In which there's a splendid nuking by Dame Groan, followed by top defence advice from Mein Gott and the bromancer ...

 

The pond stands ready to serve with Rish!

Moving right along, the pond doesn't usually deal in porn, but Christopher Warren is the Pauline Réage of Murdochian porn in Crikey ...News Corp is ailing. How long will the Murdochs care about propping it up?News Corp's mish-mash of legacy media assets once made sense, delivering cash flows and political clout. Now they're just hard work. (paywall)

Few things say “company in decline” louder than News Corp’s now annual round of job cuts in its troubled news media segment, with last week’s annual budget meeting in Sydney revealing more cuts planned across the next financial year.

Over the past decade, News Corp has averaged about $150 million in thanks-for-coming payouts in a relentless trimming of journalists, printers and administrative staff. That’s about 1,000 people each year across the corporation.

But no matter how finely corporate strategy slices the bread, it’s still serving up the same old, umm, sandwiches, with that familar garnish of nose-turning ersatz journalism. It’s the media’s equivalent of the witticism, attributed to Einstein, that “Insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results”.

News Corp’s annual reports filed with the US regulator show that since the Murdochs split the family’s media assets in 2013, the News Corp arm has paid out more than $1 billion in employee termination entitlements (or “benefits”, as it calls them).

Unusually for the company, News Corp last year tied the cuts to a 5% headcount reduction, resulting in 1,250 employees being let go. This year, it looks like it’s planning on culling the proverbial deck chairs along its Australian mahogany row.

It’s a reorganisation based on a business model: subscription-supported products (tagged, apparently, as “prestige” products, such as The Australian), the advertising-supported news.com.au, and the apparently no longer viable business model of its metro mastheads. 

The reported consolidation marks the final step of wrapping the once-powerful local mastheads into a national offering through a single subscription, with the state mastheads now endure purely for marketing purposes. (Nine has done much the same with what insiders have long called “The SMAge”, the combination of The Age and The Sydney Morning Herald.) 

For News Corp, it’s been a long-term management for decline, starting with national political news and the syndication of its tabloid commentariat, before following up with common supplements (like travel), then sections (like finance), and, finally, news. This drove a lookalike design of both print and web, as well as a shared chase for the same news-lite market of low-attention, aging, conservative men.

The national-dressed-as-local effect is starkest when mobilised to support the increasingly ineffective culture war crusades, with near identical, all-caps headlines shrieking the same message around the coast from Adelaide to Cairns. But they’re yelling at ever fewer of us; for News Corp, the strategy has failed and the decline grinds on. 

Talk about titillation, talk about knowing how to press the pond's buttons, talk about knowing how to arouse.

The pond began to tremble, heart aflutter, panting with lust and desire. 

Could it be true, could it be real, did the pond dare hope to be swept away in a swoon? Then the daily grind returned, and the pond was immediately ground down ... not simplistic Simon - here every conflict imaginable and Biddable - occupying the top extreme far right slot ...

And who was the centrefold?

Not today Juliar, of all days, not today ...

Not today Juliar, not today, not after recent events ... you know, the odd "mishap" ... or talk of hell on earth ...

The pond woke today to a Zionist explaining how Dresden, Hiroshima, so shit happens ...

A better analogy might be noting the way that the Germans used to deal with terrorists. 

Suppose a terrorist gets out of line and does a bit of mischief... what better way to quiet things down in the gulag, ghetto if you will, than to take 30 or 40 civilians and burn them to death in plain sight ..

Put it another way ...

Sorry, that story was in another place, (paywall), and way outside the remit of reptile studies.

Put it another way ...

Meanwhile, the pond has a bone to pick with Media Watch. 

As usual, they made unfair allegations about News Corpse and its treatment of the CSIRO report on the chances of nuking the country to save the planet ... suggesting we might have been Krogered or Crauterised...

...So how was this reported at The Australian, which has long campaigned for nuclear energy and lower power prices? 

Well, it certainly wasn’t front-page news, where the paper was warning about the risk of green energy and blackouts.

But tucked away on page five was this enticing headline:

CSIRO runs ruler over value of large-scale nuclear power- The Australian, 22 May, 2024

And indeed there was ...

Talk about splendid, exciting coverage, top notch stuff, Paddy doing some of his finest work, but Mr Barry had the cheek to suggest there was something awry ...

...Wow. Talk about clickbait.  

And online, the story was even harder to locate although we did find the CEO of Woodside slamming Labor’s energy policy as wishful thinking. 

But this subtle downplaying by the Oz was nothing compared to the approach at Sky After Dark where commentators lined up to sink the slipper into the scientists at CSIRO and claim that its negation of nuclear should just be ignored.

With Chris Kenny landing the first blow:

CHRIS KENNY: Is this science or is this advocacy? Is this science or is this ideology? - The Kenny Report, Sky News Australia, 22 May, 2024

Kenny accusing the nation’s science and energy experts of fiddling the figures to suit the renewable message:

CHRIS KENNY: So the CSIRO, they just juggle around with some of their numbers and they chuck in a bit of transmission here and a bit of firming there and some batteries there and they pretend they’ve invented a new form of energy, reliable renewables. - The Kenny Report, Sky News Australia, 22 May, 2024

Yes, these government scientists can’t be trusted.

And on Sharri Markson’s show, former Victorian Liberal Party president Michael Kroger was telling us why:  

MICHAEL KROGER: The CSIRO haven’t got the credibility they had 20-30 years ago … 

… because they’ve been very much part of the, sort of, you know, the screaming cultural left on these environmental issues over more than a decade now.  - Sharri, Sky News Australia, 22 May, 2024

And that message was echoed by Peta Credlin, also on Sky, who declared:

PETA CREDLIN: I know where I want to go, I want to go nuclear. - Credlin, Sky News Australia, 22 May, 2024

And beaming into Credlin’s program from Stockholm, her fellow traveller, Nick Cater, agreed:

NICK CATER: We know the technology is there, we know it works. Sweden right, 40 per cent nuclear … 

… I just think it’s a no brainer.  - Credlin, Sky News Australia, 22 May, 2024

Luckily the pond had already heard from the no brainer yesterday, so it could search the lizard Oz for the ultimate refutation of Mr Barry, and whaddya kno ...

Dame Groan to the rescue. No need to worry about ancient Troy or Jason drumming up Islamophobia or the lizard Oz editorialist rabbiting on about Greenies or Foreign Criminals ... (excluding News Corpse). 

Luckily the immortal Rowe had taken care of that matter with a bit of graffiti by an expert demoniser who puts Jason in the shade ...

So the pond could get on with Dame Groan and a bloody good groaning, and a great snap from iStock to get her going...

Now some might think that Dame Groan, what with having been a gas merchant and making a career out of renewable denialism, might have some sort of bias ... but fair dibs, she's just doing what all the reptiles do ... wagging her tail and barking at the moon and nuking the country to save the planet, though as the planet doesn't need saving - according to an extensive survey of reptile climate science denying scribbling - the point of it all is beyond the pond ...

At this point the reptiles featured an image which was weird even by reptile standards, and the pond suspected it might be an early AI sighting ...

... but the credit said iStock and indeed it was just an aged, tired generic, used hundreds of times ...

A bit of a metaphor for the aged, tired Groaner, dull and predictable, and still yearning for SMRs...

At this point the pond needed another shot of that titillating Warren porn just to keep going ...

...The company-wide adoption of the more aggressive Sydney tabloid style of The Daily Telegraph has driven away the mid-market audience once locked up by mastheads like The Courier-Mail and the Herald-Sun (or at least its predecessor, the Sun News-Pictorial). Meanwhile, the news-lite audience — trained by cable news and talk-back radio to gulp down whatever’s put before them — has slid into outright news avoidance. 

The traditional consumers still engaged in news overwhelmingly lean to the left. The result? Subscriptions have plateaued, with Nine’s lightly paywalled mastheads The Age and The Sydney Morning Herald leading in readership ahead of News Corps’ more restrictively paywalled metro outlets. 

News avoidance is eating at revenues from ad-supported distribution. Monthly unique audiences at The Sun in the UK are down by a third over the past year, and the New York Post is down by about 14%. News.com.au is down, too, according to last week’s Ipsos rankings. Google’s pivot to AI-generated search (once it gets it right) is also expected to gut the key referrals to all news mastheads.

Faced with the same challenge, most of the families who built their wealth out of newspapers — like the Fairfaxes and the Packers here in Australia — are long gone, having given up trying to manage their way through decline. In the US, most mastheads have ended up in the hands of private equity-owned chains happy to slash their way to quarterly returns in exchange for any thoughts of enduring influence.

Rupert’s longevity has left News Corp as an enduring challenge for the latest generation of Murdochs.

Its core value is now as a holding company of a majority share-ownership in Australia’s REA Group, which by market cap is about two-thirds of News Corps’ worth. The remaining third can be ascribed to the Wall Street Journal and its book publishing arm, HarperCollins. 

All the rest, like the Australian mastheads, are a mish-mash of legacy media assets picked up by the Murdochs, like a bower bird, from the 20th-century mass mediums of newspapers, magazines and cable television.

They made sense at the time, once delivering the twin gifts of powerful cash flows (which, in turn, funded further acquisitions) and political clout across the Anglophone world, while also providing employment and content distribution for the family’s political loyalists. (Why, here’s Scott Morrison’s Plans for Your Good, published by HarperCollins. Or look over there, there’s Tony Abbott comfortably ensconced in his seat on the Fox board.) 

Now? They’re just hard work. For how long will the largely disengaged American family continue to care?

It took the pond a little while to wipe the excess moisture off the keyboard to get to the last gobbet by the Groaner ...

After all, with Dame Groan advising the nuke mob, what could possibly go wrong? What chance of a cost blow out? Why that would be patently absurd, we never have a cost blow out in this country ...

Pencils? Even the language is vintage 1950s ...surely they should be sharpening their key boards, you silly old duck ...

As for situating plants near transmission lines, the pond thought that the large ones were best situated near large supplies of water, to help with the heat ... perhaps near the coast so that they could be exposed to rising sea levels ...

Oh there's plenty of helpful suggestions to hand ...

And now to a major pivot, because while he'd vanished from the scene early this day, Mein Gott still lingered in the pond mind ...

Mein Gott, that was just what the pond needed, a real confidence boost and nobody and nothing did that better than fro yo or Mein Gott ...

Mein Gott, it's a complete disaster, with only a few snaps to save us ...

Some might wonder where the bromancer is in all this - it turns out that Mein Gott isn't just the best for economics, he's best for defence too - and he had a tale of woe to tell ...

Mein Gott, there was Dame Groan assuring the pond that all would be well - just bring in a few experts and you could nuke the country for a ha'penny or so - and here was Mein Gott explaining that experts had created a major mess, and there were major cost blow outs, and technical disasters and ...

Mein Gott, is Mein Gott some sort of Ruski or Chinese stooge? He's suggesting we've been sold a pup by the Yanks, the sort of pup you'd probably have to take off to the gravel pit and put down ...

Mein Gott, this leaves the country completely up in the air, or down on the ground, depending on your point of view ... and with the subs to follow in splendid style, though they'll be able to use Dame Groan's infinite supply of nuke energy ...

Mein Gott, he's cracking jokes? At this point the pond knew it was a case for the bromancer ...

Some might wonder why the bro remains obsessed with his war with China by Xmas, especially considering the way that Ukraine is going through an existential crisis at the hands of the sociopathic Vlad the impaler, but somebody had to set Mein Gott right ... 

Send a note indeed ... not on the bromancer's watch, he's not weak or distracted ...

Mein Gott,  so many questions, and only snaps and videos for answers ...

Noticing that man with all the scrambled egg on his jacket, the pond wondered if this was the moment that the bromancer might put to bed that insidious question asked by an esteemed correspondent ...US military commander has ‘no idea’ how Australia’s Aukus submarines would be used in any Taiwan Strait dispute, Lt Gen Stephen Sklenka denies any expectation on Australia despite a top official predicting the pact would change how ‘our countries operate together’. (Daniel Hurst in the Graudian)

A US military commander says he has “no idea” how Australia’s nuclear-powered submarines will be used in the Taiwan Strait, despite a top state department official predicting “enormous implications” for “cross-Strait circumstances”.

Lt Gen Stephen Sklenka, the deputy commander of the US Indo-Pacific Command, played down the potential for Australia to be drawn into a devastating war in the region against the Australian government’s wishes.

“At least from the military perspective, there is no expectation of anybody participating in any conflict with us, because those decisions are national sovereign decisions,” Sklenka said during a visit to Australia.

“We don’t dictate that to other countries.”

The deputy US secretary of state, Kurt Campbell, one of the architects of Aukus, said last month the security partnership between Australia, the UK and the US could “change the nature of the way each of our three countries operate together”.

Campbell said Aukus had “the potential to have submarines from a number of countries operating in close coordination that could deliver conventional ordnance from long distances”, adding: “Those have enormous implications in a variety of scenarios, including in cross-Strait circumstances.”

Sklenka, who works with Australia and other allies in the region as a leader of the US Indo-Pacific Command, was asked on Thursday what role he envisaged for Aukus submarines in the Taiwan Strait.

“Look, Secretary Campbell is a policy guy and I’m not,” Sklenka told the National Press Club in Canberra.

“I have no idea. I can’t answer that.”

Pressed on whether the Indo-Pacific Command had factored the submarines into its long-term planning, Sklenka said it was “too far down the path” but Australia and the US “do share planning actions”.

“Recently, we have done a lot more with Australia,” he said.

Australia plans to buy at least three Virginia-class nuclear-powered submarines from the US in the 2030s, before a new class of Australian-built submarine – SSN-Aukus – enters into service from the 2040s.

Sklenka said the US and its allies must “take seriously Chairman Xi Jinping’s directive to his own forces to be prepared to invade Taiwan by 2027”. But Sklenka denied the Aukus submarines would therefore be too late.

“Not if he doesn’t fight in 2027,” Sklenka said of the Chinese president.

“I don’t think conflict is inevitable – I really don’t – but I’m a military guy and if you’re an American you’re paying me not to live on hope. You’re paying me to be ready.”

The Australian government has repeatedly said it has made no pre-commitment to the US to join a conflict over the status of Taiwan, a self-governed democracy of 24 million people that Beijing regards as an inherent part of Chinese territory and has not ruled out taking by force.

As part of the staged Aukus plan, the US and the UK will increase rotational visits of their own nuclear-powered submarines to the HMAS Stirling base in Western Australia from 2027.

Sklenka said a second element of the plan – collaboration on advanced defence technologies – had “the potential to expand to include new partners”. That meant that “the beneficiaries of Aukus will extend far beyond the three formal members”.

Japan is seen as the first potential Aukus pillar 2 partner, but South Korea, New Zealand and Canada have also expressed interest.

The Chinese government has argued Aukus would only add to regional tensions.

Dear sweet long absent lord, thank heavens we have the bro to sort it out.  

Useless aircraft, useless subs ... but a master Reichsmarschall on hand to marshal our somewhat limited resources to save the day ...

Hmm, with the greatest respect, there seems to be something distinctly odd about the bromancer's report and the way it doesn't mention what the Graudian mentioned ...

Never mind, we're in the safest hands ... have faith (you might need it) ...

Even more with the discrepancies, but have faith ... the bro will explain how a country of 25 million will sort out a country with the odd billion or so ...

But if they strike, the bro will be there with our subs and our planes and will sort them out quikstix ... and with that, and feeling incredibly safe - a bit like they're feeling Kharkiv at the moment ...

... the pond turned to the final bro gobbet ...

Say what? With the mango Mussolini back high office, Vlad the impaler will be handed Ukraine and China will take over Taiwan, and there'll be peace in the world - or at least a piece of this and a piece of that - and full credit will be given to Faux Noise for their intrepid help ...

Alternatively we could adopt the British solution foreshadowed at the very start this day ...