Well that was weird but somehow deeply instructive. The pond sat down, as it usually does on a Monday night, to watch the latest John Oliver episode and it happened to be about trans rights.
For those who don't watch "in the wild", Rolling Stone followed up with John Oliver Explains (Again) Why Opposing Trans Rights Is Wrong, (dammit, paywall), while The Daily Beast did the same with John Oliver Debunks the Right’s Weirdest Anti-Trans Conspiracy Yet. (also a paywall)
(While adding a header, the pond thought it should add a link to Tim Miller's piece at The Bulwark, Furrygate: A Litterbox of Lies, featuring furry panic, a bit like tranny panic of the Paul Barry kind, only lighter).
And then the pond watched Media Watch, only to be served up an epic bout of transphobia and bigotry, thinly disguised as a quest for "impartiality", but trotting old fears, including the sports mythology that Oliver had comprehensively debunked.
The pond gave The Insiders another chance on Sunday and was bored witless, and now Media Watch bites the dust, and that's just about it for the pond and ABC TV ...
Still, with Oliver off next week, it opens up Monday night in a most pleasant way ...
The pond will now just stick to news radio and its herpetological studies, though more and more frequently the well is also running dry at the lizard Oz ... look at today's offerings and see what you could make of these runes and chicken entrails ...
The long absent lord sent the floods to aid Comrade Dan's re-election chances? With a bonus blast about "black-cladding"?
And the triptych of terror was too far out for the pond, though there were a host of new contenders ...
The reptiles are sounding increasingly terrified - zoom bombing, Islamic families, extremist lefties.
It all sounded extremely dire, so what could the pond do but give Ticky and Elon a go ...
Um, Ticky, we need to talk about Chairman Rupert, currently busy rejoining Faux Noise and News Corp so that he might engineer himself back into a position of power that should disturb markets and world leaders ... per Glenn Dyer and Stephen Mayne at
Crikey with
Why is Rupert Murdoch thinking of putting the band back together?, paywall, but inter alia:
...forget the dynastic stuff for a moment and focus on the underlying business logic. To put it simply, the two Murdoch companies have missed the bus on the biggest media development for decades — streaming video pioneered by Netflix.
Streaming is now in every media group’s armoury — except Fox Corp and News Corp. It is an offering in the 65%-owned pay TV business Foxtel through its sports stream called Kayo and the general entertainment offering Binge. But if you go to the Foxtel dashboard, so are Netflix, HBO, Paramount+, Disney+ and other streams from various foreign media companies.
Having sold its production crown jewels to Disney, Fox (and Foxtel in Australia) doesn’t have access to or produce enough of its own programming to justify a few hours of its own original stream each day, let alone a week or a year.
And that’s why recombining the empire’s two arms looks like an attempt to scale up and stay in touch with a media landscape that has evolved away from the Murdochs’ dreams of power and influence.
Netflix has around 220 million paid subscribers and is about to start an advertising-based streaming offer. Disney now has around 221 million paid subscribers (including ESPN), while smaller rivals Discovery, HBO and Paramount have around 100 million between them.
Compare that with Apple, which has a staggering 860 million subscribers to its music, Apple TV, cloud storage and other services offerings, although this would include some double counting. Apple also has a rapidly growing digital ad business.
Amazon has around 200 million Prime subscribers and a rapidly growing online ad business. And through Google and YouTube, Alphabet has money-vacuuming businesses that no other media company possesses. YouTube alone now has revenues running neck and neck with Netflix at around US$28 billion to US$30 billion a year. Alphabet’s overall revenues now exceed US$250 billion a year.
These companies and their offerings will drag more money away from the TV businesses of Fox in the US, including Fox News, from Foxtel here and from the company’s newspapers around the world. Probably only the Dow Jones Co looks like it will prosper as a growing business data and information service.
With only one child still working in the family-controlled businesses and Rupert preparing for life after he departs, it makes sense to put the empire back together.
However, it won’t be an easy sell, especially as both companies make a controversial push into the Australian and US gambling markets. The combined company will be a much bigger target for advertising bans and divestment movements, and Rupert will probably need to keep it listed on the ASX to avoid potential regulatory opposition on foreign investment grounds.
Why is it that the reptiles always forget that Chairman Rupert's contemptible Faux Noise and the likes of Tuckyo Carlson have a huge streak of pro-Russian sentiment, and buying into that conspiracy-laden channel is just as bad as buying a Tesla ...
The pond has a profound contempt for Musk, but he's just doing the Faux Noise thing - wanting the mango Mussolini to run wild and free on Twitter (admittedly instead of on Fox), and wanting to give Vlad the Terrible a break ...
The Chairman and the Musk are not that far apart ...
Um, Ticky, it wasn't so long ago that people were asking more than what was going on behind the scenes. They were astonished by what was happening in front of the cameras ...
There's more
here for Ticky to read, but Ticky never once shows signs of understanding she's a kissing cousin to Tuckyo, and soon might be getting even kissier if the two corps merge ...
Who knows? Perhaps we should ask a role model and inspiration to all the billionaires wanting to fuck the planet? Come on down Chairman Rupert ...
And so to the usual Tuesday groaning, and it's a pitiful effort. If it isn't activist judges, or activist environmentalists, then it surely has to be activist super funds ... but the pond has faith. If climate change doesn't get a mention, it'll eat the piggy bank ...
At least the activist funds for a moment took the Groaner's mind off the usual suspects ...
... and no doubt, Media Watch style, diversity, equality and inclusion will score a negative ... but have faith, because soon enough dinkum, clean, Oz coal - buy shares now - will score a mention ...
Ah, thar blows the old dame, with a classic Groan:
"It reads like a year II essay about the need for climate action and social justice - lots of assertions, worthy-sounding nonsense and random footnotes."
And of course there was that mention of gender composition and fossil fuel companies doing splendidly, and as for climate science, nothing to see in a Groan ...
The pond had to go for a cartoon-led recovery, because getting through the old duck's groans these days is increasingly difficult ... you see, social inequality and gender inequality were also there for a groaning, or a Media Watch style pounding, all in the name of impartiality of a peculiar groaning kind ...
Meanwhile, another cartoon reminded the pond of an ancient wonder returned to stalk the world stage...
There's still a lot of great comedy stylings doing the rounds, with the Graudian featuring ‘Virtuous globalization mastermind’: Scott Morrison lauded by international speaking circuit agency
Former prime minister Scott Morrison has been described as a “virtuous globalization mastermind” and credited with “controlling natural disasters” by the agency that says it now “exclusively” represents him.
Morrison is known for “aggressively working toward a net zero global emissions economy”, the Worldwide Speakers Group said.
Those comments prompted the University of Canberra’s Prof Chris Wallace to say the gig “raises former prime minister Scott Morrison from the national to world-class gaslighter league”.
Morrison, now a backbencher, remains the member for Cook.
Morrison and his government received widespread criticism for dragging its feet on the climate crisis...
Indeed, indeed, and stringing those three words together reminded the pond of the Korean style which might see you celebrating Happy Harmonious Honesty, but the pond needed a light moment before searching for its bonus, by turning to the top of the lizard Oz digital page ...
Alas, that remarkable saga is unfolding in the courts, and so is off-limits to the pond, and that only left the bromancer, and the pond will concede it was a cunning ploy, but sorry reptiles, it won't work, giving the bro a hard time by attempting to defend the indefensible Ivan the Terrible or Emperor Xi simply isn't the pond's style ...
Who's your favourite dictator? There's a simple answer, but the pond has already done Tuckyo Carlson and Faux Noise, so best move on to the next gobbet ...
The pond is only in it for the entertainment, and to read the bromancer piously scribble "Rudd is right" was the pond's entertainment for the day ...
All those years imbibing the reptile teaching that Rudd was as wrong as a blind pink batt suddenly flew out the window, without so much as a blind bat radar ping...
But speaking as we must of increased isolation, the pond did enjoy this Wilcox, though it did wonder why it retained the framing ...
Insignificance agreed, and it's on with the bromancer, still musing on in an inimitable way, without ever wondering once why even now, there's still a Papal state ...
Of course Chairman Rupert was an Australian, and pretty undignified and publicly unrestrained in the way he ran through wives in his later years, but still it can be observed that he has engineered a cult of cash and power that has as much personality as a pound note in the pond purse ...
Still, brooding about the Chairman got the pond to the last short gobbet ...
And then what do you know, the immortal Rowe chimed in with an entirely appropriate cartoon just to wrap things up ...
Yes, directors of companies are always ready for a groan about them pesky shareholders. Back in the day when our Dame was a director of Santos, South Australian Ports Corporation, Mayne Nickless, SGIO - and apparently a couple of others - larger shareholders tended to be financial institutions, who could be relied upon not to be intrusive at the AGM, and individual investors who, if they wanted to ask questions, could be fobbed off by suitably assertive chairpersons. Most of them were there for the free bikkies and cheap coffee anyway.
ReplyDeleteBut that was 30 years ago. Of course, directors who were not ‘collegial’, and who, themselves, might raise awkward issues like audit in a major bank, could be removed from the board, with the tacit approval of the finance corporations that held significant voting rights; ‘collegiality’ was seen then as very much in the best interests of shareholders, and certainly of the company. We didn’t want the Morgenblätter hinting at any disunity in the board.
Now larger shareholders are more likely those superannuation funds, who seem to think that ‘shareholding’ gives them some right to ask questions of the company they think they own a piece of. Cheeky possums even question how much executives and directors are paid to save them - shareholders - from having to worry about where the company is going, and how it might get there. I mean - who is better placed to know the best interests of shareholders? - directors, most of whom sit on several boards - or, er - shareholders?
Perhaps on another day, our Dame might give us an analysis of how corporations that have prospered in the longer term have done so by focussing wholly on ‘generating great returns for shareholders’ - and how that has made them way more successful than other corporations that have developed and expanded their core business, promoted productivity and efficiency with their workers, (note, ‘with’, not ‘on’ workers), maintained their social contract with the communities they affect, and suchlike. A quick look at what too many Australian companies have done with the virtually free money that government policy has put at their disposal over the last few years, could give us a useful indication, but I suspect the analysts for the super funds are already on top of that.
Ok, Morgenblätter = morning leaves = morning newspapers. Learn a word a day. But I guess all that collegiality was prior to Stephen Mayne and the rise of the 'activist' small shareholder.
DeleteThat's terribly unfair Chadders. Who knew you could spin gold from Dame Groan dross?
DeleteGroany: "Somehow HESTA knows best how to run companies..." Well now, given that Groany also reckons: "one of the large funds, HESTA." then just maybe it does. Certainly it knows better than those 'retail funds' that produce much lower "shareholder returns" than HESTA and other 'industry funds', yes ?
ReplyDeleteBut here she goes again: "...generating great returns for shareholders isn't good enough for HESTA. Companies should do what we might expect governments to do." She does admit HESTA produces "great returns" though, and yes, when governments plainly refuse to do what governments should do, and should have been doing for some time, then what options do we have ? It's either the HESTAs or nobody. And how is a sadly ruined world in any way a good return for any company's shareholders ?
So when Groany spouts: "...HESTA members basically want a comfortable retirement and the sole purpose of the fund according to the law is to maximise the retirement incomes of members." does that mean that HESTA should be striving to maintain a world in which the members can actually retire ? A world in which they won't be drowned in floods, die of thirst in severe droughts or be cooked in major heatwaves ? Or have to pay an annual fortune in insurance against all three ?
But no, Groany is a reptile, so any "climate change" is now, and always will remain, benign
Pro tip for Groany, well, for all the reptiles really, its best if your example supports your argument rather than contradicts it. They seem to think if they shout loudly enough no one will notice the detail.
DeleteIt seems to work for a lot of people, Bef.
DeleteBut then most of their audience don't hear or read what is actually said, but insert their own thoughts and believe that they are what was communicated.