In which the reptiles offer up the bromancer, the lizard Oz editorialist, Lloydie of the Amazon and a bedraggled Lily of the field ...

 

 

 

It’s been great fun for professional reptile observers of late. Look at this from the venerable Meade, in full here. 

What a way to make the reptile stew go down smoothly. The Meade ferments in dark places where the pond never treads - the pond can say with some pride that it has never watched five minutes of any Sky News after dark piece in one continuous go, and has only caught the odd minute by accident, and is reminded of the days when the pond's boss would hop into a cab and hearing the parrot, would instruct very firmly, "another station, please, driver!" 

So the pond appreciates reports from the loonatic fringe:

When the Coalition lost government on Saturday night, Sky’s Paul Murray admitted he was “overly emotional” and needed to sleep on the result before analysing what went wrong.
But the journalist who campaigned nightly on his TV show to “stop the mad left” winning government was sure of one thing: “The resistance starts here.”
For six weeks Murray told his audience the polls were inaccurate and the Coalition could still win. He had cosy chats with Scott Morrison, who chose to appear on his program rather than the ABC during the election campaign.
“I’m proud of my mate”, an emotional Murray said on Saturday night when it was clear Morrison had lost.
On Sunday night he was gearing up for a new fight, saying: “Welcome to the first meeting of the new resistance”.
The reaction from News Corp’s media stable of commentators to the Labor win and the teal and Greens gains has ranged from shock to grief and anger.
Outsiders co-host Rowan Dean wasn’t taking it well. The editor of the Spectator said we were facing “three years of hard-core left-wing government that will destroy the fabric of this nation”.
For Peta Credlin, one of Murray’s Sky After Dark colleagues, the way forward was clear. The Liberal party, for which she worked before becoming a Sky talking head, must lurch to the right to provide a clear alternative.
“From Menzies, through Fraser and Howard to Abbott, the lesson is clear,” Credlin wrote in the News Corp tabloids on Sunday. “The Coalition wins and keeps winning when it’s a strong alternative to Labor. It loses when it’s hard to distinguish from the other side.”

You see? They've entirely missed the point and doubled down, as noted in Media Watch regarding the crazed Dean of reptile loonacy ...

...while Albanese strives to bring the country together, Murray won’t be the only one at Sky pledged to divide it:

ROWAN DEAN: Now we are faced with three years of hardcore, left-wing government that will destroy the fabric of this nation …

I can’t wait for, check my diary, early 2025. Put it in your diary too. Donald Trump will be sworn in as the next US president, or Ron DeSantis, and a few weeks later Peter Dutton and the Liberals will be swept into power in Australia following three disastrous and incompetent years of a Teals-led Labor government … - Outsiders, Sky News Australia, 22 May, 2022

And on and on it went.

Strap in for at least three years of nightly resistance as Sky After Dark and other voices at News Corp try to push the Liberal Party further to the right. (here)

Paul Barry had his own both siderist issues, rabbiting on endlessly about what a wonderful, skilled and experienced campaigner the liar from the Shire made, up against Albo's gaffes, and yet here we are, with the Liberals decimated, and if that's skilled marketing, the pond might hire SloMo to sell the Opera House to Barry ...

How all that skilled marketing blather about inner city 'leets warmed the cockles of the pond's readers hearts with a net zero presence in the big cities ...

Meanwhile, the reptiles at the lizard Oz have been taking it hard ...

 

 

 

 

Eek, an EXCLUSIVE featuring the bleeding obvious. Tertiary educated! More of that hideous shame, copping an education, those bloody inner city 'leets and a reassuring dose of Lloydie of the Amazon, anon ...

Now if we could just sidestep idle talk of democracy ...

 

 

 

 

... and get into the reptile feast with a bromancer-size serve ...

 

The bromancer was mentioned in Media Watch despatches...

 

 

 

 

 

Talk about a cue for another venerable Meade gobbet …

...Michael Kroger, a former Liberal powerbroker and Sky regular, expressed the pain the Sky After Dark crew was feeling after the election of an Albanese Labor government: “It wasn’t the best night for us. Let’s be truthful. It was an absolute shocker.”
Herald Sun columnist and Outsiders host, Rita Panahi, was quick to accuse Albanese of causing division because the first thing he said in his victory speech was that Labor will commit “in full” to the Uluru Statement from the Heart.
Panahi said: “It wasn’t about Australia on the international stage. The very first thing [Labor] said was concerned with race, identity politics, division, and this is what it’s going to be like for the next three years. So strap yourself in. It’s going to be an interesting period.”
Like Credlin and Kroger, Panahi was calling on the Liberals to once again appeal to the “conservative values that Labor have abandoned”.
“Labor is a radically left party which the Coalition did not in any way go after,” she said.
But it was Andrew Bolt, the Herald Sun’s star columnist and Sky News host, who reacted with visceral anger.
“Scott Morrison’s pathetic Liberals got smashed by telling the world they were the Guilty Party,” Bolt wrote. “Guilty on the ‘climate emergency’. Guilty of being mean to women. Guilty on ‘reconciliation’.
“Who’d vote for such a mewling pack of self-haters with so little self-respect that they won’t even sack a party traitor like Malcolm Turnbull? Thank God this election wipe-out has taken out many of their worst grovellers.
“Please, Peter Dutton, take over, and make the Liberals stop apologising for not being more like Labor. Let the Liberals be Liberals again. But still I see some of the more clueless Liberal survivors crawl from the wreckage and whimper that they’ve got to swing even more to the Left.”

They’ll never change. 

Ranting, raving ratbags until the end of time, always yearning for an authoritarian messiah, much like the sheep at RT or the loons on Faux Noise …and showing the way is the bromancer ...

Oh sure he's down on SloMo, but he doesn't want any talk about veering to the left or even to the centre ...

 

 

And then there was this from renegade Malcolm Farr, a News Corp refugee, exile, turncoat or modern hero, whatever, and now scribbling for the Graudian. He had great fun when he took a look at the tragedy of the reptiles, available here in full.

The pond thought it might be fun to throw in the odd chunk, as another leavening for the usual reptile stew. 

Why not sample a saucy Farr chunk of creamy goodness ...

The slackening authority of our most prominent sources of political news and analysis has been further weakened by the results of this federal election.
Few election campaigns have seen the performance of news outlets so intensely monitored, and perhaps no other election outcome has exposed such a gaping disconnect between a major news supplier and voters.
And the consequences indicate more voters are bypassing traditional media and making their own judgments on information from other suppliers, such as reputable social media outlets and online journalism.
At the centre of this extraordinary detachment of political coverage from reality are the Australian newspapers of News Corp, from the national daily the Australian to the popular tabloids in Brisbane, Sydney, Melbourne and Adelaide in particular…

Now back to the detached from reality bromancer for a final gobbet ... and of all the things to lead with, he tries on the party going, boozeup artist, Brexit liar and Covid criminal for size ...

 

Back for another ladling of the Farr sauciness, and again the bromancer scored a mention:

…News outlets back candidates for many reasons, the most salient being because they genuinely believe, after an honest evaluation, they would do the job properly, or better than the alternative.
It’s not unusual for a newspaper to stand by its principled assessment. In fact, that is an important purpose of their work.
But promoting an evaluation which isn’t genuine and balanced is a betrayal of that purpose.
In that vein, the brutal and relentless savaging of independent candidates by News Corp was telling. The attacks knew few boundaries.
“The most destructive, harmful and dangerous vote anyone can make in the forthcoming election is for a teal independent or the Greens,” wrote the Australian’s Greg Sheridan on 3 May. “They are both a direct threat to our national security.”
Well, that didn’t work. The Greens picked up another three seats.
Independents on Saturday stomped home in Sydney, Melbourne and Perth, and television coverage of their triumphs rivalled that given to the outgoing prime minister, Scott Morrison, and his Labor successor, Anthony Albanese.
The News Corp campaign was directed at preserving a two-party political structure – Labor v the Liberal/Nationals coalition – no matter what voters wanted.
But it wasn’t only the prospect of political diversity which agitated the newspaper group. Most of these successful independents were women. And many of the successful ones replaced men.
So, for example, Zoe Daniel took Goldstein from Liberal Tim Wilson, Monique Ryan appears set to do the same to the treasurer, Josh Frydenberg, in Kooyong, and Allegra Spender evicted Dave Sharma in Wentworth.
In some cases News Corp papers attempted a double shot project aimed at bolstering the government and damning an independent. Such as the Herald Sun running what looked like advertising but was a dressed-up front page and centre spread news story on why Kooyong voters should keep Frydenberg and not dally with Ryan.
The singular story of election night was how News Corp, with all its recourses and all its outlets, from newspapers to subscription TV news, couldn’t convince voters to follow its course, at least not in the numbers needed.
It is being seen as a demonstration of impotence in political affairs, and of absence of authority in the group’s claim to speak for the nation.
Academic and journalist Margaret Simons is no chum of News Corp but was not alone when she wrote this in the Sydney Morning Herald on 16 May: “I am not sure News Corporation bothers to deny its bias these days. But could this be the election in which the impotence of its skewed reporting is exposed?”
there was a constant rollout of the opinion panjandrums of the News Corp titles tut-tutting uninterrupted over the menace they saw, not just of a Labor government but all those female independents. Some big name writers should worry they look rather silly.
All legacy media might worry as well.
One aspect of the election campaign, anecdotally at least, was that voters knew what they wanted in news and opinion and were open to fresh avenues of information.
They watched press conferences live on the ABC or Sky News, or as they were livestreamed from online sites. Many younger voters didn’t need the newspapers their parents relied on.
The Greens even advertised on Grindr.

Meanwhile, Denis Muller was mulling on the reptiles going rogue in The Conversation and scoring a MW mention ...

 

 

 

 

 ... and that brings the pond to today's lizard Oz editorial, still on the road with the Canavan caravan ...

 

Nary a hint of a change in the reptile messaging ... have they learned any sort of lesson? Not bloody likely ...

 

Reptile brains are still exploding, still in love with diinkum clean Oz coal and climate science denialism ...

 

 

Oh yes, the fire next time. Oh wait, we've already had the fire, the rain, the drought and the maximalist climate change kicking in, but what a way to segue to Lloydie of the Amazon ...

 

 

 

 

That reminded the pond of Christopher Warren at Crikey, paywall affected:

News Corp seems to have already decided how it will approach the new post-conflict political order: with more conflict, not less. No surprise — it’s their business model, after all. It reckons that with independent teals, Greens and Labor reds, they’ll be able to paint a garish horror show for its pay-walled (and declining) grumpy old men demographic.
Time, then, for the rest of the news media to recognise that there’s now precious little useful news in News Corp.

Yes, yes, Mr Warren, there's precious little news or science, but by golly, watching the reptiles writhe in agony is some sort of sport or sick entertainment ...

And now back to Lloydie of the Amazon explaining how it's all to hard, it's just too bloody hard ...

 

 

 

 

Good old Lloydie, still doing the best FUD he can manage ... and the reptiles throwing in a few click bait videos to help him out ...

 

 

 

 

 

 

Oh come on Jimbo, the reptiles are still up for a climate war and so is Barners and so please stay on board the unrepentant Canavan caravan, it worked out so well  ... 

 

 

Hmm, Lloydie just petered out, a bit like that other peter the Murdochians perched on ...

how about this story from the Guardian featuring that useless steaming pile of English foppery, with John Harris of the Graudian thoughtfully bringing the pond up to date:

TalkTV is in trouble. Despite the millions Rupert Murdoch has invested in his newly launched television channel, and the supposedly magnetic presence of Piers Morgan, its numbers have sometimes been so low that the official broadcasting rating agency has not registered a single viewer. Last Wednesday, Piers Morgan Uncensored, the nightly showcase of debate and un-woke opinions intended to be TalkTV’s centrepiece, was said to have attracted 24,000 people, and then lost over half of them, leaving with it with an estimated audience of 10,000.
Over at GB News, the similarly right-inclined talk-based outlet that has survived its equally disastrous launch, it was presumably pints of bitter and sausage rolls all round: that night its competing offering – hosted by the somewhat niche Canadian pundit Mark Steyn – reportedly won the ratings battle with a princely initial viewing figure of 54,000.
It was for research rather than recreation that I watched Morgan’s show that night. It was an underwhelming experience: a very long hour of the host affecting to be what Noel Gallagher once memorably termed “a man with a fork in a world of soup”, fuming about everything from the governor of the Bank of England (who is “running around like a … hyperbolic headless chicken”) to an unnamed police officer who had allegedly refused to work outside office hours.
During an item that began with Morgan complaining about the royal family apologising for the British empire, a journalist from the Sunday Times had to inform him that they had done no such thing; Morgan’s thoughts about the UK’s colonial legacy found no expression more eloquent than the claim that “there is good and bad in all these things”. For a programme intended to “upset all the right people”, it is weirdly anodyne: proof, perhaps, that if you sell yourself to the public as an irate scourge of snowflakes, “cancel culture” and all the rest, it is probably best not to look like someone going through the motions.
Even if Morgan’s show – and, indeed, TalkTV itself – prove beyond rescue, they are one small part of a change that may well be here to stay, born in the madly polarised world of American news broadcasting and then taken to its logical conclusion by social media. Thanks partly to an anarchic, amateurish spirit that seems truer to its Brexity values than the slickness of Murdoch’s new offering, GB News might just about endure: though its ratings are not exactly mass-market, they seem significantly higher than Talk TV’s (Nigel Farage’s Monday-Thursday show has recently attracted a peak audience of 99,500), and the channel exerts a much bigger influence through the clips it endlessly circulates online.
“Talk” culture, moreover, has long since bled into politics. The fact that the UK has a government led by a former newspaper columnist was always going to make us a case study in this syndrome, and so it has proved. Deporting refugees to Rwanda is the kind of idea that might have been proposed by a GB News host or some irate caller to LBC, and it is now being rolled out into the real world. Much the same point could be made about Brexit.
But the best example is surely Boris Johnson and his colleagues’ increasingly tedious “war on woke”, whereby ministers sound off about the evils of working from home, the sanctity of statues and whatever else, and their words dissolve into the same white noise that emanates from the mouths of Morgan et al. Herein lies a model of government copied from Donald Trump, whereby leaders are not there to actually do anything, but to endlessly orchestrate outrage and division to their advantage.
And yet. Morgan’s ratings suggest that, in the UK at least, the appeal of endless “talk” has its limits. TalkTV’s basic mistake, perhaps, has been a failure to understand that the politics of polarisation and fury peaked back in 2016; and that after our drawn-out exit from the EU and our grim national experience of the pandemic, most people are now weary and jaded, and in no mood to spend endless hours watching and listening to angry people. The vast majority either want to consume as little news as possible or tune into something calm, even-handed and rooted in reality.
The war in Ukraine has provided a sobering reminder of the importance of on-the-ground reporting and journalistic expertise. Something comparable applies to this country’s cost-of-living crisis, which demands not hot takes, but sensitive coverage and serious solutions. In that context, who cares about a view of the world that seems to extend no further than a set of studio walls? What matters is the single mother who cannot feed her kids or heat her house, the family taking refuge in a Kyiv basement, and stories that prove one thing beyond doubt: that “talk” – whether “uncensored” or not – is not just cheap, but irrelevant.

Sorry John, not a single word you scribbled reached the reptiles at the lizard Oz, and for those who've hung around, the reptiles provided a ripper by digging up a splendid Lily in the field ...

 

 

 

 

Now in case you're wondering who this splendid Lily of the field is, she's from the Speccie mob ...

 

 

 

 

And she can be found at the Australian Institute of International Affairs, where she shamelessly boasts of being a member of the 'leet, with a Bachelor of Laws degree ...

Eek, a tertiary education! Well there's a fuck-up right from the get go, but as a Speccie wannabe, our Lily of the field can say what the reptiles can't, though they didn't even bother to dig up a snap ...

 

 

 

 

Ah yes, concerned ordinary people with a Bachelor of Laws degree ... but if they can't dig up a snap, couldn't the reptiles at least have provided a cartoon?

 

And so on with the war ... and yep, blather yet again about the cashed-up 'leets ... perhaps having a Bachelor of Law degree isn't a big earner these days ...

 

 

So much anger and so much stupidity, all in the one priceless serve ... and yet, take us surfing, infallible Pope ...

 

Is it wrong for the pond to gloat? Oh there'll probably be schadenfreude in due course, but then there's been plenty to go around already ...

...that doesn’t mean we didn’t see some silly polling stories in the media.

Like this exclusive from Ten News last week, based on leaked Liberal polling, boosting the chances of Katherine Deves:

PETER VAN ONSELEN: The Liberal candidate is still in the hunt to win the seat, trailing independent Zali Steggall 47 to 53 per cent. Too close for comfort in the eyes of many.  - Ten News First (Sydney), 17 May, 2022

And how did that turn out? Not well. Steggall was returned with an increased vote, 61 per cent to just 39 for Deves on the two-party preferred.

And it wasn’t a good night for Clive Palmer, either, the supposed electoral kingmaker running candidates across the country.

What did the billionaire get for his $100 million advertising blitz? Not one lower house seat.

And finally, spare a thought after a tough weekend for Sky’s Paul Murray, who, having failed to get his mate Morrison re-elected, is now leading the fightback:

PAUL MURRAY: Our laser-like focus is 1,000 days to take the country back from the mad left. It's actually 1069; I added it up today. - Paul Murray Live, Sky News Australia, 22 May, 2022
 

What a hoot it's been, and no bigger hoot than this Lily of the field ...

Consider the lilies of the field, how they grow; they toil not, neither do they spin: And yet I say unto you, That even Solomon in all his Speccie mob and lizard Oz glory was not arrayed like one of these.

 

 

There it is again, boasting about holding a law degree. Shouldn't she be boasting about getting up at 4 am to dine on breakfast of tar and gravel, before heading off to factory for endless shift, before heading off to bed at 4am, only to get up at 3 am, dine on breakfast of cardboard and cement before heading off to factory to start shift?

The pond takes it as a sign. 

The bromancer, the lizard Oz editorialist, Lloydie of the Amazon, the plucking of Lily from the field ... all signs, portents, runes, tea leaves and chicken entrails ...

There'll be no change ...

News Corp seems to have already decided how it will approach the new post-conflict political order: with more conflict, not less. No surprise — it’s their business model, after all. It reckons that with independent teals, Greens and Labor reds, they’ll be able to paint a garish horror show for its pay-walled (and declining) grumpy old men demographic.
Time, then, for the rest of the news media to recognise that there’s now precious little useful news in News Corp.

But what splendid cartoon coat hangers they make ...and so at last to the immortal Rowe for a cartoon ... with more always here ...
 

 

 

Eek, look under the airstair ... the reptile dreaming already at work ...

But did you notice that image at the top of the Rowe account?

By golly that makes it hard for a reptile to swallow ... and what a fine reference it is ...