Mark Day, Eric Beecher, and who said incestuous conduct was banned in the Australian media?

Here at the pond, words mean exactly what we want them to mean.

This month audit means ulna. Hit it hard enough and you'll get a good laugh. Next month the ulna nerve will mean humerus ... which will of course also mean humorous. (And if all that's mysterious, here for Hockey was economical with the truth, and here for the ulnar nerve).

But that's all by way of a sideshow, and just because we love the phrase 'economical with the truth', led as it was by Cabinet Secretary Robert Armstrong during the Spycatcher trial, at which Malcolm Turnbull caught many an eye with his rousing defence of Peter Wright.

The real flap on the pond, with all the squawking and the rage, involves the ABC. You there, in the back of the class, stop nodding off, sit up straight. Stop rolling your eyes, and sighing, this is serious. Who hit the ceiling with that spitball?

Enough. You catch the navel gazing drift ...

Eric Beecher is terribly upset that Aunty has rolled the tanks on to his lawn, in the form of The Drum, and he's mad as hell and bleating to The Australian about it, in Crikey! Publisher Eric Beecher lashes the ABC.

Well the lizard Oz always loves a good Aunty bashing, so it was all hands on deck. In what surely must be the strangest case of cheese having a go at the cheese, and never mind the chalk, Beecher is outraged by the standards of The Drum:

"The Drum seriously and dangerously compromises the ABC's editorial integrity," Mr Beecher told Media.

"It is full of personal opinions, mainly from the Left and often wacky, which is something that sits uncomfortably with the notion of a rigorously independent publicly funded national broadcaster.

Would that be the same ABC that the Murdoch press boasts recycles everything from the Murdoch stable?

Would that be the man in charge of a website which promotes wackiness as a national sport? Crikey ...

The main sin? Hard to say, but it seems publishing a piece by Marieke Hardy which made some fun of Christopher Pyne was the short end of the straw (pulled by Drum editor Jonathan Green, who used to work at Crikey - and they claim incest in the media was banned by rule of law).

Hardy was of course being exceptionally polite about Pyne.

In recent years Paul Sheehan has variously called him a mosquito (surely more offensive than wishing him attacked by a large, libidinous dog, since that offers Pyne a sex life), and one of the most irritating MPs ever to utter the words "point of order", and - giving him papal quality and potency - "infallibly irritating", and yet again a "parliamentary mosquito", given to empty grandstanding and pointless points of order.

Point of order. There's no point gratuitously pining for Pyne, or Sheehan abusing Pyne, when the matter to hand is Eric Beecher's outrage with The Drum.

Beecher, you see, has turned into a mini-Rupert Murdoch, and wants steps to be taken:

"I can now fully understand why the BBC has limited its online activities, especially in the commentary arena," he said of Britain's state-owned broadcaster pulling back on its domestic online footprint.

Yes, Tony Blair was always banging on about exactly the same point. How jolly he muzzled the BBC, how jolly that the Iraq war happened ... without too much vexatious commentary in the commentary arena ... (and while visiting the BBC, make sure you steer clear of features and analysis. No thinking, please, just the news ...)

If you've visited Crikey lately, you can fully understand why Beecher's hopping up and down, because in its limited free offerings, the rag has clearly hit skid row, under-resourced, working to limited hours, and doing a kind of mini-Huffington Post by linking to almost every other news source on the planet, and thereby sending its readers off to all points of the globe, since there's bugger all up on Crikey to keep them within the tent.

There's every sign the rag is suffering from its smell of an oil rag operations. Peak oil is long gone ...

Beecher's mini-Murdoch routine - I'm Eric from the antipodes - begins to talk up the business of intervention:

Mr Beecher said the government should step in to limit the operations of the ABC if it did not regulate itself. "I think the ABC should self-regulate. Only if that demonstrably isn't working -- and although there are some concerning signs, like The Drum, I don't think it has reached that stage -- should (the government) intervene."

Dammit, that's not true mini-Murdoch posturing. What happened to solidarity with Judith Sloan? Aunty suddenly fills the air, and it's a real shame. Privatise the ABC, privatise it now, and make the world safe for Eric Beecher ... and First Dog on the Moon ... Oops, talk about whacky zany with slightly odd tendencies ...

Yep, Beecher still has a trick or two to learn about rhetoric before he becomes a fully blown Murdoch minion, or Rupert chum ...

Meanwhile, in this world of strange bedfellows, there's the even stranger sight of Mark Day snuggling up to Beecher and even having a kind word for the Huffington Post, in You too can be a millionaire mogul - go for it.

... if you want to launch an online publication you don't have to invest in high-speed colour presses, a building in which to house them and a fleet of trucks to distribute your product.

As Mayne and Arianna Huffington have shown, if you have a good idea, boundless energy, faith in your concept, the vision to see where you're going, the flexibility to adjust, a good team around you and good timing, you, too, can be a multi-millionaire media mogul.

Go for it!

The rest of the piece is a splendid piece of blather about how Huffpo and Crikey are parts of a visionary new interwebs future.

Lordy, was it only a year ago that Day was having a nervous nelly fit, and scribbling furiously:

Crikey used to be a media gadfly with a kind of insouciant charm. It traded off the same need, deeply embedded in society, which sustains Sandilands - we all love to hate a bad boy. It is now a crushing, insufferable bore.

Yep, that's the way to make millions. Become a crushing, insufferable bore. Or perhaps call for the ABC to be regulated by government! Just like big Rupe ...

They say things move faster these days - it seems we all play video games - so it's a wonder and a marvel that it was only July 2009 when that Pollyanna John Hartigan was explaining in fruity and forthright fashion that Journalism, not the limited intellectual value of blogs, is the future of the web.

Then there are the news commentary sites, like The Huffington Post, Newser and the Daily Beast and in Australia sites like Crikey and Mumbrella.

Most of the content on these sites is commentary and opinion on media coverage produced by the major outlets.

These sites are covered in links to wire stories or mainstream mastheads. Typically, less than 10% of their content is original reporting.

The sites that produce a high proportion of original content aren’t making a profit. Almost anyone can start one of these sites, with very little capital, no training or qualifications.

Then there are the bloggers.

In return for their free content, we pretty much get what we’ve paid for – something of such limited intellectual value as to be barely discernible from massive ignorance.

Golly Harto, steady on. Seems like you can hang out your shingle, make millions if not squillions by being a total bloody bore, and then whinge about the ABC.

But I guess Harto was right about one thing.

The bit about limited intellectual value barely discernible from massive ignorance. Yep, Miranda the Devine is now a forlorn, wretched figure, the lowest of the low ... a blogger for News Corp sheltering within the Daily Terror tabloid format. And in return for the free content, we get even less than what we paid for by way of advertising and clicks ...

Now she's reduced to twittering and blogging about toilet paper ... The real Phony Tony ...

Did they hire her to make Tim Blair look good?

Oh it's a funny old pond, the very small and incestuous media pond of Australia ...

Could we be so bold as to offer a thought for Beecher? Perhaps the ABC is offering better content, and that's why you're being drubbed? I wouldn't know, I'm not a regular Drummer, but when I drop in on Crikey, the original content is frequently abysmal, and so I make use of the links to hightail it out of there ...

Meanwhile, pay for any of this self-indulgent, self serving tosh, as a way of preserving the current media landscape? Isn't it bad enough to sit through all the wretched forced ads and forced clips they dish up?

As that learned loafer Bob Ellis would say, a pox on the lot of them ...

(Below: oh look, they even turned it into a T-shirt. Sorry, no sale, but I am open to one with the words 'Spare me the hypocrisy ... Australian media' or perhaps 'Spare me the hypocrisy minions of Murdoch' seeing as how Rupe controls most of the shop).