In which the pond plans to end its wildcat days, but not without a hint of regret ...

 

The pond has to apologise from the get go for harping on about Australia Day and even worse, on Australia Day itself ... but of late the pond has been forced to deal with the Murdochian tabloids, and by definition, while dealing with a bunch of tools, they're not the sharpest tools in the tool shed.

That's sadly about to change and more of that anon, but please forgive the pond if it does a Tootle and wanders off the tracks to look at the great news Rupert Murdoch calls off proposed Fox-News Corp merger, and the way that the chairman has been in the wars of late ...

...The planned merger would have combined the rightwing and highly controversial TV channel Fox News and TMZ assets with News Corp’s news operations, which include the Times and the Sun newspapers and websites in the UK, the Journal and New York Post in the US, and the Australian suite of newspapers.
In a separate legal case, an Australian court will decide on Monday if Lachlan Murdoch can alter his defamation claim against independent media site Crikey to have the publisher of Private Media Eric Beecher and the company’s chief executive, Will Hayward, brought into the suit.
In December, Rupert was questioned under oath over his network’s coverage of unfounded vote-rigging claims during the 2020 US presidential election.
Dominion alleged in its March 2021 lawsuit that Fox amplified the false theories to boost its ratings and stay abreast of hard-right competitors including One America News Network, which Dominion is also suing.

Oh it's great fun, and then there was this in the Daily Beast, open to all via Yahoo News, How Rupert Murdoch’s Final Grasp for Power Failed So Spectacularly...

...The ascendancy of the stockholders over one of the most powerful and driven of media moguls is a striking demonstration that Murdoch no longer enjoys the absolute power he once had. Peter Kreisky, chairman of Kreisky Media Associates, a veteran Murdoch watcher, says:

“The promise of the Murdoch magic is severely damaged. Stockholders refused to believe that Murdoch could turn a bad deal into a good one by sleight of his mogul’s hand. Reflecting his error and the views of his major investors, stocks in NewsCorp and Fox immediately rose on the news in after-hours trading.”

This setback will refocus attention on the succession issue. Although most analysts believe that Lachlan Murdoch is the chosen successor, this sudden demonstration of stockholder clout is a warning that however much a founding mogul believes that family members will rule forever, times have changed. Kreisky says:

“This reversal of fortune demonstrates the limited credibility of Lachlan compared to his father to successfully manage a diverse portfolio of media assets. He may have good ‘cred’ at Fox but shareholders don’t see it transferable to other key parts of the business. Lachlan’s future suddenly looks limited.

“Moreover, predators are taking a new look at what might now be up for grabs if enough money is dangled before the major investors and stockholders: Hence the rumors flying after the announcement of a potential bid for the Wall Street Journal by Bloomberg.”

News Corp has produced two highly successful chief executives, Robert Thomson, who runs Dow Jones in New York, and Rebekah Brooks, who runs News Corp in London. As The Daily Beast has reported, on the basis that the merger went through, Brooks was tipped to take over from Thomson, due to retire soon, and become supremo of the newspaper businesses.

There is a rich irony in that. Brooks was the editor of the tabloid News of the World, where the newsroom was addicted to phone hacking in the pursuit of scoops, a scandal that outraged Britain and eventually led to the closure of the newspaper in 2011 and the break-up of the empire into the two parts.

Not only did Brooks escape any blame for the hacking, she was swiftly promoted to run Murdoch’s London papers at a time when the tabloids began to be decimated by the rise of even more salacious and unruly websites and social media. Under Brooks, Murdoch’s two upmarket broadsheets, The Times and the Sunday Times, have become hugely profitable, while the remaining tabloid, The Sun, loses money and has yet to build a digital presence.

The editor of the Sunday Times, Emma Tucker, is moving from London—on the initiative of Brooks—to become editor of The Wall Street Journal, the paper’s first woman editor who arrives with a record of supporting fearless investigative journalism.

When all these changes were set in motion it was assumed that Murdoch’s merger would happen. Now it looks like the future leadership of the empire will be decided not by Murdoch but by investors and stockholders—and decided on deep executive talent, not birth. The contenders will make Logan Roy’s nasty brood in the HBO series Succession look like babies.

Speaking of Succession, some might care to go on with Dumping Trump Is Just the Start of Rupert Murdoch’s Ugly New Era ...

Meanwhile, in recent times, the pond has been playing with the cards its been dealt, even though sensible people would immediately have had a go at open misère.

Yesterday the pond caused some wailing and gnashing of teeth by burrowing into the dung heap affectionately known as the HUN to aficionados of first world war nomenclature; today it's the turn of the Terror ... though it's likely not to cause as much fuss, because everyone knows the rag's a joke ...

 
But here we are ... and there was James Morrow, and the only consolation the pond can offer is that apparently he's co-host of the Outsiders on Sky After Dark....where dragons and possibly zombies be ... 

The pond will confess to knowing nothing about Morrow, and caring even less, just a look at the page is enough to make the pond rush out to chew some Tamworth grass and induce an upchuck ...

In short, there has been no end to the depths of depravity the pond has faced in recent days, and that unctuous, self-satisfied, smug, Uriah Heep-style smirk on the wretch's face says it all ...

Still, if there's one thing the pond has learned in the last few days is that it must get out more, and explore other areas of the Chairman's failing, flailing empire ...

Unshackled from the reptiles of the lizard Oz, it's been an unknown frontier and the pond seems to remember there was an inspirational TV show that celebrated that theme ...

Exotic, unknown reptiles: the final frontier. These are the voyages of the starship SS Pond. It's a never-ending mission: to explore strange new worlds full of weird folk. To seek out new mutations and new tribes of Murdochian Morlocks, molochs if you prefer. To boldly go where no blogger has gone before! Or at least no blogger still with a shred, a whiff of sanity ...

But enough of the sci fi references, let's get jiggy wit it ...and spare no thought for the morrow, because the Morrow is here with Class, not race, is the real reason for anti-Australia Day push...

As usual it was saturated with snaps in the tabloid style, and so the pond had to revert to old school blogging, just the print, thank you ma'am, just the typing ...

The push is on to shut down the simple, unifying Australia Day ritual of a beer and barbie by sniffing ‘Well, go ahead if you must, but it seems awfully divisive’. It’s worth asking how we got to this point, writes James Morrow.

Is there any other nation on the planet that has allowed its national day, indeed its entire modern history, to be so comprehensively talked down and ruined as Australia?

France has a massive party on Bastille Day every year despite the terrors of the French Revolution which followed.

In the US, where I spent nearly the first three decades of my life, Independence Day is celebrated by all.

This even though the 4th of July was not all that liberating for America’s slaves, who would have to wait nearly a century and live through a civil war before winning their own freedoms.

Yet here in Australia, which also has a history that is to say the least difficult, the push is on to shut down the simple, unifying ritual of a beer and barbie by sniffing, “Well, go ahead if you must, but it seems awfully divisive.”

Let us start out by acknowledging that of course Australia’s past, like so many other nations’, is complex.

Despite our success as a modern and prosperous democracy we could have done and can continue to do better by Aboriginal Australians. 

But even so, it is remarkable to note what is happening.

In the past week we have seen hotels that once had massive parties deciding to treat Australia Day as “just another day” to Kmart banning Australia Day merchandise from its shelves to middle management minions at a major cruise line telling crews not to put up the flag for passengers on the 26th.

Contrast this to the mood in 1988 when Australia celebrated – yes, celebrated – the 200th anniversary of the First Fleet.

On January 26, 1988, the Daily Mirror, then an afternoon newspaper before it was folded into this masthead, proclaimed in a large type banner headline the words “SO PROUD: 200 TODAY”.

A separate box read simply “Happy Birthday Australia”.

The front page was dominated by a photo of Sydney Harbour showing it so thick with boats anchored to watch a ceremonial re-enactment of the First Fleet that you could practically walk across the water, deck by deck.

At this point some might be wondering what was used as illustrations for Morrow's dirge and sure enough this was one of them ...

And thereby hangs a tale. 

Way back when the Mirror was a lefty rag. In the Sydney market, there was the morning tabloid Terror, run by the Packers and inclined to the barking mad right, and there was the afternoon The Sun and the morning Sydney Morning Herald, run by eastern suburbs ponces and toffs of the Malcolm Turnbull kind, with the Fairfax flock thinking they were born to rule, at least until young Warwick came along, and eventually the family skedaddled entirely ... though still living comfortably on the tithing of the sheep ...

Young Rupert back then understood the need for product differentiation, and when he took over from the determinedly eccentric Ezra Norton, he saw a commercial advantage in presenting an alternative in the marketplace ... per Mitchell Hobbs and David McKnight ...

 At the 1963 federal election, using the pages of his newly acquired Sydney newspaper The Daily Mirror, Murdoch backed the leader of the Labor Party, Arthur Calwell, whom he had been cultivating for some time (Munster, 1985, p. 71). The following year, he founded the new national daily broadsheet, The Australian, which was to be a loss-maker but which gave its owner political clout at the national level. It allowed him, for example, to strongly back the leader of the Country Party, John McEwen, whose protectionist economic policies he then supported (Cryle, 2008, pp. 17-20). By the 1972 election Murdoch switched the support of his newspapers to the Labor leader, Gough Whitlam, not only making financial donations but actively assisting with party publicity and speeches by Whitlam (Oakes & Solomon, 1973, p. 278). Murdoch himself later admitted: ‘we all really threw ourselves into the fight, to get a change. It did break twenty years of conservative government. Not a bad thing to do’ (Shawcross, 1992, pp. 162-163). Three years later, his newspapers turned on the government and campaigned for its defeat. The conservative parties precipitated a constitutional crisis that culminated in the dismissal of the Whitlam government by the Governor-General, with Murdoch later admitting that his newspapers played a central role in the affair (Kelly, 1995, p. 244).

Reflecting on this early period, one of Murdoch’s executives, John Menadue, noted that

    [Murdoch] was and still is, a frustrated politician. He can’t leave politics alone … working with him for seven years I saw what drove him. It was not making money, as useful as that was, but gaining acceptance by and then influence with people in positions of power (Menadue, 1999, pp. 89-90).

Though it's hard to remember, back in the day Arthur Calwell was even more conservative than Ming the Merciless in some respects. 

He had to be, he had the DLP nipping at the heels of his flock, and worse his gravel voice sounded more like a cement mixer than a politician capable of winning power... and incidentally we still have, if not actual reincarnation, then certainly the ghost of B. A. Santamaria haunting Elsinore castle in the form of prattling Polonius ...

But the Chairman saw commercial advantage in following the Labor line, until he didn't ... and that's how he could end up in bed with the autocratic authoritarian proto-fascist Trumpists, because the chairman will do anything for a dollar and for power ... and that's why the pond finds the Morrow urging on the sheep to wave flags and celebrate vastly amusing ...

Now you are hard pressed to find Australia Day bunting for the backyard and big corporates are telling workers that if they don’t want to celebrate on Thursday they can work through and take another day instead.

Talk about your false choice: How many strivers are going to risk taking the day off and risk being marked down by HR as a troglodyte?

It is worth asking how we got to this point.

Obviously the progressive capture of major institutions like schools and much of the media, particularly the ABC, is a big part of this.

What a goose, he can't even remember the line that it's actually a long march through the institutions, but what would Gramsci mean to a tabloid scribbler?

To illustrate the point that the pond was in the land of cackling populist geese, this was one of the illustrations ...

Yes, this Morrow's idea of vintage Australia is to celebrate a politician who achieved the rare feat, the incredible distinction, of not just losing government, but also his seat ...

In these places the Australian disdain for overly showy patriotism has morphed into a general belief that nothing good happened from the First Fleet to Whitlam, and that every subsequent period of Coalition government has threated (sic, so and thus) to throw us back into a new dark age.

And speaking of the Coalition, while this so-called long march has been going on since the 1960s it is worth noting that the right side of politics has never thought much to turn it around.

And yet ...

Murdoch himself later admitted: ‘we all really threw ourselves into the fight, to get a change. It did break twenty years of conservative government. Not a bad thing to do’ 

No time for irony, here no irony, so on the pond trudged, as the trudging Tudge came up, much as the rough Brough had returned from the shadowlands to haunt the lizard Oz the other day ...

When the Coalition was last in power, then-education minister Alan Tudge said all the right things about the politicisation of our classrooms.

But crucially he never managed to fix teacher education or blow up the national curriculum and start again by buying Singapore’s maths and science program off the shelf while re-writing the history bits so kids don’t wind up totally hating Australia.

Scott Morrison and his communications minister Paul Fletcher, meanwhile, bizarrely decided to give more money to the ABC despite its hit squad treatment of their government and other conservatives.

Party politics, however, only go so far here.

Another of the illustrations?

It's almost possible to feel the Morrow quiver and quail ... and certainly wail ...

Much more has happened structurally, under the surface, to get us where we are today.

No one likes to discuss it but class – in the sense of attitudes more than assets – has driven much of this shift against Australia Day.

It was in the Howard era that the first real murmurings of discontent with Australia Day started to appear amongst those who would sneer knowingly about “flag-draped bogans” with slabs of VB.

Many of those same “bogans” would turn out to be Howard’s battlers who, to hear their haters tell it, had the bad taste to take advantage of an economic boom to build businesses and better their lives.

This phenomenon was famously lampooned via shows like Kath & Kim and described on the ABC and in broadsheet metropolitan papers as, essentially, a bunch of tradies somehow striking it rich and buying V8s and McMansions and flat screen TVs.

And it goes without saying this was an appeal to the perceived Terror demographic ...

There was a Wilcox cartoon for that ...

Meanwhile, speaking of broadsheet metropolitan dailies living the life of Riley, how lost in nostalgia and the past can you get?

It's four bucks for the lizard Oz on a daily basis and five bucks for the weekend edition ... or so it was back in July 2022 when the reptiles announced a price hike ... dear sweet long absent lord, and the reptiles expect pensioners to fork out four bucks for a Sunday Terror. Four bucks!

Does this Morrow really think this tosh is going to work with vulgar youff and they might be expected to land in the embrace of the Murdochians?

Particularly for those loaded up with HECS debt in economically precarious jobs, buying into this fight became a way to push back against a vulgar, unintellectual nation they felt wasn’t rewarding them properly for their genius. Having the “right” attitude to Australia Day just became part of the uniform.

Now, many of these same people are in elite roles and have become cultural tastemakers who despite being in the minority (most Australians still want to observe the day Thursday) have an outsized influence on how the rest of us act.

Seen in this light, Australia Day becomes not just when we mark our progress from convict colony to global success story, but also when we embrace our anti-authoritarian traditions and enjoy ourselves when the wowsers, prudes and bluenoses much preferred we didn’t.

What a goose, as if the reptiles were somehow an anti-authoritarian bunch of larrikins, when they're actually in league with a bunch of populist authoritarians with autocratic tendencies ...

Meanwhile, over at The Times ...

And thereby hangs a sorry reveal. 

Yes, the pond has regained access to the lizard Oz, but decided against going there today ...

Look at the dismal parade that was on view early in the morning ...

But the pond has already seen petulant Peta in her tabloid guise, and thought down market trumpet blower was more fitting than yet more blather about the voice, apparently now a dire threat to Australia Day... as never a day goes by without monstrously stupid fear mongering... and as for the minor Milner and blather about an inevitable change of national date by """, and the lizard Oz edtiorialist once again doing all the heavy lifting ...

Faaahget it, just faashget it ...

The pond has learned much in its time out in the cold, as it confronts the harsh, demeaning reality of a return to the lizard Oz ...

There's much else to enjoy in the world ...  for example, there was this sighting ...

At first the pond thought that there'd been a simple mistake, a mix up with the dates in the transfer to Yahoo News, but no, there it was in the original ... admittedly with an original date of 2022, but then updated to January 2023, without a thought for the header ... the mystery explained, and pure gold in the process ...

And so to a final celebration before returning to the salt mine, because indeed the pond will return to its original business model ...

But from time to time, it will try to find a home for curmudgeons and grumpy old men shouting at clouds and the world ... including this Baker's dozen.

The next time he turns up recycled in the lizard Oz, the pond might pay attention ... what with the pond always being a sucker for false dawns ...

It's funny how the reptiles love a catastrophe, love to predict disaster, and adopt the pose of "that'll larn 'em", without being aware that they're on the same planet, and they might be forced to do a little larnin' too ...

Inevitably this includes the usual mention of climate science in a disparaging way ...

Before proceeding to the final gobbet, there's one thing the pond can say with some pride. It was never so desperate that it felt the need to dig into the depths with an Andrew Sullivan ...

There's slumming, and then there's dumpster diving with the bin chickens.

Sure it could read Charlie Sykes dissing Sullivan ... Why is the Right Losing the Young? produced a wondrous set of links and laughs out loud ... in part ...

Really!

And the pond could enjoy other ironies, as in this piece before it turned subscriber only ... Musk Twitter: Garbage In, Garbage Out ...

The pond knows what it was thinking. How could it return to the lizard Oz when there are comedy gems like this to savour?

And now back to the doom and gloom merchant for a last gobbet of that'll larn' 'em...

Oops for the typo, and oops for the talk of the globalists, and without a shred of irony, as this Baker plies his trade in the oven of a wannabe globalist who recently saw the glimmer of a twilight ... and now is caught up in twilight's last gleaming ...

Globalism, will we ever hear the end of it from globalist Murdochians?

And somehow this lack of irony will bring in vulgar youff?

It reminded the pond of a 1959 letter by Norman Lindsay (who has recently been the pond's toilet reading). 

Lindsay went on a rant about how Sydney wasn't the same, not like the days when he painted in a studio in Bridge street and walked in the Quay where Conrad had walked, and knew the cigarette-selling Frenchman who had lost both his hands and featured in a Conrad story ...

Lindsay got agitated about an overhead railway mounted on crude brick pillars roaring above the Quay and moaned about a "vilely designed Opera House ... being built at one end of it ..." (only Lindsay).

But then he thought of his daughter Jane ...

"Yet here is something that gives my detestation of it pause. Jane, I find, likes it. She likes its noise, its flood of speeding cars, its sense of existence pitched up to an excitement of the nerves. In short, it belongs to her earth, and mine has ceased to exist. And I know perfectly well that if I were offered the possibility of returning to it even for a day I would refuse to do so. It would become again a present-moment factuality, and I would be as indifferent to and unaware of, its nostalgic charms as I was when it was just a commonplace figment of the ays of my youth.

This is one aspect of conflict between the generations which we, at the tail-end of our generation, are apt to forget, when we are bored to hell with a stale procedure long left behind us, while the young of this generation are charging into it as something new and interesting, to be explored and exploited with avidity."

And there you have it, and there you have the likes of Gerard Baker blathering about the globalists and the Chairman a fading globalist deep in the twilight zone, and the Morrow yearning for an Australia Day that never was ... because rust never sleeps and Rish! is prone to rust, or at least a cracking good Craceing ...

Hang on, there's another Wilcox celebrating the future for vulgar youff ...

And so tomorrow, the pond will, abashed and ashamed, return to the lizard Oz, back into the salt mine, and possibly the hole in the bucket man, and even the immortal Rowe unable to provide much comfort ...

But dammit, the pond might still keep running odd clips ... these, for example, were big way back when in film schools around the world ... now lost to time and memory ...

1949! Optical sound!

 

1955! Quirky music!