The Australian, and paranoia at the barricades as the minions stand guard at the paywall ...

(Above: nothing like a little agitprop to set the right tone for a debate).

(Above: oops, that's more the kind of crude agitprop we were thinking of).

You have to hand it to The Australian ...

The lizard Oz is splendidly boastful, defiant and splenetic, and its abuse of other media outlets continues apace.

There was Laura Tingle getting them agitated by talking to Phillip Adams about the soon to be announced anti-siphoning decision, and suggesting that the minions of Murdoch might have more than a passing interest in what happens, because of its relevance to Foxtel.

Could you please keep your voices down? We're trying to cook up a conspiracy in here, came the retort to Tingle, and if you wonder what the paranoid fuss was all about, you can hear the inept Adams go at it with Tingle by way of download or stream here.

Like a dog with a bone, and nowhere to chew or bury it, the agitated Oz couldn't let the insult go, and so came up with Independence above all else as a further editorial response.

The notion that the crusading Oz is independent of the News Corp agenda is so splendid, surreal, and fanciful that it offers a guaranteed laugh for all.

Naturally, the lizard Oz, stablemate with that most splendid of all conspiracy theorist hysterics, Fox News, contends that conspiracy theories are a function of being left:

Sociologist Frank Furedi describes it as a "crisis of causality", a growing tendency to see a hidden agenda behind important events.

In The Weekend Australian last month he wrote that conspiracy theory had migrated from crackpot fringe to the mainstream and its most vociferous supporters belonged to the cultural Left.

Suddenly Glenn Beck and Rush Limbaugh and Fox News are on the cultural Left? Golly, count me a right winger ...

As usual, the lizard Oz makes a sweeping generalisation of the kind only a genuine cultural paranoid could make. Perhaps because it's in bed with the crackpot fringe (and provides plenty of space in their opinion pages for same) ...

Oh there's dark mutterings about grassy-knoll explanations, and talk of the progressive green tint, which colours the news judgement of those two Satanic news organisations, the ABC and Fairfax.

The Australian stands by the promise it made to readers in its first edition, on July 15, 1964, that it would be tied to no party.

Uh huh, except of course the party of Murdoch. And tied by such a Gordian Knot that no bold stroke could sever it:

The outcome is that Fairfax and the ABC lose credibility and customers. While the economy improves, the circulation of the AFR continues to fall, down 4.9 per cent on last year. But perhaps this is all part of the conspiracy.

Or could it be that it's all part of the downturn in newspaper sales, no matter how they litter The Australian like cocky cage lining through the Qantas lounge? Lordy what a supply there was this weekend past, such that jaded travellers couldn't even find the heart or the energy to steal the rag and take it with them.

Unless of course The Australian is talking about the biggest loser of all, the Sunday Mail in Queensland, which dropped nearly 5.7% in the latest figures? Was this because the rag continued to lose credibility and customers as a result of its inept editorial policies, generally of a right wing Murdoch minion kind? The Monday to Saturday editions didn't do much better, dropping 4.8% through the week, and 5.4% on Saturday.

The Herald Sun has also dropped 3.4% through the week, and even managed to lose 3.1% on Sunday.

Sure the Fairfax rags are in relative free fall, especially the Australian Financial Review, which has found its paywall inept, and its habit of picking up international features for the Friday and Saturday rags no longer attractive in a world where the originals are a click away.

But you have to be careful about throwing rotten eggs on the basis of editorial skills, for fear that some of the egg might stick to the thrower.

You see, before The Australian gets to chortling about its own 1.6% increase from July-September 2009 to July-September 2010 - gee that papering the halls with holly and the Oz must be working well - it should contemplate the reality. That's a simply stupendous increase from 134,100 copies to 136,268. And I could find that extra two thousand in the Qantas lounge on the weekend ...

And don't go flinging around the bonuses for unflinching independent journalism just yet, especially as the Weekend Oz managed a 0.7% drop to just a tad over 300,000 copies in the same period.

And we could do the same for other Murdoch rags - with the Advertiser/Mail in South Australia dropping over 3% on each of its editions and the West Australian joining the slide. (And there's more figures than any media junkie might require, with readership data also confirming the slide, in Latest newspaper circulation figures: not a nice set of numbers, by Margaret Simons, who also mentions the dumping scandal that figures in current circulation calculations).

For The Australian to think this all has to do with ideological values, and that its own much self-esteemed and vaunted 'independence' means its riding the wave, produces only a snicker, or fond memories of the snake in Snakes and Ladders, wherein pride came before a fall.

Meanwhile Foxtel is suffering in the current cold multi-channel, 18 channels and nothing on, climate, and has been forced to make unseemly offers like six bucks a month for six months, but beware the six buck a month routine somehow transmutes into $396 bucks over twelve months. Well there's a knockdown way to turn around churn ...

And in the week ending November 8th 2010, the cardigan wearers at the ABC were delivering healthy ratings figures, from 19.9 on Saturday (knocking Ten into fourth with 18.8) and hovering at respectable 14-17 through the week. And the macrame fiends and knitters aren't doing too badly in radio either ... and The Drum is doing nicely enough to get Crikey agitated and moan along with Murdoch's minions about state-funded competition ...

Well the deeper question is how well the paranoid crusaders at the Oz will do behind the approaching paywall ...

Bring it on, so that paranoid rhetoric about conspiracy theories most vociferous supporters belonging to the cultural Left can be hidden from general view. But it does say a lot about the political bias at work at the rag, and its capacity to see the world through a glass darkly ...

Poor old Mark Day can't tweak the ball and impart any decent spin on this sticky wicket (oh we luvs our sporting metaphors for jocks) in Online pay puzzle far from being solved. Noting the 2% annual fall across the board in newspaper sales, he worries:

Clearly, there's life and profits left in printed newspapers, but it would be a folly to suggest our slow rate of decline is a reason to ignore the big questions about the transition to digital delivery and how to monetise the new formats.

Day refuses to call the recent News Corp figures for The Times' paywall rubbery, and instead dubs them "opaque". Talk about a glass darkly, in a kind of opaque way.

And then he quotes Clay Shirky's analysis suggesting that the reduction in The Times web audience seems to be in the order of 97 per cent :

Put another way, that means just 3 per cent of past readers are paying. Ouch. That, to me, does not suggest a strong and vibrant base for growth. Those quick to jump to conclusions might even say it's a case of "What's plan B?".

But Shirky says the pay wall does more than simply shrink an audience. He argues it fundamentally changes the nature of the organisation behind the wall.

"One way to think of this transition is that, online, The Times has stopped being a newspaper, in the sense of a generally available and omnibus account of the news of the day, broadly read in the community," he says. "Instead, it is becoming a newsletter, an outlet supported by, and speaking to, a specific and relatively coherent and compact audience.

"This re-engineering suggests that pay walls don't and can't rescue current organisational forms. They offer instead yet another transformed alternative to it."

I guess that must be part of the conspiracy formed by the ABC, BBC, and others, to do poor Chairman Rupert down.

Well it's all enough to make Mark Day jump ship and hastily dub The Times paywall an experiment. Just that: an experiment!

Instead he seeks refuge in the Wall Street Journal and Financial Times models, and the porous wall being planned for the New York Times, and hope beyond hope, The Daily, a tabloid newspaper designed for Apple's iPad, targeted at US consumers, which will need 800k app buyers to break even.

A tabloid! That's what the world needs, another tabloid. Did I detect a quiver, a shiver in the lizard Oz's broadsheet format?

Poor old Day jumps ship so far that he even begins to talk about alternative sources of revenue:

Murdoch has been on something of an education crusade recently. He sees education as the key to lifelong opportunity, and perhaps he sees it as a business opportunity, too.

The owner of Fox Noise is suddenly a crusader for education? What, so we can all understand Glenn Beck a little better, and buy gold in case his conspiracy theories turn out to be correct?

In 1984 The Washington Post purchased a small company called Kaplan, providing services in the education sector. It is now by far the biggest division of the Post's business, a point not lost on readers of Murdoch's tea leaves.

Shouldn't that have read, a point entirely lost on Tea Party followers?

Well it's amiable fun to start the week by watching the minions of Murdoch caught up in and bemused by the Internet threshing machine. And the more they talk of their circulation figures as a corollary of their editorial 'independence', the more deluded they sound ...

Because like The Times, The Australian is already a newsletter, an outlet supported by, and speaking to a specific and relatively coherent and compact audience. Who are welcome to it ...

And as we used to say in Tamworth, they can put that in their paranoid pipe, and smoke it ...

(Below: surely they could have found room for the lizard Oz on the blackboard? Seeing as how they're such keen spotters of conspiracies).