certainly not a state secret. By the way, you [sic] age is not in your bio either.
* * * * *
Email From Gerard Henderson To Amanda Meade - 3 June 2009
Amanda
You are shifting ground. In “The Diary” on Monday you wrote that Kerry O’Brien’s age is on the public record. When I asked you where this information could be located on the public record, your only reference was to Wikipedia.
You should be aware that the principal source of biographical data in Australia is Who’s Who in Australia. If you bothered to check this, you would know that my date of birth is published in Who’s Who.
So basically Go Hard Gerard's beef is that he thought he had to reveal his age in Who's Who Of Australia, and included, but Kerry O'Brien realised a date-of-birth wasn't mandatory, so he didn't include it.
So what does this have to do with journalist Amanda Meade? Absolutely sweet fuck-all.
Amanda Meade puts it more succcinctly.
Email From Amanda Meade To Gerard Henderson - 3 June 2009
This is so boring and tedious.
I will say only this: Kerry O’Brien is 63 and I know this because he told me wen [sic] he was born in a profile interview. That fact was published in the Oz, which makes it on the public record.
* * * * *
Email From Gerard Henderson To Amanda Meade - 3 June 2009
I don’t intend to continue the correspondence. But I would recommend that in future you have a glance at Who’s Who which does provide birth dates, where they are submitted, on the public record. If Kerry O’Brien did this he would not need you as his apologist.
Best wishes
Gerard Henderson
What a silly old bastard he is.
Go Hard Gerard is not put off at all by being told he's boring and tedious. He's used to that.
This is how the boss of supposedly Australia's (at least once) most influential think-tank, The Sydney Institute, passes his days.
And this is yet another example of why old people should be given free video games. Immediately. They keep the mind busy, while reducing the amount of annoyance the bored elderly, like Gerard, cause to people with better things to do than to be drawn into nonsensical e-mail arguments about absolutely nothing of any consequence.
18th Century Celebrity Outlaw Traded For Five Gallons Of Rum
A great piece from Michael Stutchbury on why Australians love gangster television (because an admiration for bushrangers is hardwired into Australian culture) at Crikey (excerpts) :
John Caesar (or “Black Caesar” as he came to be known) was the first to take to the bush in search of a life of crime. A huge, hulking man built like the entire front row of the All Blacks, Caesar was a former Negro servant who was transported for theft. Arriving at Botany Bay in 1790, driven by hunger he stole an Aboriginal canoe and escaped into the surrounding bushland. Following a brief period raiding homesteads and Aboriginal camps, he was captured and returned to authorities, yet was not severely punished.
This set forth of a pattern that was to repeat itself over the next few years — Caesar would escape, wander the bush for a time, receiving food and ammunition from sympathetic settlers who had heard of his exploits breathlessly recounted in the newspapers, before he was sent back to prison.
Unfortunately for Caesar, his exploits eventually went too far and provoked the authorities into appealing to that other great love of Australians — drinking. Five gallons of rum, a liquid damn near worth its weight in gold to thirsty Sydneysiders, was the bounty placed on his head. A month later, in February, 1796 he was shot dead at Strathfield by a settler, who promptly claimed the reward.
Blair's blogger mate JF Beck, on whose comment boards Blairians now say what they're not allowed to say on a "family" Daily Telegraph blog, also likes to spread anti-Jewish propaganda, through his headlines :
They'll tell you they're being ironic or something.
.
Thursday, June 04, 2009
"We're Going To Need Another White Board...."
By Darryl Mason
I wasn't kidding when I said that Kevin Rudd doesn't see a biting comedy when he watches ABC's The Hollow Men, he sees a tense, real-life drama, filled with the kinds of challenging events and burning bureaucratic tensions he already knows all too well.
Occasional reader Kerry contrasts the episode of The Hollow Men where the prime minister's staff must decide if the PM's good mate, and defence minister, should quit or be sacked with yesterday's big non-Chaser related news event, the resignation of Kevin Rudd's good mate, and defence minister, Joel Fitzgibbon :
How Hallowmen is this? It ticks all the boxes:
Ministry – defence
Reason – breach of ministerial conduct (very close to undisclosed investments)
Friend of PM – PM gave full support to his mate the defence minister until the announcement.
Resignation – Was it genuine or did the Hollow Men's Tony/Murph real life equivalents in PM's office argue whether it needed to be a resignation or sacking?
The only thing missing is that it’s not close to Remembrance day.
It's very annoying that I can't search through permanently-online episodes of The Hollow Men and link to the right moments in the TV show to make these 'coincidences' clearer. But searching video like we can now search song lyrics is still two or four years away.
Joel Fitzgibbon's resignation is just another curious example of Ruddlife imitating The Hollow Men, instead of the other way around. The episode where the PM's staff battled to decide whether it looked better for the prime minister to sack his defence minister, or accept his resignation, was only repeated on ABC 1 a couple of weeks ago.
Rudd's key staff have seen The Hollow Men. How could they resist watching it? So they'd know this episode, and would have been aware of its interesting parallels to how they had to sell this major fuckup in Rudd's considerably smooth sailing of recent.
The Budget episode of The Hollow Men, aired a week before the Wayne Swann delivered the real one, was also full of key phrases and words that were put to good use when Swann and Rudd and Julia Gillard stepped in front of the media to sell it.
You'll know some sort of Evil Lefty ABC conspiracy is afoot if the Wonder Drug episode of The Hollow Men airs a week or two before the Rudd government begins seriously trying to sell the swine flu Wonder Vaccine.
The details of why Fitzgibbon had to quit are here, in short he failed to "fully comply with the ministerial code of conduct", but when you read the following quotes from Rudd, you can easily imagine the Hollow Men-like scenes inside the PM's HQ as his staffers battled to come up with just the right wording, the all important phrasing, to get the prime minister over this credibility-degrading crisis :
"The minister's decision was to extend his letter of resignation at his initiative," Mr Rudd said.
"I accepted that resignation, it was the right thing to do."
Mr Rudd described Mr Fitzgibbon as a "first-class Defence Minister".
"The Government expects high standards of accountability on the part of ministers," he said.
"I feel very sad about this," Mr Rudd told a press conference in Canberra....
Mr Rudd said Mr Fitzgibbon had made "mistakes in terms of accountability and paid a high price".
He said Mr Fitzgibbon's resignation goes to the "probability of the process engaged in".
Finding agreement on the "probability of the process engaged in" could have taken hours, and at least one completely filled up white board.
No Matter How Far They Go, The Mainstream Media Will Never Campaign To Have The Chaser Taken Off The Air
By Darryl Mason
The Chaser's Julian Morrow made a promise on May 28, after the first episode of the new series of the mainstream media's reliable 'Public Outrage!' content provider, and comments generator, went to air :
"We care about complaint numbers far more than ratings. We were disappointed there were so few complaints this week, so we'll try to make it worse next week,'' Morrow said.
The Chaser kept its promise :
The complaints are pouring into the ABC, but more importantly, so are the comments to mainstream media blogs, your says and discussion boards. There must be 3000 comments already across a dozen or so Murdoch media blogs and news stories.
The Chaser made fun of dying children, or at least made fun of the way dying children are marketed by charities and top rating commercial television shows. Who the fuck doesn't have an opinion on that?
The Chaser's 'Make A Realistic Wish' Outrage! will soar to the top of Most Read stories across all the mainstream media online news sites, generating hundreds of thousands of extra page views, and by the time the Public Outrage! dies down, a few million in total page views that never would have existed had not The Chaser asked what's the point of helping dying children? "They're only going to die anyway."
A one minute skit from The Chaser produces a free video story, and copious online news stories mostly built out of comments made online by parents of dying children and furious others demanding the ABC cancel The Chaser by dinner time. This is not a costly piece of investigative journalism. It's all free. But it's exactly the kind of free Public Outrage! news story the mainstream media, tabloid and 'serious', are quickly becoming addicted to.
A few million extra page views, thanks to The Chaser, for online mainstream media new sites, translates into, at least, thousands of dollars worth of extra ad revenue.
The figures get bigger when you take it to the commercial television networks who will fill a few minutes of the evening news with this story, which will also soak up a solid five to eight minutes of the evening current affairs shows. Again, free Public Outrage! content.
It will be interesting to see who actually interviews dying children first to see what they think of The Chaser's demand they be more realistic about their dying wishes. Maybe A Current Affair can follow Julian Morrow around with a couple of cancer kids until he breaks down and weeps an apology.
If The Chaser can be relied upon to keep delivering totally free Public Outrage! stories every week for the rest of their last series, and no doubt they can (and if they don't, there will be enough material for some confected Public Outrage! anyway), mainstream media news sites, and blogs, can expect increased ad revenue because advertisers know The Chaser-related stories will pull the online eyeballs that they want to reach. It's not often a newspaper or news site can count on a popular story being served up to them for free, every Wednesday night.
Interestingly, if say the Daily Telegraph, an obvious online ad revenue beneficiary from The Chasers's totally free Public Outrage! stories, decided to go hard and stop at nothing until The Chaser was pulled off air, and got the rest of the series canned, they would be kissing goodbye to thousands of dollars worth of extra page view/ad revenue, plus all those stories that feed the endless demand for new semi-news related content. (Note : I'm basing those very loose ad revenue estimates on what those kind of page view numbers would generate for the average independent blog carrying Google ads. I'd expect the money generated by The Chaser's free Public Outrage! stories to be substantially greater).
Clearly it would not be in the interest of any of the mainstream media online news sites, or the evening news or current affairs shows, to actually have The Chaser pulled off the air, no matter how far they go.
So in the time they have left, eight to ten weeks, in this final series, The Chaser can do anything they want, within legal restrictions. They could do some of the most dark and demented satire Australian TV viewers have ever seen. They could really break out of their own worn-out format and do something utterly unhinged.
The Chaser is clearly invaluable to all the Australian media. What they do generates public discussion and debate, filling newspaper pages, dreary day empty evening news spots, comment boards, and all those hours of talkback radio.
The first episode of the new series of The Chaser also provided hundreds of thousands of extra page views and free Public Outrage! content and online comment for the commercial TV networks and the Fairfax and Murodch media :
The public broadcaster received complaints about almost every segment of the satirical ABC show, which set its sights on making fun of the Cronulla Sharks group sex scandal.
The Chaser's War On Everything spokesman said complaint words used included: ``Disgusting, cruel, offensive, pathetic, revolting and disgraceful''.
It also showed the incident in which the boys flew a blimp into protected airspace above the Vatican, a cameo by TV talk show host Kerri-Anne Kennerley in a romantic tryst with Morrow.
Morrow also featured in a skit where a mannequin dressed as Governor General Quentin Bryce was thrown over a wall of the all-male Melbourne Club.
Some said a Footprints sketch was offensive to Christians, while a Wipeout Palestine segment and Billy Connolly sketch were also complained about.
Many more took to websites to express their disappointment with the show which has been off-air for 18 months.
While I don't doubt that many, many people were seriously offended and upset by the 'Make A Realistic Wish Foundation' bit, you also have to wonder, in these remaining days of anonymous commenting, just how busy the PR units of rival networks are in creating or at least adding to the avalanche of comments demanding The Chaser be taken off the air, immediately. Consider this :
An average national audience of 1.54 million watched the show last night.
It smashed its commercial rivalsCriminal Minds, The Mentalist and Law and Order: SVU.
It's not just that The Chaser completely dominates its prime time position, advertisers are reluctant to pay what they once did for 30 seconds in Law & Order because they know nearly all of their key target audience of 16 to 35 year olds are watching The Chaser.
The commercial networks, however, could go hard against The Chaser and air something that would pull away probably half of The Chaser's audience. The latest episode of The Daily Show for example. Or The Trailer Park Boys. But to air those shows in prime time, the commercial networks would have to become as subversive as The Chaser, and they won't be doing that anytime soon.
According to Mumbrella, Channel Nine morning news chose not to report on the Air France mid-air explosion because the same news bulletin was going to be shown on Qantas flights :
A spokesman for Nine sent a brief email to Mumbrella saying: “We never report news involving plane incidents on Qantas inflight news bulletins.”
And yet they have no problem showing terrifying footage of house fires on the evening news to an audience primarily sitting around in houses.
"So The Fat Four Eyes Says To Skinny Four Eyes..."
By Darryl Mason
Are we a racist nation?
That depends. Are you a wog?
Do you eat weird foreign food that dickhead bogans haven't yet realised tastes pretty fucking good?
Do you tend to work harder and longer than most white people of your age group in jobs most of them think are beneath them?
Do you have family traditions of language, song, art and story that go back dozens or even hundreds of generations?
Do you think Australia is the best country on Earth but populated by white people who have no idea just how incredibly lucky they are to live in such a land of opportunity?
Do you see cartoons in newspapers, or catch moments on The Footy Show, or read comments on blogs, or hear bitter old people bitching on talkback radio about what's wrong with "people like them", that debase your ancient racial heritage and think, 'What the fuck? These people have shit for brains. Fuck this for a joke.'
Then yes, Australia probably is a racist nation.
It was a weird juxtaposition to hear Sol Formerly Of Telstra talk about how racist and backward we are as a nation, to be met with widespread shouts of indignant outrage about how very unracist we are, just before 'Chk Chk Clare' got instantly famous for her "There Were These Two Wogs Fighting" tale which, of course was, yeah, maybe racist but that's okay because it was funny, so.... David Penberthy at The Punch thinks Australia is most definitely a racist nation.
The Professional Idiot, naturally, reacts with all the hilarious petulance we've come to expect of those of Dutch descent, and shouts, "No We're Not!"
But the old Australian attitudes towards people who don't look like they'd give up their life to fight in a war because The Queen demanded they do so are changing. You remove most of the bullying from society and most of the racism goes along with it.
As Scott at Grods points out in an excellent essay, 'On Racism', anti-bullying education in Australian schools is making a fundamental difference to how young Australians now view casual racism.
I've noticed Scott doesn't look he's copped much racial abuse in his life, but he does wear glasses, so I wrote this comment :
As a member of the bespectacled, Scott, how would you feel today in the following circumstances :
- A taxi driver asks you to show him on the map where you want to go, but it’s a bit dark, hard to see, you hear the taxi driver mumble under his breath, “Fucking Four Eyes are blind as bats.”
- You exit a building, slip on the stairs, two women nearby laugh to each other, “Those Four Eyes are always so clumsy.”
- You walk into a library, a passer-by shouts derisively, “Hey Four Eyes! You want a wheelbarrow for all your books?”
- You run through the rain, get in a lift, someone cackles, “You really need little wipers on those Coke bottle bottoms, don’t you?”
- You go a fancy dinner for work, the obnoxious office joker keeps coming up to you all night long, holding up three fingers, then two, then four, always asking the same question, “How many fingers am I holding up?” then laughing like a fuckwit while the people you were talking to slink away.
- You go to a restaurant, the waiter sets up the specials board six feet back from your table, he looks at you squinting through your glasses, the waiter says, “Oh, you’re one of them….I’ll bring it closer to you.”
Racism, like bullying, like picking on people who look different to most other people around them, is something most people grow out of, particularly when they're not witnessing it or hearing it from their parents, and the most prominent people in their culture.
I do find it fascinating, though, that those who are the fastest to shout "We Are Not Racist!" are usually those who also thought, still think, going to war and laying waste to races of people is a good, practical idea.
Racism, like bullying, like a belief in war, is immaturity at its most basic.
When the vast majority of Australians give up all three of those beliefs and attitudes, we become a mature nation.
