Another day and a frantic call to arms, quick angry anonymous liberal bloggers, help save the minions of Murdoch ...

The vexed question of anonymity on the web keeps raising its ugly head, most recently in a chat on Counterpoint featuring Christian Kerr ranting and railing how Social media is for blowhards.

Kerr is convinced that people who write angry comments on The Australian, The Punch and other Murdoch social media sites (including but not limited to Tim Blair, Andrew Bolt and Piers 'Akker Dakker' Akerman) are bored, cranky workers, wastrels and time wasters with nothing better to do than get agitated and be driven into a foaming tea party frenzy, when they should be attending to their jobs ...

What's that you say? How on earth did I find the time to waste to listen to Kerr rant and rail, when I should have been off tending to my cardigan wearing duties?

Well it's a long story, but if you can't be bothered wasting your time streaming or podding Kerr from the ABC's social media site, you can waste your real time time by catching the repeat this Friday on Radio National. Unless you've got an appointment with the dentist, which will be much more pleasurable ...

Along the way, presenter Paul Comrie-Thomson raised the question of anonymity as a reason for all the trolling, as people learn to behave like the anonymous editorialist for The Australian, and threaten to bring down evil political parties like the Greens - we will destroy you - or make snide satirical remarks about decadent inner west latte sippers ...

Kerr refused to bite, being more intent on putting in the boot to cranky people made cranky by Murdoch publications (you might think he was on about liberals, to each their own), which is just as well because the pond recently strayed upon Jeffrey Toobin's fine portrait of Clarence Thomas in The New Yorker, outside the paywall at Partners Will Clarence and Virginia Thomas succeed in killing Obama's health-care plan?

Inter alia, Toobin raised the matter of Justice Thomas's attitude to anonymity on the web:

The opinion is an originalist tour de force, with extensive discussion of the practice of anonymous speech as practiced by the framers of the Constitution. “In light of the Framers’ universal practice of publishing anonymous articles and pamphlets,” Thomas wrote, it was clear “that the Framers shared the belief that such activity was firmly part of the freedom of the press. It is only an innovation of modern times that has permitted the regulation of anonymous speech.”

Now I know quoting an originalist is a little like quoting the nuttiness to be found in biblical literalists. The notion that the truth in relation to all matters is to be found in a strict interpretation of eighteenth century thinking is as bizarre as conforming to the precepts of the Old Testament, or thinking that a return to the gold standard will sort out the world's financial system.

But there you have it. The eternally silent tea party justice on the American bench has spoken, and it turns out anonymous blogging against the Murdoch empire is roughly equivalent to brave American revolutionaries speaking out against the tyranny of the British.

This case marked the début of Thomas’s absolutist position on free-speech issues. “I don’t agree with him, but Thomas has the most internally coherent view of any Justice,” Richard Hasen, a professor at the School of Law at the University of California at Irvine and the proprietor of a widely read blog on electoral law, said. “His view is that the First Amendment allows virtually no regulation of campaign advertising, campaign contributions, or expenditures. The Court has been moving his way.”

Long live V on the intertubes. Down with google and facebook, and their outrageous behaviour (Death of anonymity online has net users fuming).

Oops, did someone just mention that right at this minute, the pond's computer is broadcasting its internet address to the world, and right now people are tracking the pond down? Better get those proxies cranked up ...

Meanwhile, diligent readers will note that the minions of Murdoch are bracing themselves for a government review of the media, and the response has been remarkable, reminiscent of the line peddled by Chris Wallace in Fox News, as analysed by Jon Stewart:

The other side of the story. “We don’t tell both sides of the story, we tell one side…the other side, the one we perceive is never told. Because as you know, news only comes in two sides. And if the conservative side isn’t being told what’s being told must be liberal. Fox News isn’t fair and balanced. It’s balancing the system, man. Don’t you get it? The system’s unfair and unbalanced. To balance the system, Fox has to be the purest form of right wing resin. Because of how heavy left wing America is. Hollywood, comedians, every single news organization, the Internet, facts, history, science, it’s all just left wing bullshit, man….” Is Fox unbalanced? Yeah. Seriously, their ears are nearly touching the floor. But it’s only because the system is unbalanced.

Speaking of purest forms of right wing resin, that's how you can get Andrew Bolt gallumphing in to demand that fine liberal defenders of a free press and free speech stand up to be counted, in Missing as press to shove, since all they'll be defending is vigorous 'scrutiny'.

Such scrutiny is not "regime change" but the job of a vigorous media.

What's more, this scrutiny is offset by the rah-rah coverage the federal government gets from the ABC and Fairfax papers The Age and Sydney Morning Herald.

Bolt as a scrutineer? By golly, the abuse of the English language continues apace.

So it goes, and that's the way it works at fair and balanced Fox News too. You see there's one side, and then there's the other. News Corp, limited in its approach down under, is just a deliverer of scrutiny, as opposed to outrageous peddling of fundamentalist conservative ratbaggery.

If you rush off to the anonymous editorialist at The Australian (why the anonymity? Go figure), you get the same routine in Shine a light: transparent media is part of the deal:

Labor has been under pressure from its Left and the Greens for the inquiry to cover bias, although we suspect the government will be wary of any scrutiny of Fairfax papers that so often support the progressive consensus. The prejudices of the national broadcaster would be quarantined from an inquiry that looks only at print, but ABC bias could still end up as the elephant in the room. The reality is that claims of bias are often simply crude attempts to intimidate journalists and editors.

Put it another way. Claims of lack of bias in Murdoch rags are often just a crude attempt to suggest that it's the responsibility of the Murdoch press to balance the rah rah coverage for the government provided by the Fairfax papers and the cardigan wearers at the ABC.

Uh huh. But bias comes in many forms, and last night's 7.30 show (it will eventually turn up here) provided a classic, if perhaps unwitting, example of how to introduce bias into a report.

Ostensibly the subject was poker machines and the club/poker machine lobby and their fierce campaign against the government's desire to help problem gamblers, but the segment began and ended by showing young athletes working out in a giant gym space, presumably partially funded by revenue derived from problem gamblers.

If instead of these images, there had been footage of problem gamblers running their weekly paypacket through the machines, leaving children hungry and living in poverty, what visceral impact would that footage have had on the story?

Now according to muddle through theory, the editor probably reached for the tidy material the field cameraman snatched on a visit to a club, which the cameraman shot because it involved nice young people doing nice things, and why intrude on the suffering of the children of problem gamblers, and the reporter thought it was grand footage, but the unconscious effect was to produce a heavily biased image of lyrical clubs providing much used and needed community services.

Anti-government bias at the ABC from cardigan wearers? It's on show all the time - who else could bring you the utterly dire At Home With Julia - but you won't read about it in The Australian, intent on bunkering down behind its paranoid fortifications as it pursues its regime-changing conservative agenda.

And if you want another example of dissembling disingenuousness, here's The Australian discounting the significance of the Murdoch press in the Australian marketplace:

News' share of print advertising revenue is 48 per cent, and newspapers' share of all main media is 31 per cent, giving News a 15 per cent share of main media revenue. Not quite the "stranglehold" some claim.

Uh huh. That's as fine an example of confusing statistical apples with oranges as we've seen in rags in recent times. And it's matched by this piece of humbuggery:

Transparency is central to our profession and we are proud of our commitment to robust, fair reporting. Unlike some in the media, we are not interested in silencing dissent, even when dissent is directed at us.

Uh huh. Except when it comes to the war on bloggers of the anonymous kind, as readers will fondly recall back in the day when The Oz declares war on bloggers: Rosen, and Controversial political blogger unmasked as a federal public servant, and As the anonymous walls of Jericho fall, the great blog war of '10 begins.

Lordy, lordy, what would the tea party justice say about that fuss?

Never mind, for a truly epic bout of paranoia about the looming enquiry, look no further than Andrew Bolt, who thinks it's the obligation of liberals to get excited on a point of free speech principle and protect him and the likes of Glenn Milne when they publish truly tawdry bits of speculation and innuendo about the long ago love life of the current prime minister.

Bolt leads with the token leftists sprinkled through the Murdoch rags like a little salt, somehow imagining that Phillip "bring back my mate Kevin Rudd to lead us out of the wilderness into the promised land" Adams still passes muster as a leftist, as opposed to a meandering radio commentator and columnist quite content to serve as a minion of Murdochian advertising campaigns ...

Bolt also turns to that old refrain of hapless powerlessness:

Labor Senator Doug Cameron reportedly told Caucus the size of News Limited threatens our democracy, presumably because, although it owns just a third of our newspaper titles, those papers are preferred by two thirds of newspaper buyers. I guess Cameron wants people to be forced instead to buy The Age or Green Left Weekly or that News Limited be made to stop publishing some titles.

Yep, it's yet another conspiracy involving the Fairfax press. Did we mention paranoia of the most fetid and child-like kind?

Speaking of child-like, Bolt's idea of maintaining standards in the debate? Referring to Sarah Hanson-Young as a child senator. She'll be thirty in December ...

And then Bolt wraps it up with a typical flourish of paranoia:

And with conservatives as the targets . . . well, that's why so many champions of "free speech" are silent.

This always was about defending not a shining principle, but a side.

Uh huh. Which is why the response to date from the minions of Murdoch has always been about defending not a shining principle - the right of Fairfax and the ABC and bloggers and anyone else to bang on how they like - but a side. Theirs.

Because as you know, news only comes in two sides. And if the conservative side isn’t being told what’s being told must be liberal. Fox News isn’t fair and balanced. It’s balancing the system, man. Don’t you get it?

Ah well, to return to Counterpoint, lately they've taken to playing Frank Zappa - Zappa! - presumably on the basis that he once took down the eminently silly Tipper Gore, and so qualified on the libertarian side of the musical fence. (But it gets worse: Tipper Gore to be Inducted into Rock 'n Roll Hall of Fame).

Anyhoo, coming right at back at Christian Kerr - in an angry dissolute wastrel anonymous blogging kind of way , and right back at the minions of Murdoch, and more especially the notion that liberals should fling themselves in front of the tanks to preserve the rights of Andrew Bolt, when thus far not one scintilla of evidence has been provided that those rights are under threat, as opposed to say government advertising going to more efficient spaces on the web where young people do their searches ...

... when all that's being proposed is an inquiry, or perhaps an enquiry, and who can imagine they are immune from inquiry ... it's time to chill out and mellow down dudes.

We get it, you hapless folk are being intimidated by angry anonymous bloggers and raging politicians, and you're innocent, totally innocent, fleece as white as snow, and you're surrounded by the ABC and Fairfax and all that left-wing bullshit man, it's just so much bullshit, and lordy lordy what's to be done?