How dare New Zealanders challenge the might of jihadist Murdochians ...

The pond was wildly excited to discover that Nuw Zeelund had its equivalent to the cesspit known far and wide as the Bolter's blog ...

Seeing as how the Kiwis have once again reduced Australia's pride to a rubble of humiliation and shame - at least if you take the art of bum sniffing, gouging, biffing, trampling, rucking and mauling as a point of national pride, as opposed to a Sydney north shore eccentricity up there electing Tony Abbott - it's good to see the silver fern in turmoil.

Everybody's had a bite at it, and The Graudian made it top of the digital page with The whale that swallowed New Zealand's election campaign.

Speaking of The Graudian, that reminds the pond of why we remain loyal to the traditional spelling of the rag's name. This is what they managed last night:

If that's what assorted alleged professionals can manage ... it makes the pond pleased at its own assorted typos and stuff ups, which are invariably the fault of amateur NZ subs ...

Meanwhile, the NZ Herald has been full of it with all sorts of stories, including the front page fall out last Friday, though you have to look below the poignant sun dance and that strange man in black:

If you head off to the blog at the heart of the trouble, Whale Oil, it turns out to be just another climate denialist, astro turfing, gutter crawling, Tea partying, racist, homophobic, abusive blog of the standard right wing kind. It's tawdry, and after spending a little time there, the pond felt the urgent need of a shower, as if the pond had been too long out on a muddy field rucking and mauling ...

What can you say about a site or a site owner that boasts it's in to dirty politics? Where's the Solvol?

(more old household product ads here)

What's more interesting is the astro turfers and fellow travellers who use the blog to help out rubbish foods, soft drinks, tobacco, alcohol ... you know the sort that calls anyone opposed to smoking a zealot, the climate denialist mob and other usual suspects of the IPA kind.

The NZ Herald did a tidy profile in Whale Oil and friends, and what a collection of scum floating on the surface of the full to overflowing intertubes ...

Still, there's an upside, because it introduced the pond to a new word for public health advocates, "troughers", presumably derived from snouts in trough, which is double fun because Whale Oil and its friends look and sound very much like pigs indulging in swill ...

Never mind, in the end, it's nothing to do with the pond, though it is curiously something of a relief.

For a long time the pond laboured under the eccentric delusion that Nuw Zeelund was a land of polite, quaintly spoken, mildly conservative, civilised and companionable folk in the grip of a most peculiar vowel shift. It turns out that the country can be brought to heel by a rabid, ratbag blogger up there with all that the Bolter and the Murdoch hounds of hell can offer ...

Which in turn reminded the pond of the Daily - today the Sunday - Terror, home to the rabid and the ratbag on these fair shores.

It seems the Terror has realised its most valuable asset - its rabid ratbags - aren't given enough of a place in the sun, and with Islamophobia the new business model for the rag, it's gone all out to show them off:

Where to start with that lot?

Well Akker Dakker is just doing a standard bit of Islamic fear and loathing - though a noble commenter by the name of David took to trolling the few comments Akker Dakker had attracted by calling him out as a fear monger full of loathing.

The real fun was to see the way the Terror is presenting Akker Dakker these days, as if he was some sort of boofhead rugger bugger:

Eeek, enough of that already.

Then it turned out that if you clicked on the names below the Akker Dakker story, you weren't taken to the featured columnists, but to the rabble known as the opinion pages.

The pond was mystified. Who was this opinion maker Buzz Rothfield? He wore a tie which seemed to suggest he was serious, a Terror bouffant Dennis Shanahan type.

Well it turned out that Buzz wrote about thugby league, and claimed to have a "no dickhead" policy, but as he wrote about dickheads, this claim was even more mysterious ...

As for the rest, the opinion pages still seemed to be festooned with writers and editorialists still in the grip of deep Islamic fear and loathing, no doubt still experiencing the after-shocks of young Timmie Bleagh's epic journey into the wilds of Lakemba ...

So how's Islamophobia working out as a marketing strategy, with wall to wall abuse of Islamics that makes the pond's sojourns with angry fundamentalist Sydney complementarian gayphobic Anglicans seem like a Sunday bush picnic?

Well there's the rub, as Crikey revealed:

Of the major tabloids the weekday edition of News’ monopoly masthead in Brisbane, The Courier-Mail, suffered the steepest falls, with revenue dropping 18% to $158 million while operating income fell 68% to just $17 million. The Sunday Mail revenues fell 15% to $71 million and operating income fell 33% to $20 million. 
The weekday edition of Sydney’s Daily Telegraph was another weak performer, with the lowest profit margins at 5%, with revenue dropping 14% to $160 million while operating income fell 65% to just $8 million. The Sunday Telegraph revenues fell 15% to $94 million and operating income fell 53% to $7 million. (here, paywall affected)

Strange, the pond thought Islamophobia would deliver a real sales hike in Lakemba and other points west...

Crikey also asked the question Are News Australian newspapers really doing better than last year, and suggested that in reality News Corp could be facing significant impairment and restructuring charges:

If a cut of US$1.7 billion is made, most of it will be applied against the goodwill value of the company’s newspapers in Australia, the UK and US and could cut the value of the papers to a few hundred million dollars — which is virtually nothing given the amount of money invested in them over the years. 
And why would most of the impairments in news and information be applied to the News Corp Australia papers? Well, according to the 2013-14 annual report, Australia recorded the largest falls in revenues (ad revenues fell US$314 million alone due to a mix of currency changes and falling revenues), the earnings contribution from Australia was 51% (or US$67 million) of the US$130 million fall in earnings for the division in the year to June, while Australian circulation losses cost US$45 million. And no paper in Australia (especially the loss-making Australian) is as valuable to News Corp as The Wall Street Journal with its 2.3 million combined print and digital sales each day; nor is there an Australian paper as valuable to News in the UK as The Sun, which still sells more than 1.8 million copies a day (including Sundays) and has a growing base of digital subscribers. The Times is in a similar situation, as is the Sunday Times. (here, paywall affected)

Yep, it's the Oz rags that are in trouble, and the weakest links are the broadsheet jihadists at the lizard Oz, the Sydney Islamophobia jihadists, and the servile Campbell Newman pandering Queensland tabloidists ...

No wonder they put Akker Dakker in heroic military rugger bugger pose and never mind the mental or the physical flab ...

Meanwhile Miranda the Devine has gone missing since Tuesday and little Timmie Bleagh keeps trotting out his climate science denialism, seemingly failing to realise that he's not a patch on the Bolter, the world's most famous climate scientist ...

So after all the shock and the rage, and the indefensible behaviour of the Terror in the past week, where has it ended up this weekend on its front page?

Ah, they've given the jihad a rest. Not a sight nor sound on the front page of the tree killer edition from the militarist Akker Dakker ...

But fear not. Sunday might be a day of rest, but the jihad will continue, onwards and downwards to commercial oblivion, rode the ragtag grab bag of rabble rousers. See NZders, you might win at bum sniffing and rucking and mauling, but we're still the best at jihads ...