In which the pond wonders what happened to the larrikin galah in the Major Mitchell, and slumbers as the woke Caterist makes off with some cultural heritage cash in the paw ...

 

Weeks of reptiles rabbiting on in a super way, and all the pond gets is a Newspoll and a simplistic Simon spinning the result as best he can, which is to say not very best at all ... and look at the company he's forced to keep, what with Tom not up on the poll news ...

Come on Tom, shouldn't that be "How the reptiles botched a tedious super raid?" 

All that super blather day in, day out, and simpleton Simon is forced to run with Super a win with voters? 

Sure he added a gotcha, but before the gotcha came Super a win with voters, or put it another way, Super a drop dead loser for fuckwitted reptiles ...

Enough already, this day the reptiles turned to another angle, because suddenly the nation was stuck in reverse ...

Note the mutton Dutton in angelic pose, a heavenly light almost shining on him, and the nation stuck in reverse, though it seemed to the pond that the reptiles' super coverage had been the thing stuck in reverse. 

Still, reverse gear was enough for the tree killer edition, though there was a hint of unhappiness in the snap showing that cockroaches might soon have to vote on the Dominator's future...

Knowing this was the day that the notorious galah, the Major Mitchell, came out to blather about the meejia, the pond had wondered if at last he might show some guts, or if he was, in ancient Tamworth argot, a gutless wonder ...

The biggest media story in recent times has involved the infamous behaviour of Faux Noise and its hosts, not to mention the words and deeds of the Chairman, but like the appearance of brother Stuie, and today Malware in the Robodebt inquiry, it's been disappeared by the reptiles.

Time for the Major to make a larrikin stand, or squawk in his usual galah way? 

He could have referenced all kinds of reports ...  there was the shame of others in the conservative commentariat  on full display in Conservative Media Pay Little Attention to Revelations About Fox News...

The Major wouldn't be like these supine dropkick losers and ignore the matter, would he? He'd surely show a spine, he'd surely be brave and bold, perhaps even a bit cocky about being such a dare devil ...

...On 26 of the most popular conservative television news networks, radio shows, podcasts and websites, only four — The National Review, Townhall, The Federalist and Breitbart News — have mentioned the private messages from Fox News hosts that disparaged election fraud claims since Feb. 16, when the first batch of court filings were released publicly, according to a review by The New York Times.
The majority — 18 in all, including Fox News itself — did not cover the lawsuit at all with their own staff. (Some of those 18 published wire stories originally written by The Associated Press or other services.)
Four outlets mentioned the lawsuit in some way, but did not mention the comments from Fox News hosts. One of those, The Gateway Pundit, published three articles that included additional unfounded allegations about Dominion, including a suggestion that security vulnerabilities at one election site using Dominion machines could have led to some fraud, despite no evidence that votes were mismanaged.
“These results are shocking,” one article asserted.
The Gateway Pundit did not respond to requests for comment.
Even in a media world often divided along partisan lines, the paucity of coverage stands out, media experts said. And it means that many of the people who heard the conspiracy theories about election fraud on Fox’s networks may not be learning that Fox’s leaders and on-air stars privately dismissed those claims.
“Choosing not to do stories is a form of bias,” said Tom Rosenstiel, a veteran press critic and a journalism professor at the University of Maryland. “The things you ignore and the things you choose to highlight are an important part of how you show whether you are a serious news organization.”
Mainstream news organizations often report on themselves when they are at the center of a scandal, Rosenstiel said, because they get “much more credit when they expose the lens on themselves as aggressively as they would anyone else.”

Ah, but the lizard Oz isn't a mainstream news organisation, it's just a rabble of reptiles. How delusional of the pond to harbour a hope that the Major would be different.

Birds of a feather flock together and the Major is in wretched company, a kind of Kurtz in an antipodean heart of of darkness, so this is what the pond copped this day  ...

What the heck? The Major's going to blather on about city news desks failing the test on rural issues? 

What about News Corp failing rural and suburban issues, and not that long ago, but apparently the Major has forgotten all about it ... he really should catch up with the Graudian ...

Or perhaps the ABC, Regional Australia laments loss of print as News Corp titles go digital (and not just digital but behind paywalls, and out of sight and out of mind, with no one in the pond's family bothering to subscribe to the likes of the Northern Daily Bleeder).

And then there was the Major's other Major failing, and the company he keeps in his coverage, which is to say, no coverage at all ...

...Those dueling legal arguments, though, haven’t been aired on Fox’s networks.

The lone on-air mention of the case on Fox News has been by Howard Kurtz, who hosts the weekly Fox News show “MediaBuzz.” He addressed the Dominion case on the air this week, telling viewers: “I believe I should be covering it.”

“But,” he continued, “the company has decided as part of the organization being sued, I can’t talk about it or write about it, at least for now. I strongly disagree with that decision, but as an employee I have to abide by it.”

A Fox News spokesperson did not respond to a request for comment.

There are no legal orders barring media organizations from covering lawsuits they are involved in. And Rosenstiel pointed to a long history of past suits and scandals covered by the news organizations involved. The Washington Post, for example, ran a deeply reported article on how and why a reporter had made up a character in an article that won a Pulitzer Prize in 1981. The prize had been withdrawn a few days earlier after the fraud was uncovered. In 1999, the Los Angeles Times ran an investigative report on a profit-sharing agreement the company had entered into with the Staples Center.

But Fox’s lawyers might fear that anything said on the air could be used against the company at the trial, said Jane Kirtley, a professor of media ethics and law at the University of Minnesota.

“From an ethical perspective, I’d say it’s a real disservice to their viewers on Fox not to be covering this,” she said.

Another publication in the Murdoch media empire, The New York Post, has also not covered the recent filings. (A Post spokesperson declined to comment.) The Wall Street Journal, which the Murdochs also own, covered both filings in February and ran an article Thursday examining whether Dominion’s evidence can meet the high bar needed to win defamation cases against media outlets.

Newsmax and The Washington Examiner — two of the four outlets reviewed by the Times that mentioned Dominion’s lawsuit but not the specific comments by Fox News’ hosts — have focused on Rupert Murdoch’s private messages, including that he saw Newsmax as a potential threat to Fox News. The Western Journal, another one of the four, mentioned the lawsuit in an article about Keith Olbermann, a former MSNBC anchor and a regular critic of Fox News.

The hosts’ comments have also not been a focus of users on right-wing social media. Instead, many users on sites like Gab and Truth Social accused Murdoch of disloyalty to former President Donald Trump. One of the articles by The Gateway Pundit that advanced voter fraud narratives about Dominion was the most-shared story about the case on right-wing social media, according to data from Pyrra Technologies, a company that monitors the right-wing internet.

When users on right-wing social networks discussed the Fox News hosts, many criticized Carlson, Hannity and others for not fully believing the election fraud lies they appeared to endorse, Pyrra found.

The pond would have accepted the Major's constant major deviations from matters of media interest if he'd decided it was only a comedy item, New Yorker style ...

But no, he's off with simplistic Sharri and the usual serve of reptile regressivism ...

The demise of local newspapers? 

Go talk to the hand ... and keep on ignoring that story has that enchanted others, with The New Yorker offering Fox, the Dominion Case, and the Perils of Pivoting from Trump (possible paywall).

It was a slow news week in Washington, at least if you watched Fox News. On Tuesday night, apropos of nothing in particular, two of the network’s marquee prime-time hosts, Tucker Carlson and Sean Hannity, retreated to their safe space, devoting long opening segments to bashing President Biden. Hannity banged on about Biden’s friendship, decades ago, with the long-dead Democratic Senator Robert Byrd, who had been a racist Klan member as a young man before renouncing the group. Carlson opted for a more straightforward hit, arguing that Biden’s age makes him unfit for office. For Fox, these monologues are what you talk about when you don’t have anything else to talk about, like when a comedian runs out of material and starts making jokes about the weather...

...Just as notable was what the Fox hosts did not mention. Donald Trump, for years the hero of their nightly shows and even now the front-runner for the 2024 Republican nomination, was barely acknowledged. Nor was the week’s biggest news concerning Fox itself: the revelations in two extraordinary recent legal filings by Dominion Voting Systems about the cynical lengths to which Carlson, Hannity, and others at Fox went to promote Trump’s false claims that he had won the 2020 election—despite knowing that he had lost. They did so, according to evidence obtained by Dominion during discovery in its $1.6-billion defamation lawsuit against Fox, because Fox’s Trump-loving viewers refused to abandon their defeated President, preferring to go along with his “rigged election” delusions rather than admit his defeat.

Fox has publicly denied the charges and complained in statements that Dominion’s attorneys “cherry-picked” quotes to make their case. But neither those claims nor the fact that Carlson and Hannity did not mention these revelations make them any less revelatory. There comes a point in many a contentious divorce proceeding where the sordid private details of the relationship are aired in public. It appears that we have now reached that point, courtesy of Dominion, in the long, unhappy breakup of the marriage of convenience between Trump and the network that both enabled and shaped his dysfunctional Presidency.

The astonishing disclosures in Dominion’s legal briefs are almost too numerous to mention, and are all the more remarkable because they are based on internal e-mails, sworn testimony, and text messages of the Fox brass themselves, including even Rupert Murdoch’s correspondence with his son. Monday’s nearly two-hundred-page filing is a better Washington read than most political thrillers. Read it for yourself.

What I found most notable about the lawsuit’s disclosures is what they said about Fox executives’ fear of their own audience—and unabashed willingness to lie to that audience if that is what it took to keep their loyalty. The Dominion filing confirmed that in the aftermath of the 2020 election, Murdoch had finally decided to abandon Trump. “We want to make Trump a non person,” the tycoon e-mailed a former Fox executive, two days after the January 6, 2021, insurrection. But Murdoch could not quite execute the pivot he wanted. “We need to be careful about pissing off the viewers,” Fox News’ C.E.O., Suzanne Scott, had warned Murdoch, on January 5th. “We have to lead our viewers which is not as easy as it might seem,” Murdoch told his son Lachlan, in another e-mail. Asked why he allowed the network to air ads from the election-conspiracy theorist Mike Lindell, Murdoch said in a deposition that the reason was “not red or blue. It is green.” Money talks.

Trump’s predictably hysterical response to the Dominion revelations suggest that he has not given up on Murdoch yet. He’s just really, really angry at him. Like a rejected spouse, he wants to share his grievances—in ALL CAPS—with the world. Perhaps, in typically Trumpian fashion, he still thinks he might be able to bully his way back into the relationship. “If Rupert Murdoch honestly believes that the Presidential Election of 2020, despite MASSIVE amounts of proof to the contrary, was not Rigged & Stollen, then he & his group of MAGA Hating Globalist RINOS should get out of the News Business as soon as possible, because they are aiding & abetting the DESTRUCTION OF AMERICA with FAKE NEWS,” Trump wrote on his Truth Social platform after Monday’s filing.

The silence of his longtime defenders on Fox seemed especially to hurt Trump. He, too, it seemed, has been listening night after night as the network’s anchors bashed away at Joe Biden—and never even mentioned Donald Trump. The former President blamed Murdoch. “Certain BRAVE & PATRIOTIC FoxNews Hosts, who he scorns and ridicules, got it right,” Trump wrote. “He got it wrong. THEY SHOULD BE ADMIRED & PRAISED, NOT REBUKED & FORSAKEN!!!”

The Dominion lawsuit against Fox News is not merely a historical exercise in accountability. (Though, it should be noted that, more than two years after Trump’s campaign to overturn the 2020 election, Fox News has a real chance of facing more sanctions for its role in that tragedy than Trump himself.) That’s because Trump remains the Republican front-runner for 2024. What will happen if he runs and wins the Republican nomination without Fox’s imprimatur? Will the network once again fall in line, as it did in 2016, cheerleading for a G.O.P. victory even after it nominated a candidate Murdoch did not want? Or will the divorce proceed? The internal machinations revealed in the Dominion case hardly suggest a network willing to stand its ground.

On Sunday, Fox released a new poll of Republicans that, consistent with other recent national surveys, found Trump leading the Republican field over Fox’s new favorite, Florida Governor Ron DeSantis. Fox, though, did not heavily promote its findings. Trump was plenty upset about that, too. Murdoch’s network, while enforcing what appears to be a de-facto ban on Trump these days, has made a remarkable effort to puff up his would-be rival, putting DeSantis on air hundreds of times since Trump left office and touting him as “the future of the party,” as one Fox producer breathlessly pitched DeSantis’s spokesperson in a 2021 e-mail obtained by the Tampa Bay Times. DeSantis’s new, campaign-style book is also getting robust promotion this week across the Murdoch media empire. “FoxNews is promoting Ron DeSanctus so hard and so much that there’s not much time left for Real News,” Trump lamented on Sunday after the poll’s release failed to produce the coverage he hoped.

Trump’s whining aside, however, it’s notable how Trump continues to dominate the Republican Presidential field—even without extensive coverage by the country’s dominant conservative news source. The crisis that Fox faced in the disastrous aftermath of the 2020 election is the same one that the national Republican Party faces today. Read the Fox e-mails and texts. They show a calculating, morally bereft Republican establishment desperate to escape Trump, fully aware that he is a charlatan and liar and probably crazy, but not sure that it can win without him. Pretending he doesn’t exist is the current strategy. Does anyone really think that will work? 

Of course it wouldn't work. 

Whatever Steve Bannon might have said about Fox News at CPAC, the Faux Noise reptiles returned to the fold to run the mango Mussolini's speech to the gathered loons live ... yes, Even Fox News, a network that has kept Trump at arm’s length in recent months, ended up airing some of his speech live on television following complaints from the CPAC mainstage a day earlier about a lack of Trump coverage. (Politico). One hour 45 minutes?! Is he trying to out Castro Castro? 

What about another strategy?

Back to the Major, still showing his deep abiding love for fossil fools and fuels...

Meanwhile, the pond has to head off to Business Insider for Text message shows Fox News president refused to air Nevada election results because it would have sealed Biden's victory, The New York Times reports.

The pond doesn't mind reptiles reporting on reptiles, or even an opinion piece in USA Today ... Fox News lied about election fraud. Why didn't Trump Nation voters notice – or care? If Ford or GM lied about their cars to bolster profits, the government would intervene. But because Fox News calls itself a journalistic enterprise, the best that can be done is a defamation lawsuit.

And where's the comedy? Come on Major, come on, there's always the comedy ...

Meanwhile, the Major, a confirmed climate science denialist, is off on his own patch of turf, yet again rabbiting on about the greenies ...

"Our media"? Go talk to the hand, or better still discuss the issues in the News Corp owned regional and suburban newspapers that once used to exist ... NewsCorp staff speak out

“I want to warn a lot of young journalists about NewsCorp because I feel like a lot of us think this is going to be our only option and then we are so exploited and degraded,“ the former NewsCorp employee said.

They stated that every job has its challenges but their previous roles at other outlets didn’t have “this overarching pressure to sell subscriptions”.

Reportedly, NewsCorp journalists must show they have brought in five subscriptions through their articles every week.

The former staff member says that other community newspapers are “all about producing good quality local news, which should be our only job and priority as journalists”.

“We aren’t sales people, and our success as journalists should not be dependent on how many subscriptions you sell.“

The Toowoomba Chronicle has this week laid off “a small handful” of advertising roles, reportedly five or six.

Reportedly, the advertising team for the company’s specials papers is being migrated down South.

Our source says the advertising staff at The Toowoomba Chronicle all signed job disclosure agreements; however one staff member did post on social media stating “I am gutted”.

A staff member at Warwick Daily News has also recently left and will reportedly not be replaced.

This is in additional to the paper moving online and laying off staff last year.

Come on Major, come on, speak out, and please, instead of blathering about parrots parroting Greens propaganda, let the inner galah go, and do a Major Mitchell number on Faux noise ... perhaps by the twelfth of never?

At this point, the pond supposes there should be a bonus, but whenever the pond sees "woke" in a headline these days, it flinches. 

This just in ... Young Republicans Are Begging Party Elders To Stop Saying ‘Woke’.

To the young Republicans in attendance, the vernacular feels a bit cringe. “We don’t really use ‘woke’ as our term,” says Evan Masse, a student at the Community College of Rhode Island. Chris Johnson, the managing director of Young Conservatives for Carbon Dividends, likened its use to how an out-of-touch uncle might search for the words to describe a nephew at the Thanksgiving table. “I think a lot of older folks use it if they don’t really know what they’re referring to,” he says. “It’s a catchall colloquialism.”

Several young conservatives I spoke with at CPAC echoed some version of that criticism of party elders. Some worry that going so hard on “woke” — a term now used almost entirely derogatorily by Republican detractors — will turn off upcoming generations of voters already disinclined to support the GOP. Others simply said it had lost its meaning, as many once-favored slang terms do, when the septuagenarians in Congress started punctuating their Fox News hits with it. 

Yes, "woke" can only mean that a tedious old fuckwitted fart of the first water is about to unleash his stupidity on the world, and sure enough, the floodwaters in quarries whisperer was doing his dooty, and memories of a serve of an Oreo on a Monday just a long faded dream ....

Keep on screaming about the fat cats, and you end up with this ...

But at least you get some great portraits of the cats ...

Enough already, the pond realises that certain correspondents salivate when they get a chance to trash a good groaning, and focus up, but could they be bothered giving the flood waters in quarries whisperer and federal government taxpayer cash in paw man an equally hard time? 

His fear mongering is so obvious and pathetic even the pond can spot the tricks... not least that spraying of "woke" near and far, like a dog pissing on a lamp post to mark its territory ...

Dear sweet long absent lord, the pond is tired of all this blather. The pond knows about the woke brigade. You call it cultural heritage and stick out your paw for the cash in paw...

Of course the Caterist might argue he's fallen in with a bad crowd. He's come under the influence of the new economic mumbo jumbo which makes scoring federal government cash in the paw a cultural heritage item ... or he might just be full of hypocritical bullshit ...

You'd think after the latest Newspoll and the desperate way that simplistic Simon had to spin it that the reptiles might have decided to take a break from all their super scribbling, but they never do ... as a committed climate science denialist, the Caterist is keen to see the planet as fucked as was his understanding of the movement of flood waters in quarries...

The only upside the pond can see is that it keeps giving cartoonists reliable material ...

Nah, nah, you can do both. Stick "woke" in somewhere, and you can have a class culture war of the woke warrior kind...