In which the pond almost says tanks, but no tanks for the tedium ...

 

The pond dropped in on the ABC, a rare event in itself, to catch a little of the repeat of the Faux Noise saga and then stayed for Media Watch, and immediately regretted the decision.

First there was a bashing of the ABC for not behaving like the Daily Snail or the Murdoch tabloids in the Thorpe matter, as if an obviously disturbed woman should be hounded. What if it had been a cleaner? Would that have been newsworthy? 

Drunken outbursts are a dime a dozen, and there was nothing particularly political or policy driven in her carry on. Thorpe is no longer an official greenie and likely enough will eventually no longer be a member of parliament, so what was newsworthy about the carry on? Unless you happen to be a feral member of the Sky after dark mob or a Daily Snail tabloid type rooting in the muck for a sniff of tabloid truffle. That's what Media Watch wants the ABC to aspire to?

The pond remembers reading a long time ago about a pissed as a parrot thugby league player being dropped in the gutter outside Glebe police station and wondering why it was reading the story. Was it a chance to help the man begin a twelve step program? Eventually he did change his ways and now he's everywhere, and the pond still can't remember why it read that story, or another about him drunkenly trying to enter the wrong motel room.

Then the show did a tired rehash of everything everybody already knew about the Dominion/Faux Noise matter. 

The only fresh angle here was the coverage, or lack of it, by the local reptiles, but that was tossed off lightly at the end of the segment, because only the Bolter came to the party. 

Then came a pounding of the Terror for the sort of appalling tabloidism the show had urged the ABC to adopt in the Thorpe matter, because you can never get enough Terrorising or Daily Snailism, except when you've had too much..

After all that let down, then came the news this morning about Tuckyo Carlson, but the show was out of sorts with the times and didn't catch the fuss ...

 

It isn't the fault of a weekly show that it misses out on big stories and then must play catch up, but it urgently needs a facelift.

As for the reptile reaction to the ABC provocation by doing its Faux Noise re-run, there was the sound of ... crickets. 

The hapless reptiles couldn't say boo to a goose as the chairman wielded the axe and all sorts of loons came out of the cupboard. 

The Graudian's live coverage had some fun, and it wasn't of the 'disturbed woman ranting on the footpath' kind ...

It almost made the pond miss the news that the Georgia DA would be announcing charges this summer ...

And it wouldn't be a story these days without a contribution from wacky, zany, wild-eyed Marge ...

Meanwhile, the Tuckyo angle even made it into the reptile bubble down under...

You had to hunt for it beneath the snap of the funny politician with a bemused grin and the reptiles raging about defence, and when the pond clicked on it, it was shocked to see the source ...

Ignore that snap of Tuckyo trying to estimate the damage he's done to the United States, and proposing it was only the size of his penis. 

Instead look at the source. Dow Jones? Not even the WSJ? And where's Killer when he's needed? As for the story, it was short and by the numbers ...

What the story lacked was the minutiae of the Macbeth-like blood letting ... per the Graudian ...

Carlson’s departure appeared sudden. As of Monday morning, Fox was still previewing his show that evening, where he was set to interview the Republican presidential hopeful Vivek Ramaswamy. Carlson’s last show, on Friday, ended with the host eating pizza and saying, “We’ll be back on Monday.”

The doomed man ate a hearty meal of pizza? Put it another way ...

Enter Murdoch.

If it were done when 'tis done, then 'twere well
It were done quickly: if the assassination
Could trammel up the consequence, and catch
With his surcease success; that but this blow
Might be the be-all and the end-all here,
But here, upon this bank and shoal of time,
We'ld jump the life to come. But in these cases
We still have judgment here; that we but teach
Bloody instructions, which, being taught, return
To plague the inventor: this even-handed justice
Commends the ingredients of our poison pizza'd chalice
To our own lips... 

But enough of the fun, the pond must return to its herpetological studies and the daily reptiles, though this day it's particularly hard ...

No Tuesday groaning by Dame Groan? What's the world coming to?

And everyone obsessed with the DSR, and nary a kind word for it? 

Actually there were a couple of kind words, but you had to head deep into the reptile wilderness to find them ...

Ah Monsieur Dupont, you've missed the boat on this one, you and the Dibbster have clearly missed the  main game ... it's the reptile wilderness for you ...

As for other policy matters, the pond would have been better off turning to a Wilcox ...

Or perhaps the full First Dog, delighting an esteemed correspondent at the Graudian here ...

The pond could only sample a few of the splendid policy initiatives which might sort out the funding crisis ...

The pond knows it doesn't know and the pond couldn't kayo less and yippie-ki-yay motherfucker, as Bruce said to the baddie ...

Sorry, sorry, way too many distractions and so the pond settled in for its dose of the bromancer saying no thanks, no tanks ...

The bromancer's fear of tanks is a running joke at the pond, up there with Killer's fear of masks, and we'll eventually get there ... but in the meantime, keep the powder dry and the missiles firing ...

Poor bromancer. The pond supposes he had to find something to whinge and moan about, but what about the tanks? And what about the war with China, which didn't happen by last Xmas, but surely will happen before the next Xmas ...

Indeed, indeed, and there was an immortal Rowe to hand to sort out the matter ...

It's always in the detail or the double take ...

And now to the matter of tanks, because the current war in Ukraine has shown how a stunning display of missile firepower can quickly produce a result, and end a war in a matter of days. 

Just ask Vlad the impaler ... or settle for that tanks rant all bromancer readers knew would come ...

Meanwhile, the pond still has slightly used copies of its Brisbane Line plan available at a knock down price ...

And so to a pond coda, and for once it wasn't another reptile of the lizard Oz kind. 

For those who didn't sign up to help the minnow fight the authoritarian not so crypto fascist monolith, the keen Keane yesterday returned to Crikey and began his story thusly (sorry there might be a paywall hitting that link):

If you think that Fox News spreading lies about the 2020 presidential election, and the direct relationship between that and the January 6 2021 insurrection, are now merely matters of historical interest, take a look at the current polling for Donald Trump against his strongest Republican challenger, Ron DeSantis.

Well yes ...always willing to take a look at Ron DeSanctus ...

But please do carry on, the pond apologies for interrupting ...

Trump will almost certainly be his party’s candidate to face off against Joe Biden in 2024. And he is promising more aggression, more authoritarianism and more retribution if he wins. That’s bad news for US democracy, and for countries like Australia that rely on the US for their security (and we’ve stupidly doubled down on that to the tune of hundreds of billions of dollars under the Albanese government).
Fox News will lie again to help Trump back into power, if it can. Not because (or merely because) Trump aligns with the reactionary values of the network, or of the Murdochs, but because it’s good business. The Murdochs long ago discovered that vast profits could be made from a media outlet that functioned as a political party, selling grievance, victimhood and conspiracy theories of demonic “liberal elites” to older white Americans. Trump is the avatar of the Murdoch business model, whatever personal feelings Rupert may have about him.
The costs of that model — polarisation, extremism, political violence and incompetence — are borne by everyone else. Or at least they were until COVID began killing Fox viewers who believed the anti-vaccination and “it’s all a hoax” tripe peddled by the network.

Well yes, and there are other matters worth mentioning ...

Sorry, sorry, do go on ...

When I pointed out the role played by Fox News — and thus Rupert Murdoch and his family — in the January 6 insurrection, much of the information about the inner workings of Fox News had yet to emerge from the Dominion case. But it was hardly an act of prescience on my part. It was already a common topic of commentary in the US media. One of the United States’ best media commentators, Brian Stelter, had explained in detail the extent to which people within Fox News had decided that the prospect of losing extremist viewers due to the fact that the network was endorsing a reality-based analysis of the 2020 presidential election was too much.
My only original thought was to reflect the fact that we’d just had the 50th anniversary of Watergate in early June, and note how far Trump exceeded the previous historical exemplar of presidential misconduct, Richard Nixon — and how much the US media landscape had changed since the 1970s. Thus the now slightly even more famous phrase “unindicted co-conspirator”.
For a statement as unexceptionable as that, it came as a surprise when a personal lawyer for a member of the Murdoch family not even named in the piece contacted us in order to threaten litigation. Surprising for a media mogul with his own array of platforms and, he says, a deep commitment to free speech and a free press. And surprising for the lack of legal nous. Every lawyer that our then-editor-in-chief Peter Fray spoke to — and he spoke to a lot of them — concluded that Lachlan didn’t have a chance. After a good faith effort to resolve the matter, during which we took the article down, a lack of progress meant we had to fight...

Then there was talk of the minnow v authoritarian fight, with this excerpt included ...

...Perhaps Murdoch assumed we’d roll over. Instead we worked out a battle plan, called on our subscribers and took our case public. Facing an existential threat, we called for help from people who share our mission of holding the powerful to account. They responded in droves.
Murdoch’s legal team, and News Corp, later tried to portray this as part of a deliberate campaign all along to use Murdoch as a fundraising tool — as if the original article had been written to order as part of Operation Use Lachlan To Boost Subscriptions.
Well, memo for Mr Murdoch — and for every other reader. I’ve never written to direction at Crikey, and have never been asked to. I write what the evidence leads me to conclude, rightly or wrongly, even if it offends readers because I’m not supporting their favourite political party or cause. I intend to keep doing that. I’m too old and foul-tempered to do anything else.

Well yes, the pond is old too, and reading the reptiles can produce a foul temper on a daily basis, which is why the pond always turns to cartoonists for a little help to get through the day.

But let's not leave it all to the keen Keane. 

Cam Wilson produced some splendid comedy involving that triple A plus loon Malcolm Roberts ...

...After Roberts spoke for nearly two hours, the “Dare to Question” event opened up to questions from the audience.
One frustrated attendee, who gave the name “Pell” and said that he was facing “15 charges at the moment”, launched into a bizarre conspiracy-laden rant which was met with applause from the audience.
His two-minute question accused former prime ministers, Crime Stoppers and the Country Women’s Association of being run by secret societies and he said his town’s embrace of the 15-minute city policy was a ruse to bring in open-air prisons. He also claimed that Paul Keating was a necrophiliac.
In response, Roberts asked his name and then professed not to know about the situation: “And this is symptomatic of our society. I can’t comment on these secret societies because I make statements based on data.”
Pell responded: “See, I want to start a military wing. I’ve got this freedom thing. Like the IRA, they always had a military wing, right? Cause they need to have some credibility. And they need to have some force. If we want to police the police, give me some frickin’ hard hitters.”

The CWA being run by a secret society?! So that's what the pond's sister has been up to all these years ...

Talk about a rapid unscheduled disassembly. You've got to admit the brightest incandescent bulbs always attract the weirdest moths ... and it almost makes the reptiles seem like a dowdy bunch of try-hard losers and drop kicks ...

And so to end with a tanks for the memories note about all the good times ... because the pond suspects that at long last the chairman is losing his grip in his dotage ...