I decided to make a cartoon to wish you a happy new year via my friend, Jules, who in his inimitable way summed up the politics of the season in an email. “May your fields of noodles be as productive as ours…”.

 

 

I hoped I would not have to explain the many sub-satirical meanings here, but I guess the ORIGINAL meaning would get lost in the translation. The word “nouilles” is noodles in English, and it is used in French to denote “idiots”. The idiotic concept of "fields of noodles" has always been a joke in France like fields of spaghettis in Italy — and the best wishes are reversed irony.

 
I was about to draw yet another cartoon of our crop of political noodles — especially Morrison telling us that “contrarily to what certain cartoonists and serious alt-social media tell you, my government is the most corrupt in the history of this country where we’re now one and free.”

The stench of PR absolution and saturation advertising of the ScoMo has been far superior to the crude 1930s-40s propaganda of Jo Geobbels. The subtleties of the Scom press-kumfrunces have reached Buster Keatonesque heights, but with words. All that is missing is a mute button and the hat.

We must thank our many media sources which we trust to varied levels of expectation. It’s quite cunning that sometimes the best media falter because of bias, prejudices, ignorance, hurried deadlines and shoddy research. We also thank our undercover agents who infiltrate the dilapidated seats of power and the poorly paid scientific petri dishes to confirm for us the validity of our arguments. These shall remain nameless as usual. We may falter ourselves by trying to bring in too much common sense.

So the round up of the media colic will be left to the Pearls:


Tamed Estate: News’ and Nine’s PR and the plight of the (Liberals’?) media

By MICHAEL WEST | On 1 January 2021

Old media caps off annus horribilis 2020 with its traditional horrible week. Michael West, standing in for Michael Tanner, looks at the fall of Fairfax, PR masquerading as journalism, who guards the Guardian, Seven News’ calls for war with China and how Scott Morrison’s media team has the game sown up.

Independent. Always.
Ahem …
How about Independent. Sometimes.

As annus horribilis 2020 shudders to its Covid-ridden close, the once venerable Australian media properties, the Sydney Morning Herald and The Age, have spruced up their advertising.
We refer not to their advertising for the Liberal Party, or even the heavy editorial influence of their beloved corporate sponsors, but rather the advertising of their own unseemly decline.
The shining example of the week was this Op-ed piece penned by a Liberal Party PR person and lobbyist Parnell Palme McGuinness.

Your humble essayist was once, long ago, a cadet at Fairfax – now Nine Entertainment. Reading this slavering panegyric to Gladys Berejiklian, which kicked off with a gratuitous swipe at Jacinda Adern, approximated the feeling one gets when scraping one’s fingernails across a blackboard.
It wasn’t just the tacky story. More the creepy incursion of political PR people into what purports to be independent journalism.
Since when is it de rigueur for a media organisation to run propaganda clickbait by Liberal lobbyists who benefit from limited-tender contracts from the Liberal Government? Answer: since Fairfax (now Nine newspapers) installed Liberal editorial management.
To be fair, the decline has been afoot for more than a decade – well before the Nine Entertainment takeover. And many fine journalists remain there – albeit cowed and interfered with – and feeble management and the global decline of a business model are largely to blame. Still …
Two days later, The Age sallied forth with a piece by a sociology professor who writes for The Australian and Quadrant claiming Dan Andrews was “heading the most incompetent Australian administration in living memory”.

This bloke must have a very short living memory. Incompetence is endemic to government and there are plenty worse than Dan Andrews.

Mainstream media train wreck

If the basic task of a media organisation is to hold both sides of politics to account, particularly the side in government, most of the mainstream media in this country has failed miserably.
Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp gave it up long ago. The Australian, the state tabloids and Sky News are little more than agitprop – their daily daggy a capellas to government merely the thing of a propaganda machine to further the power and financial interests of a US billionaire.
And although still insisting forlornly it is independent, still touting the “Independent. Always.” slogan on its mastheads, replete with emphatic full stops, Fairfax has now joined the choir; the shrill descants of the News Corp sopranos ringing above the melodic Fairfax bass, all perfectly complemented by the altos of talk-back radio and the reliable tenors of commercial TV – together as one – singing the praises of the most corrupt government in Australian history.
Independent. Always.? What a clear breach this is of Trade Practices law; truth in advertising, if anybody could be bothered to prosecute the case.

Forced molting

The ACCC recently fined an egg producer $300,000, finding it had falsely labelled eggs as free range. “The Federal Court agreed with the ACCC, finding as a matter of fact not all chickens were free to roam.”
Are News chairman Rupert Murdoch and Nine chairman Peter Costello’s chickens free to roam? Not on your nelly. They are well and truly caged, their raison d’etre is to give birth to government propaganda and, in so doing, to attract financial favours from the gamekeepers of the Morrison poultry farm.
And they do it with precision. Cluck, cluck.


So it is that the ACCC is busy kowtowing to the Government, fruitlessly compelling Google and Facebook to make “content” payments to News and Nine (when the digital giants actually provide free advertising already, drawing eyeballs to the paywalls of The Australian and the Sydney Morning Herald so consumers can subscribe to read the propaganda. And OK, to be fair, some journalism too, nicely arranged to suit the broader corporate and political agendas.
So it is that the chooks cluck and the favours are dispensed: licence free relief, reprieve from network transmission costs, government intervention against Google and Facebook, regulatory inertia, bullying the ABC into submission and self-censorship, untendered and unexplained cash payments to Foxtel, the large rural newspaper subsidy schemes followed by the closure and sale of same newspapers, laws changed to allow Nine to take out Fairfax and further concentrate the shallow pool that is Australian media.
By changing the law to allow Nine to take over Fairfax, former Minister for Communications Mitch Fifield did a big favour for his government, as well as News, Nine and Fairfax.
Now “Mitchell Peter Fifield is the Permanent Representative of Australia to the United Nations”. Thanks Mitch, job well done – for the Coalition, which relies on an obsequious and beaten Fourth Estate to stay in power.
It is a symbiotic relationship to be sure; a marriage counsellor would call it co-dependent. So tightly in the clutches of Murdoch is Mitch’s successor, Paul Fletcher, that he and his office can’t, or wont’, answer questions about where Rupert Murdoch has taken control of Foxtel.

But to the Guardian and its maturing. Success has its own pitfalls and the rise of Guardian Australia has brought much praise and, lately, some condemnation from the left. It boiled over on Twitter this week when political correspondent Katharine Murphy ran a simple news item quoting in-house polling.

“But for mine, the real miracle happened in 2020, during one of the most difficult years that many of us have experienced. That miracle was the return of trust to Australia’s political system,” wrote Murphy of the latest Essential poll. It was a straight story, a boring report about a quintessentially unessential poll that presumably reported the findings in good faith.

Yet she was hammered on Twitter. It may well be the case that there was some polling uptick in trust compared with some previously nebulous metric dreamed up by a pollster. The fact is, however, that government has never been so corrupt in Australia, corrupted by corporate money. And the level of accountability of our elected representatives has never been so low.

The pandemic has accelerated inequality and corporate domination, the federal government has accelerated its control of the media, and Guardian Australia, now making profits, is very much in the mainstream, very much on Scott Morrison’s “drops” list – the exclusive Canberra Bubble Club of mainstream media correspondents who are briefed in advance on government announcements … before all the facts, with little time to write, think or call.

This is tricky turf now for the Guardian.

Do they tell the PM’s office, no, please don’t give us the scoop; we prefer to report it independently the next day – fully apprised of the detail of the latest policy? Or do they tread the tightrope? Behind the scenes there are personal and business factors: assorted political relationships, political and corporate advertising to consider, perhaps an application for charitable status that has to navigate a Liberal-led ACNC charities commission.

 

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