The Australian, and the flacks are out hacking away in approved house style once again ...

(Above: it's literalism illustration day at the pond, but at least we can celebrate the wonderful house of Gaudi before brooding about the wretched house of Murdoch).

In the usual way of punters who love to punt on the squawks from the pond, we proposed that the week would see the usual nonsense from The Australian on matters to do with climate change and the NBN.

Sure enough, here's Marc Hendrickx scribbling Aunty is mistaken but not malicious, which manages a two in one double bunger, combining a swipe at the ABC cardigan wearers along with a generous dollop of talk about climate alarmism. Here's the opening par:

On ABC's opinion site The Drum, "public intellectual" Clive Hamilton has claimed the public broadcaster has been infested by a nest of climate deniers. According to Hamilton, Aunty has handed its editorial control to the far Right. It's a pity he forgot to provide any evidence to support his claims, as even the most superficial assessment reveals nothing to substantiate the right-wing conspiracy alluded to, just everyday sensationalism, along with naive and inept journalism.

Um. What about George Megalogenis's sensational claim on Lateline the other day?

The thing that really concerns Labor ministers from what I'm told by some of them is not what's in our paper but the fact that the ABC will take a cut and paste and broadcast our line across the rest of the country.

The Murdoch line? The Oz line? That's about as far Right - it's okay Genghis, they won't really hurt you - as can be found in this country. And one of their own stable accepts that the cardigan wearers at the ABC parrot the Murdoch line?

QED, done and dusted, and sad to say, since we have many disagreements with Clive Hamilton, it seems he's right on this one.

We keed, we keed, but that's because Hendrickx' piece is a tired and tiring re-hash of all the usual climate denial points, right down to talk of hockey sticks. Truth to tell, you can be any kind of fetishistic scribbler, but if your viewpoint suits the corporate agenda, you can get a run in The Oz's opinion columns.

Hendrickx indulges in a fine old bout of cherry picking, lavishly disputing a temperature here, and a temperature there, and blathering on about the politicisation of climate science, and the woes of scientists speaking via press releases and interviews, not seeming to notice that his superficial piece for the Murdoch rag is very much part of that very same politicisation process. We look forward to him submitting his piece for peer review so it can get published in a respectable scientific journal ...

When he ends with a rousing flourish suggesting the ABC's coverage isn't a conspiracy, just bias born from sensationalism and naivety, it's tempting to note that where muddle might explain the ABC's behaviour, it certainly doesn't explain the Murdoch rag's editorial line. We'll happily settle for a conspiracy theory, in best loon pond style.

Naturally The Australian is a firm believer in publishing the argument, putting on record the debate so to speak, arguing the argument, toshing the tosh, which leaves me hanging as we wait for them to continue the scientific debate over creationism and intelligent design.

In the meantime, what about the carping snippets in The debate about climate change is back on the boil and generating new steam.

That's a warm up for a standard appearance by Bjorn Lomborg in A radical solution to climate change, proclaiming that he seems to be the only one who knows how to deal with the economic issues involved in solving the carbon crisis.

Or could it be that he's got a new book to sell? Lomborg's solution isn't to moderate human behaviour or carbon use, but to indulge in research into climate-engineering technology.

Yep, that'll fix it. Perhaps as a preliminary model Lomborg can study the excellent way that rabbits helped improve Australia's landscape while providing excellent game meat, or imitate the way the clever scientists at the Meringa Experimental Station near Cairns imported a hundred cane toads from Hawaii in 1935 to deal with French's cane beetle and the Greyback cane beetle. Talk about ripper scientific environmental engineering success stories ... and we've got dozens more.

Meanwhile, spreading FUD about the NBN gets an outing with Jennifer Hewett's Telstra will pay for NBN pricing, rollout uncertainty, wherein she explains once again and interminably that the NBN business model is fatally flawed, and that consumers will prefer slow speeds, in much the same way as here at the pond we yearn for the good old days of dial up. To round it out, she suggests that the introductory prices in Tasmania for high speed will inevitably go up, and proposes that high-speend wireless broadband will win in the end.

It is, in its own immaculate way, a first class example of fuddery futtocking, much more classy than the efforts of Henry Ergas, and never no mind that a more balanced column might have considered the deficiencies involved in wireless, which she nails to the mast at the end of her piece as a likely NBN killer.

Same as it ever was in The Australian.

Well we've been yammering away on the pond for years about the peculiar editorial posturing of The Australian, but their recent splendid outburst urging that the Greens be destroyed - and confusing editorial and opinion piece practices to achieve that end - managed to get them noticed last night by Media Watch, in Gunning for The Greens.

No need to re-hash what is already covered in the Media Watch story, which contains all the necessary links to the evil empire, but all the same it's hard to resist a chortle at Chris Mitchell's responses to assorted Media Watch questions. Asked:

1. In your editorial yesterday you wrote of Bob Brown: “We believe he and his Green colleagues are hypocrites; that they are bad for the nation; and that they should be destroyed at the ballot box.” Have you acted on this editorial belief? Has The Australian been running articles attacking, undermining and discrediting the Greens?

Mitchell responded:

1 Possibly but not exclusively. We have covered many Greens news stories straight.

Possibly but not exclusively? Straight? You mean as straight as in that thigh slapper response? Which is to say that you've used news stories un-straight, to attack the Greens? I guess it's hard to deny outright the bleeding obvious.

Then Mitchell offered up the capper for Barry's show:

Just as The Australian refused to be intimidated by Mr Rudd last year, we have no intention of bowing to Bob Brown’s bullying this year.

Bob Brown's bullying? Barry chortled at that one. And I'm still laughing the morning after. Not often I get to laugh the morning after.

There's something strangely disturbing and odd about the editorial and corporate posturing of The Australian. It reminds me of when I once worked for Nine, and experienced the bullying corporate culture that came directly down from god, which is to say in those days Kerry Packer. He bullied everyone - he was a first class bully - and in turn everyone in an executive position bullied subordinates, and so on down the chain.

In a bid to please their master, The Australian seems to have set out on a course which will establish it as the antipodean print equivalent of Fox News. A strange ambition, but typical of the warped weed environment offered by News Corp.

Watching Mitchell writhe and dissemble when asked about his paper's editorial and news practices was a joy to behold (here in pdf).

Hendrickx might like to blather on about the ABC, but perhaps he should take a look at the glass house wherein he's ensconced for the day and from which he throws feeble stones.

Give me the cardigan wearers any day of the week:

There was a crooked man and he walked a crooked mile,
He charged a crooked sixpence for a crooked Glenn Beck pile.
He bought a crooked cat, which caught a crooked mouse.
And they all lived together in a big corporate crooked house.

Of course we don't mean crooked in the classic News of the World illegally bug peoples' telephones style.

We mean crooked as the opposite to straight ...

(Below: and now as we love literalism, the Crooked House in Sopot, Poland, by night).