Miranda Devine, Catherine Deveney, and the future of newspapers made safe by her boning ...

(Above: wanting to display your manliness? What better way than a boning stein from Zazzle?)

I was trying to maintain a dignified silence about the urgent need for the boning of Sydney Morning Herald, and therefore The Age columnist Miranda the Devine, but the Devine kept dragging me in to the discussion. Here's how she did it in A crudity that was just too much:

I was trying to maintain a dignified silence about the boning of the Age columnist Catherine Deveny, but the twitterati kept dragging me in.

"Sack Miranda Devine", came the cry.

"If The Age has fired awesome Catherine Deveny, then surely for balance the SMH should fire awful Miranda Devine."

It was hard to fathom what link I had with Deveny's self-immolation on Twitter on Logies night.

Hmm, what link could there be between the boning of Deveny, and the potential boning of the Devine?

Boning? What a curious, offensive, vulgar word, almost as bad in its deployment, surely, as the suggestion that Bindi might, nay should, get laid down the track.

I rushed off to the Urban Dictionary to confirm my suspicions, and here are just a few of the unsavoury implications of the word:

Laying your man pipe in a girl's nether regions until neither party can handle it any longer.

Engaging in sexual intercourse
having vaginal sex
to have sexual intercourse, to fuck.
sexual intercourse until your penis reaches her bone

And so on and so forth. The silly American-centric dictionary hasn't caught up with the Australian deployment of the word, but if anything that's worse, since it's a vulgarism designed to mean fuck over, fuck someone hard in an employment sense by giving them the fucking sack, and otherwise shafting them good. Shoving it up them, giving them the shove, rutting in their penury and poverty. Not to put too fine a point on it, The Age fucking over Deveny.

And so on and so forth, in the best management style evoked by the likes of Kerry Packer and the axe Al Dunlap, where if you weren't boning them in style you were giving them a haircut with a chainsaw.

Ah the good old days of Al, whose name had become a Wall Street verb, and who in turn - as happened to the inventor of the guillotine - was given a boning by Sunbeam back in 1998 (Chainsaw Al Dunlap Gets The Chop).

But I digress. Could the use of the word by the Devine indicate a fatal innocence, rather like the Tea Partiers who quickly had to let go of the tea bag as a symbol when they rushed off to the Urban Dictionary to discover with shock and horror that tea bagging meant the putting of testicles in someone else's mouth? (here)

Or is it an attempt to match Deveny at her game, to show that the Devine is ballsy too, and game, and up for a verbal boning anytime you bring on a joust? Or is the Devine a thrillseeker, teetering on the edge of a cliff, shouting to the editor 'bone me if you dare'? Or perhaps just a masculinist, ready to assert anywhere anytime that boning is a legitimate activity?

Whatever, for we will never know. It turns out that the Devine thinks of Deveny this way:

I am a Sydney journalist. She is a Melbourne stand-up comic. Her persona is heroically retro-left wing with a particularly savage atheist streak. She does car crash comment, saying the most outlandish things, often with sexual overtones and foul language, just for dramatic effect.

Okay, at last I get it. Boning has no sexual overtones, and perhaps is just fowl language, said for dramatic effect.

Still I could barely resist the temptation to do a little subbing of the piece. Instead of this:

It was the short-term British former Age editor-in-chief Andrew Jaspan who made the mistake of plucking her out of obscurity as a freelance contributor to the TV pages in 2007 and placing her on the opinion page. The imprimatur of the Age opinion page gave her fringe lunacy reach and sting and gravitas, and made her tweets about Bindi Irwin international news.

How about this?

It was the soon to flee to New York to ruin the New York Post Daily Terror Col Allan who made the mistake of plucking her out of obscurity as a police reporter and assistant editor way back when in the nineties and placing her on the opinion page. Then she shifted to The Sydney Morning Herald and the imprimatur of that opinion page gave her fringe lunacy reach and sting and gravitas, and made her tweets about the boning of Catherine Deveny international news.

I keed, I keed, because you see the boning of Deveny is the way that newspapers will be made safe for family reading, and ensure that their futures are enshrined in the heart of readers:

Jaspan's successor and the editors of this newspaper know that safeguarding journalistic standards is more important now than ever as other sources of news encroach on their territory. For this newspaper the reward last year was steady circulation and healthy profits, despite an economic downturn.

Yep, safeguarding journalistic standards is the way forward. You know, like Chairman Rupert is guarding journalistic standards in the Daily Terror and the Herald Sun, and the New York Post, and especially in that haven for fair and balanced reporting Fox News. As for good old England, why it's full of splendid rags showing relentless objectivity.

You see, it's all good, and all up, and never mind that this very week the Washington Post has put up Newsweek for sale, and perhaps might even accept a suitcase of decent second hand clothes as a fair price. Provided the clothes have been washed and ironed.

Sheesh have I got it all wrong. Instead it's all good, and a new golden age is imminent:

Far from newspapers being on death row, the good ones are thriving, and have created online businesses that may one day provide the sorts of fat profits that used to flow in the golden days of print. Experiments have begun with pay walls, as well as newspaper applications on new reader-friendly devices such as the iPad.

Yep, very shortly you will have the astonishing pleasure of paying for the opinions of Miranda the Devine, and taking them anywhere in your new reader-friendly device, the iPad.

The fact Rupert Murdoch paid $US5 billion for the publisher of The Wall Street Journal shows the world's most successful media mogul has faith in the staying power of newspapers. He boasts of 64,000 active users for the WSJ iPad application, after just a month. The WSJ on iPad, by the way, like USA Today, looks just like a newspaper page.

Oh yes indeed, it looks verily like a newspaper page, in much the same way as Avatar on its 9.56 x 7.47 inch screen looks just like a movie up on an 80 foot wide x 35 foot high theatre screen in 3D.

Apart from the way the iPad fails to rustle when you tilt it, and refuses to show an entire page, and doesn't leave black ink all over your fingers but instead shows smudgy fingerprints and the faintest hint of dandruff or dust (carry a cloth at all time), and fails dismally in the most important job of any newspaper, which is to decently wrap fish and chips, and stand guard in the outdoor dunny ready for any emergency.

But ain't it grand that the Devine doesn't think Chairman Rupert paid too much for the WSJ, as argued by those wretched liberals in the New York Times in Murdoch's Soft Spot for Print Slows News Corp. And now, to try to keep his investment buoyant, Chairman Rupert has embarked on a campaign to take out the New York Times, by producing a local New York edition of the WSJ, which led to this response by Times executives:

So as our welcome gift to New York, we pass on a few helpful hints to our Journal colleagues: the Dodgers now play in Los Angeles, Soho is the acronym for South of Houston, Fashion Week has moved to Lincoln Center, Idlewild is now JFK and Cats is no longer playing on Broadway.

If you happen to know anyone who works for the Journal’s new section and he or she wants any additional information about the greater New York region, tell them to check out NYTimes.com’s always very helpful archive. (here)

Still as the sharks circle, and the industry cannibalises itself, and Chairman Rupert looks for road kill as he tries to turn New York - New York New York!! - in to a two paper town - his two papers - it's still all good for the Devine:

Newspapers are still more popular as a news source than the internet, though TV is No. 1.

Que? Poor hapless Devine. She certainly isn't a news source, as all you have to do is google the full to overflowing intertubes, and you can find a dozen surveys that say the precise opposite. Here's just one: Online 'more popular than newspapers' in US:

Online news has become more popular than reading newspapers in the US, according to a survey.

It is the third most popular form of news, behind local and national TV stations, the Pew Research Center said.

"News awareness is becoming an anytime, anywhere, any device activity for those who want to stay informed," it said.. .

...The survey showed that news aggregators such as Google News and AOL were most commonly used, along with the websites of CNN and the BBC

Doesn't the Devine understand the concept of news grazing and the dastardly role news aggregators play in ruining the newspaper game, to the chagrin of Chairman Rupert? Does she understand the contradiction in celebrating the arrival of the iPad, which is the sure sign of the end of the physical newspaper, and the arrival of the four "anys" into our lives - any content on any device any time any where?

Some will be able to monetise their content in this new world, and good luck with that, and some will give it away for free, sustained either by advertising or by public subsidy, and hence the attacks by Chairman Rupert and his clique gang of lick spittle followers on the ABC and the BBC.

But back to the forever optimistic Devine, spouting statistics like a tea kettle:

And the competition online has just made more people read more news. According to British surveys by McKinsey Media and Entertainment News, cited in the magazine Change Agent magazine last month, news consumption grew 20 per cent in the past three years - from 60 to 72 minutes between 2006 and 2009, with the greatest gains for people under 35.

And 10 per cent more of those savvy young people cited interest in newspapers than they did in 2006.

The young taking an interest in newspapers? Well I guess they take an interest in vinyl, and fifties fashions, the more foolish ones at least. If you haven't lived it, it seems to exercise a strange ghoulish charm, even a compelling fascination. Yes, I'm talking about you Faster Pussycat.

Never mind, back to the Devine and the clutching at the straws, when it's the straw that breaks the camel's back.

The whole spiel, the seizing on the Deveny matter for a little local colour and timeliness and faux relevance, and then the lurching off to apply said relevance to the current plight of newspapers, reminded me of how endearing the Devine's confused, chaotic, prejudiced, incoherent, illogical and irrational opinions are:

In a chaotic world of aggregators, of Google and Twitter and specialist web feeds, a newspaper is a "credible one-stop shop" of local news where all the hard choices have been made for the reader. Which is why not trashing the brand is more important than ever. Sorry, Catherine.

Uh huh. You want me to pay for the pleasure of reading the Devine and this kind of guff? Let's phrase that another way:

In the abundant fertile world of the Internet and of aggregators, of Google and Twitter and specialist web feeds, where good content of all kinds is easily indexed and easy to find, a newspaper is but one stop on the Internet superhighway, now littered with many interesting and credible sources, especially for local news, not to mention crannies and nooks with tasty content, and where there's no need to be spoon fed or to hunt out pre-digested pap where all the hard choices have been made for the reader. And the last thing that is needed is just another ill informed opinion, since the world is full of ill-informed opinions. We do it daily on the pond. Which is why not trashing the brand by publishing incoherent columnists is more important than ever. Sorry, Miranda.

Never has anyone in their own lunchtime argued so forcibly, so cogently, so incoherently, for their own boning. But steady on, if they bone Miranda, or put her behind a paywall, what will loon pond do? How will we cope?

Never mind, there are plenty of loons in the world, and we're all as mad as hell, and now we're all online ...

As Sideshow Bob once said in his wise Germanic way about newspapers - or was it Bart Simpson - The newspapers The.

Or as the Nazis once said, Die Wehrmacht, Die.

And now a thought from the young: