In which the pond eventually joins the grave Sexton in giving that salute, with other authoritarians and crackpots to follow ...

 

The pond has taken to recording the reptiles late at night, and this was top of the digital page ...

This morning the centrepiece revolving fickle finger of reptile fate had changed, and the yarn had been moved down a notch ... and the snap of the turncoat replaced with a more staid figure, and it was "here come da judge" that was top of the digital and tree killer edition ... though comrade Dan was still clinging to a placing ... 

 

Can the pond just make a note on that comrade Dan timing? 

13 minutes ago this morning is exactly the same as 10.51 pm last night?

Call it reptile never never time.

Why do the reptiles lie about their publication times? Because they can, and because they do it so fluently ...

Meanwhile, the reptiles were moving on, but as a correspondent returning to the fold noted, there were bean counters at work, including Karl Quinn, in both L'Age and the SMH, asking and answering Did News Corp target the ABC and Stan Grant? The answer’s in the numbers ...

The methodology isn't great but it shows what the pond missed out on by red carding the reptiles for weeks ...

On Tuesday, the Australian boss of Rupert Murdoch’s media empire batted away suggestions that his organisation had played a major role in contributing to Stan Grant’s decision to take indefinite leave from the ABC through a sustained campaign of criticism.

“ABC director of news Justin Stevens has made a raft of unsubstantiated claims about News Corp’s reporting of how the ABC covered the coronation, and the ensuing fallout that Stan Grant says contributed to his decision to stand down as host of Q+A,” News Corp Australia’s executive chairman Michael Miller told his own masthead, The Australian.

“The ABC needs to stop passing the buck and blaming others for its own internal problems,” he said. His comments were a response to direct criticism from Stevens that News Corp had fanned the flames of abuse targeting Grant.

In a similar vein, Janet Albrechtsen – a regular contributor to The Australian and a former member of the ABC board – and Tom Switzer, executive director of the right-leaning Centre for Independent Studies and a presenter on ABC’s Radio National, wrote on Wednesday that “so far the ABC is using the Grant affair to blame News Corp for highlighting the public broadcaster’s editorial fiascos and increasing on-air activism, instead of recognising ABC management’s failure to enforce the division between news and opinion”.

Are they right? Is Justin Stevens imagining the Murdoch media in Australia is waging a campaign against the ABC, a campaign that merely went into overdrive following the coronation coverage on May 7?

The evidence would suggest not.

A search of news stories using the terms “ABC” and “Stan Grant” turned up 34 mentions in the two weeks prior to the coronation panel that sparked sustained criticism of Grant. All but three of them were in News Corp-owned properties.

Two were in Nine properties, and referred to Grant’s cameo in the Hollywood comedy Ricky Stanicky, and one was in regional publisher Australian Community Media’s Illawarra Mercury, advising that Wollongong residents had been invited to join the studio audience of Q+A.

It is important to note, though, that Ray Hadley and Neil Mitchell, broadcasters on radio stations owned by Nine, were also highly critical of the coverage in the days following the coronation.

In the News Corp papers, The Daily Telegraph led the charge in print/digital with four mentions, followed by The Australian, the Geelong Advertiser and The Courier-Mail with three each. Some of these were syndicated (and thus duplicated), some merely advised where to watch the coronation coverage, but a number took Grant to task over the role he was expected to play.

The four mentions on Sky News were the only appearances on television, and all were critical of Grant.

It’s fair to conclude, then, that even before the coronation coverage, News Corp media properties were more than a little invested in the ABC and Stan Grant.

In the 12 days following the coronation and up to the moment Grant announced he was stepping down from Q+A, the same search produced 78 results. Ten of those were in The Australian and 22 were on Sky News, spread across a suite of right-wing opinion-led shows: Bernardi, Outsiders, The Late Debate, The Rita Panahi Show, The Bolt Report, Chris Kenny Tonight.

In all, 64 of the 78 mentions came in News Corp properties, and virtually all of them were critical. (Following Grant’s announcement, mentions of him and the ABC skyrocketed across all news outlets; that spike in interest has been excluded in order to concentrate on the relatively “normal” patterns of coverage.)

From this admittedly small sample, there is evidence of a sustained campaign from News. What’s more, the evidence is not merely quantitative – it’s qualitative too.

Referring to the portion of the ABC’s coronation coverage in which Grant was a member of the panel, The Australian‘s media reporter Sophie Elsworth said on Sky News’ The Media Show (May 11), “that one hour … was one of the most disgraceful moments in their television history”. She described it as “an absolute pile-on on the British monarchy”, accused it of “ripping this country’s history to shreds”, called it “an hour of hatefest”, and decreed it was an “absolutely disgraceful editorial decision to have such a lopsided panel”, concluding “the ABC has no balance”.

None of those assertions was challenged.

On Sky’s The Late Debate on May 8, former ABC staffer and now-Sky regular Kel Richards opined “this is an ABC which has lost its way, and it’s either got to have its funding cut off or be dragged back to what it once was.” (Demands to “defund the ABC” are a recurring theme on Sky and in The Australian.)

An article published on Sky News online claimed a “fellow host” of Grant on the ABC had said the broadcaster was “derelict in its duty” in allowing him to blur the line between presenter and commentator (a favourite line of attack on Sky, which presents itself as a news outlet but runs wall-to-wall commentary). The fellow host in question was Tom Switzer, a former opinion editor of The Australian. News Corp declined to comment for this story.

The Australian’s letters pages were full of people accusing Grant of “hijacking” the coronation coverage by bringing in the perspective of Indigenous Australians. And lest there be any confusion about what The Australian itself thought, the paper thundered in its editorial on May 12 that the discussion of the relationship between Indigenous Australia and the crown amounted to “a one-sided tirade of bitterness and bile”.

There's more, and the pond ran it at length because it's a valuable contribution to herpetological studies, though it requires a few amendments.

That reference to Dame Slap for example entirely misss the point. Not only is Dame Slap a "regular contributor", but in the Lehrmann matter, she's been acting as a journalist and a reporter, routinely rolling out leaks from a certain camp ... the sort of two-hatted behaviour which the reptiles raged about the ABC encouraging Stan Grant to do ...

Speaking of bile and bitterness and hate and fear and loathing and tirades of a reptile kind, there's petulant Peta out and about this day ...

Another reason Quinn's survey could never be complete - it goes on day after day at the lizard Oz - and another outing explaining why the pond's survey of the depths of the News Corp gutter can never be complete, though it does give the pond a chance to get in an immortal Rowe early ...

So if crooning out of tune in the Hillsong style is out for the pond, what's in?

Of course, of course ... what a relief ... the grave Sexton defending parading fascists ...

Is the pond being over-sensitive but are the reptiles being grotesquely insensitive by juxtaposing "arbeit macht frei" with what followed? You know, freedumb and all the usual freedumb bullshit, though surprisingly "Orwellian" didn't get an outing ...

Actually times and fashions change. Even Nikki Haley managed a few gestures, but even then Nikki Haley gets the history of the Confederate flag very wrong ... (possible WaPo paywall).

If the paywall kicks in, there's always a wiki with a few relevant quotes ...

In their study of Confederate symbols in the contemporary Southern United States, the Southern political scientists James Michael Martinez, William Donald Richardson, and Ron McNinch-Su wrote:

The battle flag was never adopted by the Confederate Congress, never flew over any state capitols during the Confederacy, and was never officially used by Confederate veterans' groups. The flag probably would have been relegated to Civil War museums if it had not been resurrected by the resurgent KKK and used by Southern Dixiecrats during the 1948 presidential election.

Southern historian Gordon Rhea further wrote in 2011:

It is no accident that Confederate symbols have been the mainstay of white supremacist organizations, from the Ku Klux Klan to the skinheads. They did not appropriate the Confederate battle flag simply because it was pretty. They picked it because it was the flag of a nation dedicated to their ideals: 'that the negro is not equal to the white man'. The Confederate flag, we are told, represents heritage, not hate. But why should we celebrate a heritage grounded in hate, a heritage whose self-avowed reason for existence was the exploitation and debasement of a sizeable segment of its population?

Why go there? Well the grave Sexton is pretty keen on "whataboutisms" in the aid of freedumb ...

Can't they just play dress-ups and salute and Seig Heil in the privacy of their own homes? Or perhaps adopt an entirely faux Roman handshake made popular by sword and sandal movies?

 

Never mind, it seems that the reptile devotion to authoritarians is never-ending, and the latest example came with this incredible suck from the lizard Oz editorialist ...

That header is entirely risible, and so the pond turned to The New Yorker, here, possible paywall ...

Well yes, but authoritarian fundamentalist Hindu nationalists do what they do, and a little later in the piece, Chotiner got into a conversation with Christophe Jaffrelot ...

And so on and on. There's a lot more, but the pond must return to finish off the lizard Oz editorialist ...

Meanwhile ...

...You are against Muslims on the one hand, and you’re for Hinduism on the other hand. These two factors are combined. But why has Hinduism become such an appealing identity? That, I think, is something you can only understand if you look at the modernization of Indian society after 1991, when economic liberalization resulted in more growth, urbanization, and consumerism. These were the ingredients of a new middle class, which was to become the core electorate of the B.J.P. This group became affluent, but also rootless. They searched for an identity and found it in Hindu nationalism, which endowed them with some cultural anchor points. This upper-caste middle class turned to new, modern, English-speaking gurus, and sectarian movements in Gujarat and elsewhere. It started to follow the yoga classes of saffron-clad masters on television. The B.J.P. has been very good at tapping that source of legitimacy by co-opting these gurus. More generally, the Ayodhya movement, the movement for the building of the temple in Ayodhya, has enabled the B.J.P. to capitalize on this appetite for Hinduism and pride in a Hindu identity.

Cue the infallible Pope ...

And so to a novelty item, strictly for those wondering what happens to Labor party hacks sent out to pasture ...

For those who came in late on the story, or who can barely remember the hack, it's necessary to head back to 2020 and this story in the Graudian ...

It got funnier and funnier as it went on, the level of delusion and grandiosity that is, including "he also acknowledged his own role in leadership instability in Labor's past. He said he was open to be drafted in the future and was 'not going anywhere'"

So where did the coal-loving, let's adopt the Liberal party climate policy, I'm open to being drafted in the future, I'm not going anywhere, man end up?

Well first we must get past a snap of stored carbon designed to gladden a Joel's heart ...

Oh and we need to get past the standard demonic snap of comrade Dan ... naturally downsized by the pond ...

And then it's on to wading through a big gobbet to get to the punch line ...

Say what about climate change? Back in June 2021 ... ‘Not just windmills and solar panels’: ALP criticised by Joel Fitzgibbon over party’s climate change policy

Mr Fitzgibbon said Labor was wrong to object to the changes and should back the investment boost when all kinds of technologies needed to be supported to reduce emissions.

“We shouldn’t be picky. It’s not just about windmills and solar panels,” he told radio station 2GB. “It’s about all sorts of other innovation, including electric vehicle charging station roll outs, and improving the efficiency of heavy vehicles and capturing the carbon so that we can use gas and coal to generate energy without polluting the atmosphere.”

Completely clueless, but no doubt a fine chair for the Australian Forest Products Association ...

And now, having already used up its infallible Pope and immortal Rowe quota for the day, but still with a fondness for ending with a cartoon, this ...