Frank Furedi and Mark Day cook up a storm for News Corp, trouncing MasterChef and Paul Sheehan ...

One of the nicest things about having a bee in the bonnet about people with bees in their bonnets is wondering which bees will turn up in which bonnets each day.

Paul Sheehan used to be a reliable bee-keeper on a Monday, but these days the buzzing is inclined to the bizarre, as in MasterChef leaves a bitter aftertaste.

First of all Sheehan confesses to being addicted to the show, and then spends the rest of the column brooding about the dark side and the underlying cynicism of the show.

And then by column's end, he starts naming names, blaming the people who are responsible for him watching the show. Actually the one person responsible for him watching the show - Paul Sheehan - isn't named and shamed, which is a damn shame. By the end of it all, one feels like saying to him, as one would to a ten year old boy, Paulie, switch off that wretched television, and go outside to play. You don't have to watch it if you don't like it ...

Well as the pond has never watched an episode of MasterChef to its conclusion - come to think of it, the pond hasn't watched more than five minutes of it in toto - the arcane nature of Sheehan's navel-gazing just whips right over head, into the ether where complaints about Dynasty, Dallas, Dancing with the Stars, and other damned "D" television shows reside.

Each to their own form of televisual poison, and enjoy it while it last, because at some time the programmer in the sky will send the show into syndication (or in the antipodes, two am on the multi-channels), but whatever, no heartburn, navel gazing or navel fluff columns over trivialities and momentary pleasures, please.

So with a hey ho Donner, hey ho Blitzen, we headed off to The Australian, to check up on the scandal enveloping News Corp like a MasterChef gravy (do they do gravy?) and sure enough, there's loyal Mark Day scribbling Cool heads needed for industry changes.

Note in the header the smooth conflation of Rupert Murdoch, News Corp and the need for industry changes. After all, Rupert Murdoch is the industry, in much the same way as Louis XIV once advised the world L'État, c'est moi.

Oh okay, Louis mightn't have actually said it, but let's face it, the Sun King (le roi-soleil) probably thought it, and the current Sun King owns The Sun, so it all fits to a tee.

Poor old Mark Day spends the entire column brooding about the predicaments and problems of News Corp, way worse than Paul Sheehan brooding about judges of culinary proceedings, and how it's all so unfair, as the jackals and the crows and the hyenas gather with salivating lips to consider the tasty meal being offered:

So where do we go in the meantime? We can expect News Corporation critics and Murdoch haters to continue hammering away at the company. In the US, The New York Times has Murdoch in its sights, and in Australia, Fairfax is not likely to miss any opportunity to shine a bleak light on its commercial rival.

Politicians on three continents are calling for curbs on Murdoch and/or the media generally. This is both opportunistic and understandable -- some might say it is karma for an individual or an organisation so willing to dish it out to other people to be on the receiving end over its own failures.

Ah yes, that karma's a killer, especially when the dishing organisation seems unwilling to eat its own tasty dish, and what goes around sometimes comes around.

Poor Mark Day even gets on to Shakespeare and Julius Caesar, and why Rupert Murdoch needs to ensure the good is not interred with his bones.

Might this involve reforming the truly deplorable state of News Corp broadsheet and tabloid culture in the antipodes? Might this involve a subtle change of direction at Fox News towards something approximating the concept of fair and balanced, currently a hideous travesty of a slogan?

Sorry. Day is mortified that the proceeds of the last edition of NOTW headed off to charity but that the gesture seems to have gone missing in all the fuss. But after all, can $4 million from the proceeds of crime buy an amnesty?

In the end, Day gets truly desperate:

I don't know what he has in mind, but a strategic response might be to accelerate his push into the education sector.

Helping deliver literacy to millions of kids might earn back some of the brownie points that have been stripped from his company.

What? So they can become trained consumers of News Corp products? Not likely, and it seems with all the current value stripped from non-voting shareholders, the evil that took place under Murdoch's reign might keep living for some time to come ...

Perhaps it'd be better first to fix the culture of reporting, and then to fix the share price and the ownership structure and the succession plan before educating the world?

Meanwhile, the heart of the nation seems intent on offering a flurry of Furedis, and so we come to Frank Furedi's The real truth is that there is no hidden agenda behind the story.

Furedi routinely peddles stupidities, but this column of monstrous generalities really takes the cake. It is by way of another defence of News Corp, though you might not gather it from the get go, as Furedi cavorts and wheels his way through talk of hidden motives, with bonus silly asides.

Then we get to the point:

All too often protagonists in a debate find it easier to question each other's motives than to advance a compelling argument. It is this visceral mistrust of human integrity that has led a group of moral entrepreneurs to demand a review of the media in different parts of the Anglo-American world. This emphasis on the media's integrity and its ethics is not just an after-the-event response to the News of the World phone-hacking scandal. Rather it represents an attempt to somehow insulate the media from the hidden agenda that apparently drives it.

This at a time when the Metropolitan Police top plod has fallen on his sword (here), Rebekah Brooks has been arrested (here), questions are being asked about David Cameron, and not just about his social life (Cameron Takes Hit From U.K. Scandal), and as is the way, the cover up has now taken on a life of its own, with the protagonists no longer able to control the way the cover up might go about the business of doing the cover up.

Confronted with these practical concrete realities, and the personal and corporate motives of those involved, Furedi has only one way to go, and that's into the land of blather:

As an academic I am painfully aware of a culture of confusion towards how to evaluate the status of arguments and written statements. Unfortunately, contemporary culture regards the truth as a subject worthy of fiction rather than of intellectual pursuit. It is frequently asserted that there is no such thing as the truth. Instead of the truth, people are exhorted to accept different opinions as possessing comparable truths.

Uh huh. What this has to do with the truth of who did what to whom and why in the News Corp scandal is left lying under the stone. Instead of worrying about those truths, Furedi goes on to exhort us to forget about such desiderata.

So we go on a typical detour into literary studies:

Invariably cynicism towards the truth leads towards a compulsive desire to expose the hidden agenda behind a statement. This obsession even extends to the study of literature. Articles dealing with literary subjects sometimes read like an amateurish social science expose of the authors' "internalised" sexism or racism. For example, post-colonial literary criticism is devoted to the project of uncovering the "implicit" racist and colonial assumptions buried in classic Western literature. From this standpoint, an allusion to colour by a Victorian novelist is sufficient to indict it for its racist premise. This act of deconstructing the text serves as an exemplar to the way that hidden meaning is extracted from public statements made by policy makers and opinion formers.

Actually you only have to take a few moments to discover the explicit racist and colonial assumptions lying on the surface of classic Western literature, and allusions to colour by many Victorian novelists and poets is sufficient to provide insights into the racism current at the time. It usually has bugger all to do with deconstructing the text, and a lot to do with reading the text and making sense of the words and concepts deployed.

The sand of the Desert is sodden red -
Red with the wreck of a square that broke; -
The Gatling's jammed and the Colonel's dead,
And the regiment's blind with dust and smoke.
The river of death has brimmed his banks,
And England's far, and Honour a name,
But the voice of a schoolboy rallies the ranks:
'Play up ! play up ! and play the game !'
(and the rest of Sir Henry Newbolt's Vitai Lampada here).

Feel free to construct or deconstruct this text as you will, but here at the pond we have only one response. Eek, the fuzzy wuzzies have broken the square and won. (Feel free to indulge in Rudyard Kipling's Fuzzy-Wuzzy poem here).

There's a couple more pars of classic Furedi dissembling, disingenuous blather:

Of course we all have our own interests and agenda. Anyone with convictions will use a variety of rhetorical and presentational strategies to persuade and convince the targets of their arguments. Sometimes, even the most honourable advocates will be tactical and selective in the way that their case is presented. Those who oppose or question their case have a responsibility to engage with what is a matter of public record.

Yep there's nothing like stating the bleeding obvious about hidden motives, while maintaining the bizarre posture that they should stay hidden, unless they turn up on the public record. Except of course when it's not a matter of public record, when it's hidden or it's lied about, or concealed, or buried in the sand pit in the back yard. Oh if only no one had discovered that tapping of a dead girl's phone ...

One thing's for sure, Furedi loves the sound of his own voice, as it delivers meaningless verbiage:

A conflict of words is transformed into a constructive debate when the argument is challenged and pursued. Experience suggests the art of logical argumentation is far more demanding than the simplistic act of condemning a person for what they have not said.

This arbitary pile of meaningless tosh builds to a splendid conclusion:

Speculating about the story behind the story requires minimal intellectual resources. But for all that it can be an effective way of fuelling suspicion and mistrust. The lesson the media and its critics must learn is that first, there is no story behind the story and second, we have to learn to deal with the story in a more serious and grown-up way.

There, you've read it, the peak, the culmination of Furedi's thoughts.

There is no story behind the story, and can any form of drivel be purer than this or white snow on the highest peaks of the Andes?

Well it's about time for News Corp, and its supporters like Furedi, to learn that they need to deal with the story of the cover up in a more serious and grown-up way, and this might best happen if they accept that the story behind the story is the now most interesting story of all, with dominoes falling all over the place in the way that would have warmed the heart of a neo con back in the Vietnam war days.

Meanwhile, brood on this, dear sweet absent lord.

David Flint and now Frank Furedi trotted out to defend News Corp on the most absurd and specious grounds, and with the kind of logic that makes you wish WikiLeaks could spill some dirt on them ... as has happened with any number of WikieLeaks stories that have another story behind them.

Is there something about names beginning with "F" that leads to foolishness?

Sorry, perhaps that's not the story behind the story we need to hear, but one thing's for sure. If Furedi was a journalist, we'd never have learned the story behind the story in relation to big tobacco, or a dozen other big stories behind the surface story. He'd have earned the nickname in the news room of Shallow Throat.

Just because many - even most - conspiracy theories are silly doesn't mean all conspiracy theories are silly, or wrong, and no amount of high falutin' gibberish will change this, or take away the stain of the current News Corp hi jinks and the subsequent cover up. Live with it, deal with it ...

And now, speaking of karma, I'm reminded of a koan:

A monk asked, "Does a dog have a Buddha-nature or not?"

The master said, "Nothing!" (Mu!)

The monk said, "Above to all the Buddhas, below to the crawling bugs, all have Buddha-nature. Why is it that the dog has not?"
The master said, "Because he has the nature of karmic delusions".

By golly, there are a lot of hacks currently in the grip of karmic delusions right at the moment ...

(Below: sorry, cartoon, there's no joke behind the joke).