Mocking the reptile mocker too busy to notice that there's more muckery than mockery ...

 

It's not that the pond is anti-sport and is therefore completely averse to discussing the latest bold initiative featuring thugby league ...

It's that the yarn was banished, shunned, spurned, ignored, discarded, made invisible, disappeared to the corn field, sent into the twilight zone, by the reptiles at the lizard Oz.

The pond did a word search of the reptile digital edition this morning, and found not one mention, not even in the obscure bits down the page. The yarn achieved the same status as the Emeritus Chairman's Succession drama ...

Others were more bold ...

If the reptiles had featured the yarn, the pond would have had an excuse to run the infallible Pope of the day ...

The Nine rag went into something of a meltdown at the prospect, as you'd expect of someone with pigskin in the television rights game...

It seems that with the reptiles in full campaign mode, anything the government does, anything that benefits the other side, must be ignored, while old wars burble on ...

Usually the pond wouldn't piss on the Mocker from a great anonymous height, but if the pond runs something from another rag, in the interests of fair and balanced coverage, it must run something spiteful, nasty, mean, malicious, bitchy and full of file from the lizard Oz. 

Hence the Mocker, but being late in the afternoon, luckily no one will notice or pay attention ...

Media Watch host Paul Barry goes out on a moral high, dividing the media landscape, Gone but not forgotten, the longtime Media Watch host leaves us with a performance that does little to advance the standards of quality journalism.

First there must be a figure in the stocks, and assorted tomatoes assembled: Media Watch host Paul Barry on the ABC program in May 2022. Source: Supplied

Supplied? So that's what they call a screen cap these days ...

As for that blather about standards of quality journalism, the pond can remember the many times that lizard Oz reptiles railed at anonymous bloggers. There was something filthy and vile about not revealing your name, and so avoid being trolled by the reptiles ...

And yet, even now, comes The Mocker ...

If you read the lizard Oz guidelines, you quickly end up rolling Jaffas down the theatre aisle ...

No byline policy
The Australian includes bylines on all of its stories in print and digital. On our digital channels, each byline includes a link to a page with the author’s biography and archive.
If a story is provided by a news agency or other third party (The Australian has partnerships with The Times of London and The Wall Street Journal), that source will be disclosed in the byline field.
The only exception to these rules applies when including a byline will endanger a journalist’s safety, the safety of their family or the writer’s livelihood.
Additionally, journalist’s job titles and biographies are included on story pages.

BTW, if you want a real hoot, cop this one:

Diversity statement
New Corp Australia believes in having a diverse workplace that recognises and celebrates individuals based on merit irrespective of differences such as cultural, gender, ethnicity, sexual preference or physical ability.
Diversity leads to business success and News recognises that diversity also benefits our employees, shareholders and our customers, who are at the heart of our business.
Our leadership team is committed to working across the business to ensure that diversity is a value embedded in our frameworks, policies, processes and behaviours.
Diverse voices policy
The Australian is committed to accurate, balanced and informed coverage and robust and informed debate. To deliver on that commitment we strive to include diverse voices from our community to put forward arguments and discussions that advance the national discussion.
We are also committed to delivering in-depth and informed coverage of the arts, higher education, legal affairs, media, travel and lifestyle, aviation, business, markets, sport, technology, science and more.

Oh yeah ... so much bullshit, in so few words.

Nukes to all that ... on with the Mocker attempting mockery ...

The departure of a beloved ABC television host is an incredibly moving occasion. In terms of gravity and enormity, it is up there with a royal coronation, although the latter has slightly less pomp and fanfare.
And so it was last week when an emotional Paul Barry made his final appearance as host of Media Watch. Any criticism of this theatre would be mean-spirited.
Barry has worked tirelessly during the past 11 years to produce a 15-minute program every week in between lengthy breaks, his only recompense being a taxpayer-funded salary upwards of $200,000. Aside from his dozen or so assistants, he did all this by himself.
It must be a demanding gig. Understandably we grieve over the great man’s departure and despair that he will no longer give us regular guidance as to who should and should not be believed. But it is also a time to marvel at his selfless devotion to duty. Journalistic exactitude, at least according to his truth, was Barry’s mission.
And true to the adage that it is about the story and not about the journalist, Barry spent much of the final program talking about himself and his many achievements in the face of adversity. 

Oh FFS, it's a final show, it's like turning up to the office farewell ... but as for the Mocker's identity, the pond took this as a clue ...

Sky News host Chris Kenny has slammed Media Watch host Paul Barry for pushing “lefty propaganda” and “cheap shots at low-brow media” in his final show at the ABC. “Now to our old friends at the ABC who get to indulge their ideological and political preferences at our expense,” Mr Kenny said. “One of the worst offenders has been Paul Barry, the host of Media Watch for the past decade or so – a program that spends millions and employs about a dozen people to produce just 15 minutes of TV each week, supposedly policing media behaviour, but mainly pushing Paul Barry’s hobby horses of climate hysteria, [and] conservative bashing.”

Note that reference to climate hysteria. That's distilled essence of dog botherer.

It's long been rumoured that the Mocker is the dog botherer in disguise, for occasions when he wanted to take cheap, malicious, nasty shots ...nasty, nasty, nasty, as Zappa would sing ...

Naturally, he made numerous disparaging references to conservative media.
It would best be described as Barry’s “With malice toward all, with charity for none” moment. Sky News Australia, he claimed, was a “prime-time line-up of right-wing barkers”.
Its commentators, he said, were “shock jocks”. Keen to reinforce the negative overtone, he twice referred to “Sky’s After Darkers”.
For all his disdain of the mastheads favoured by the great unwashed, Barry is not above resorting to tabloidism. So what are the terrible sins of Sky’s commentators? Brace yourself. “Bashing Labor,” proclaimed Barry.
I do not suppose it has occurred to Barry that the Albanese government has proven so abysmal it could well be the first in nearly 100 years to be voted out after only one term.
As the latest Newspoll revealed on Sunday, voters regard Anthony Albanese as the weakest prime minister in decades.
That is on top of his many other credibility issues, particularly his hopelessness in getting across detail and his inability to spell out Labor’s policies.
That much was painfully obvious during the election campaign.
Journalists, or should I say some journalists, rigorously questioned Albanese, repeatedly demonstrating the then opposition leader’s ignorance.
What was Barry’s response at the time? It was not “good journalism”, he said. “It’s cheap and nasty. And it’s done with one intent – to catch the leader out.” 
But the problem was not the journalists trying to catch out Albanese.
The problem was not enough journalists were calling him out. In fact some ABC journalists were all but running cover for Labor.

What to make of this illustration? Paul Barry’s disparaging references to conservative media did not go unnoticed. Source: X

The reptiles are notoriously thin-skinned and lacking in a sensa huma, no more so than the dog botherer ... and what followed was a tired rehash of old grievances ...

Fast forward three years and we have a cost-of-living crisis, skyrocketing electricity bills, a dearth of reliable energy supply, and a prime minister who is fiscally and economically illiterate. 
Even Labor’s win did not satisfy Barry.
“What News Corp did succeed in doing was help magnify doubts about Labor’s leader,” he complained in May 2022.
“And perhaps suppress the party’s primary vote”.
For good measure, Barry attacked The Daily Telegraph for its front-page story during the campaign that Labor’s energy policies would add $560 to the annual household electricity bill. This claim was a “hoary old scare about power prices”, he insisted.
Since then the home electricity bill has risen an average of $609.
A hoary old scare you were saying, Paul Barry? But let’s forget for now that inconvenient truth and move on to Barry’s next denunciation of Sky.
The channel, he claimed, was “denying science with a relentless campaign to hold back action on climate change”.
As Barry inadvertently demonstrated, the lazy accusation of science denial is remarkably selective.
Take, for example, his reaction in 2020 to the exposé by Sky presenter and then Daily Telegraph investigative journalist Sharri Markson that Western intelligence agencies were examining the possibility that Covid-19 had originated from the Wuhan Institute of Virology. 
“Clearly the lab escape story is one the Trump administration wants to be true,” Barry smugly observed, linking it to “conspiracy theories”.   
“Markson should have told readers that almost every virus expert had dismissed the lab escape theory,” he added. Imagine Barry’s chagrin when the following year US President Joe Biden, in response to this same theory, ordered an inquiry into the origins of the virus.
Asked to reflect on this Media Watch episode, he maintained it “reflected the overwhelming consensus among experts that Covid-19 had a natural origin”.
Since when was good journalism about falling in with the overwhelming consensus?

Since when has the lizard Oz been an example of good journalism?

Apparently these days the Bolter passes as a journalist rather than a tabloid fear monger and troller:

Sky News host Andrew Bolt has blasted Media Watch host Paul Barry after he blamed Jewish soccer fans for the violence seen in Amsterdam two weeks ago. Mr Bolt said the ABC should “die of shame” after the Media Watch episode. “What an utter disgrace, Media Watch host Paul Barry can't be allowed to get away with this. “Barry – like many in the media left around the world, are now rewriting this history. “The ABC claims Jews were guilty of provocations, rampaging through Amsterdam – how very sick.”

Actually:

What happened on Wednesday night?
The first incidents were reported on Wednesday evening, the day before the match. Police say Maccabi fans tore a Palestinian flag down from the facade of a building and burned it, shouted “fuck you, Palestine”, and vandalised a taxi.
After a radio callout a number of taxi drivers converged on a casino on the nearby Max Euweplein, where about 400 Israeli supporters had gathered. Police dispersed the taxi drivers and escorted supporters out of the casino.
Verified social media videos show Maccabi fans setting off flares and fireworks and chanting in Hebrew “olé, olé, let the IDF [Israel Defense Forces] win, we will fuck the Arabs”. The Dutch national broadcaster NOS, other local media outlets and Amsterdam city hall officials also reported that fans chanted that there were “no children” left in Gaza.

And then it was on for young and old and both sides ...

The Mocker then provided a classic example of bad journalism:

Last week, following a two-year investigation, the US Select Subcommittee on the coronavirus Pandemic found that “Covid-19 most likely emerged from a laboratory in Wuhan, China”.
Funny enough, this botched targeting of Markson did not get a mention during Barry’s bellowing rendition of ‘My Way’ last week. But he did find time to congratulate himself for his fearless objectivity. 

A nanosecond's scrolling would have provided a bit more balance. Cue the BMJ, Covid-19 originated in Wuhan lab, alleges Republican congressional report (footnotes at source):

A long running congressional investigation into the coronavirus pandemic in the US has concluded, with Democratic and Republican members publishing competing reports. The Republican version alleges that the virus emerged in a leak from the Wuhan Institute of Virology, rather than breaking out at a nearby live animal food market as most scientists believe.
But the contrasting reports generated more heat than light. The Republicans on the committee brought no new evidence to support their claim, while much of the Democratic report was devoted to criticising the methodology of the Republican one.
“Four years after the onset of the worst pandemic in 100 years, the weight of the evidence increasingly supports the lab leak hypothesis,” concludes the Republican majority report of the House Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Pandemic.1
“Today, a zoonotic origin and lab accident are both plausible, as is a ‘hybrid’ scenario reflecting a mixture of the two,” the Democratic minority report concludes. “Republicans’ investigation did not uncover the origins of covid-19—both pathways remain plausible and we are more or less where we started.”2
Politicised investigations
The subcommittee was set up by Democrats in April 2020 to examine the Trump administration’s response to the pandemic, but its focus shifted after Republicans took the majority in the November 2022 midterm elections.
Its hearings were often combative. In the first session after Republicans took the majority, committee member Jim Jordan falsely accused Anthony Fauci, the government’s top adviser during the pandemic, of awarding one scientist a grant to change his opinion on covid’s origins.3
Today the committee contains 16 members, of whom seven are doctors and none are infectious disease specialists. Its best known members are Marjorie Taylor Greene and Ronny Jackson, who was White House physician under Trump.
The majority report concludes that Republican criticisms of US public health authorities have been vindicated, and that the party’s policy approaches to the pandemic were correct. Public health officials took part in a “coordinated effort to ignore natural immunity and suppress dissenting opinions,” it charges. It accuses the Food and Drug Administration and other agencies of unfairly denigrating ivermectin, a drug popular among Republicans but found ineffective after a study by the World Health Organization.
“Masks and mask mandates were ineffective at controlling the spread of covid-19,” it argues, and “unscientific lockdowns caused more harm than good.”
The report praises Trump’s vaccine initiative, but questions the safety of coronavirus vaccines and accuses Democrats and health officials of exaggerating their benefits. “Covid-19 vaccine mandates caused massive collateral damage and were very likely counterproductive,” it argues, citing a BMJ Global Health article in evidence.4
The report also criticises WHO, depicting it as submitting to Chinese government pressure. It questions US participation in the proposed pandemic treaty, an international blueprint for confronting the next global outbreak which member states agreed to pursue in 2021.
It does not tackle the question that the committee was originally founded to examine—why the US lost so many lives compared with most other developed nations.
Evidence of laboratory origin
The Republican claim of a laboratory origin relies on the existence of a furin cleavage site in the SARS-Cov-2 virus.5 The pandemic virus was the first of the sarbecovirus family of coronaviruses to have such a feature, which is believed to have been key to its transmissibility among humans.
The report cites a British science writer and supporter of the laboratory leak theory, Nicholas Wade, who testified before the committee, arguing that since no other sarbecovirus had a furin cleavage site, the covid virus “cannot have gained such a site through the ordinary evolutionary swaps of genetic material within a family.”
But most virologists do not believe that the furin cleavage site is evidence of a human designed virus.678 Many other bat coronaviruses and betacoronaviruses—of which sarbecovirus is a subset—have furin cleavage sites. The furin cleavage site of the covid-19 virus was also observed evolving naturally throughout the pandemic, often increasing the transmissibility of the virus.
The evidence reviewed by the subcommittee is the same as that seen by US intelligence agencies, nine of which have conducted independent investigations into the origin of the virus. Five assessed that a natural, zoonotic origin was more likely, while the FBI and the Department of Energy favoured the laboratory leak theory.9 None expressed high confidence in their findings and all said both hypotheses were plausible. Two other agencies, including the CIA, reached the same conclusion as congressional Democrats—that the question is unanswerable given the limited information available from China.
The Republican report suggested that the virus was designed during “gain of function” research and that China’s armed forces were developing viruses for military use at Wuhan. This claim goes beyond the findings of the US intelligence community. “Almost all intelligence agencies assess that SARS-CoV-2 was not genetically engineered,” stated their joint report. “All agencies assess that SARS-CoV-2 was not developed as a biological weapon.”

And so on and so forth and so to the concluding mockery:

“It is remarkable that any broadcaster tolerates a program that rips into it as we have done,” he said, praising current ABC managing director David Anderson and predecessor Mark Scott for their support.
It is no coincidence Barry favourably singled out managing directors who proved totally inept at standing up to the ABC collective.
It is easy to castigate them in the manner of a shop steward instead of calling out the ABC’s pervasive, activist and anti-conservative culture as well as its contempt for the organisation’s statutory charter.
Barry’s token criticisms of ABC for bias were far outnumbered by his regular tirades against News Corp.
“I’ve never had a set of political views that could be described as left or right,” said Barry following his appointment as Media Watch host in 2013.
What was that he was saying about denialism?

That reference to denialism is projection, surely a sign that the climate science denialist dog botherer was behind the mockery ...

Meanwhile, that other debate is heating up, with this in the Nine rags, Dutton claims taxpayers will spend billions less on nuclear than renewables (soft paywall):

Opposition Leader Peter Dutton will ask Australians to support a $331 billion plan to build nuclear energy, using taxpayer subsidies to build the industry while promising its taxpayer-backed scheme will come in about $260 billion cheaper than the government’s renewables rollout.
The Coalition pledge comes as an exclusive survey reveals deep concerns about use of taxpayer funds to start the sector, with only 21 per cent of voters in favour of taxpayer investments or subsidies for nuclear power.
The Resolve Political Monitor, conducted for this masthead, showed renewable energy was more popular, with 45 per cent of voters backing subsidies for rooftop solar and 34 per cent supporting subsidies for home batteries – an option Labor is exploring as an election policy next year.
Dutton is expected to reveal more details of his plan on Friday with a pledge to build seven full-scale nuclear power stations, rather than smaller “modular” reactors, to deliver baseload electricity and lower the nation’s greenhouse gas emissions.
“Australians will be better off under our plan. We will avoid hidden costs, reduce unnecessary infrastructure expenses, and lead to lower energy prices,” Dutton told media outlets in a statement.
A key part of the plan will be an assumption that coal-fired power stations will continue to operate while a Coalition government awards contracts to build the nuclear plants, even though energy companies are planning to stop using coal over the next two decades.

Yep, it's all about keeping clean, dinkum, pure, virginal coal on the go, and dissing renewables ...

Further down ...

...Power bills would rise by about $665 a year to repay the cost of building seven nuclear plants, according to analysis by the Institute for Energy Economics and Financial Analysis, based on the repayments needed to fund the average of construction costs from reactors recently built around the world.
The Coalition policy assumes a smaller addition of renewable energy to the electricity grid compared to government policy, which forecasts an increase in the share of renewable energy to 82 per cent of the grid by 2030.
The opposition has claimed the influx of renewables, which currently supply 40 per cent of electricity, will increase power bills and the risk of blackouts and disrupt regional communities where wind and solar farms are built.
Another key point of difference is the opposition’s assumption that the nation’s coal plants will run for decades longer than the Australian Energy Market Operator (AEMO) has forecast.
AEMO predicts that 90 per cent of coal-fired generation will be shut down before 2035, with closures complete by 2040.
The opposition has said its first nuclear reactor will be completed by 2035, while experts including the CSIRO say 2040 is the earliest possible date. A fully operational fleet of nuclear reactors cannot be expected before 2050.

Here, have a 'toon to celebrate: