The Weekend Australian of September the twenty fourth features another of Brendan O’Neill’s heart rending defences of the tattered image of News Ltd. Brendan is furious at “bigwigs who will poke their noses into the behaviour and morality of the media.” Given that the Murdoch press was poking their noses into other people’s behaviour and morality in a way that made it a criminal act seems to have been missed by Brendan. Here’s a tip Brendan, when you commit a criminal offence you will get noses poked in your business. Another point is that if you lie about knowing about the committing of a criminal offence that too will be scrutinised and judged by people with big wigs.

Now Brendan it is interesting that you have dredged up John Milton to complain about the paradise that you have lost.  “If then his Providence – Out of our evil seek to bring forth good, – Our labour must be to pervert that end,” Perhaps Milton did have some premonition of the Murdoch press. However, I don’t believe he had any inkling at that one man could so dominate world media and thereby politics, so pervasively and aggressive that any opposing voice is shouted down and campaigned against using not reason and debate but by personal abuse as was hurled at Cate Blanchette.

Brendan claims “Milton argued that public discussion, the battle of ideas, did not require a referee, certainly not one as powerful and biased as the state.”  This paraphrasing is a rather imaginative extrapolation from Milton’s “Let Truth and Falsehood grapple,” and “Who ever knew Truth put to the worse in a free and open encounter?” While this is a noble statement it does not fit his argument as the Murdoch media is not prone to presenting both sides of an argument and as Brendon’s article shows nor does it stick to the truth. For example Brendon states “Not content with having brought about the closure of the News of The World, a paper read by7.5 million people, some campaigners seem to want to eradicate all publications they consider scuzzy and inferior.”

This statement is blatantly false. It was Rupert Murdoch who closed the News of The World in a desperate effort to limit the damage to the corporations credibility caused by that papers criminal hacking of phones and computers. The campaigners had nothing to do with it.

I note that Brendan presents himself as the “ordinary bloke” on the side of the man in the street. He bravely takes on the “elites” and the politicians and “celebrities’ and ‘bigwigs” and of course “academics”;  to whom he ascribes as exhibiting “eye swivelling snobbery”, whatever that is. This dislike of anyone who has intelligence or social status seems at odds with him choosing an archaic classical poet to give some credence to his defence of his master, who I might add, is clearly a bigwig.

Brendan’s ordinary bloke portrayal even goes so far as to use an identifying photo in which he has forsaken the usual business attire for the black tee shirt and facial stubble. One could easily imagine that it was snapped in his garage while he was tuning up his FJ Holden. There is a distinct odour of the Roger Ailes – Fox News resentment methodology in the Brendan O’Neill articles. Rolling Stone magazine wrote of Ailes “He takes the shame of people who feel that they are being looked down on, and he mobilizes it for political purposes. Roger Ailes is a direct link between the Nixonian politics of resentment and Sarah Palin’s politics of resentment. He’s the golden thread.”   Brendan is our own Aussie nickel plated version.

|

It seems like our universe has entered the anti-world of Doctor Edward Teller.

Edward Teller, a brilliant physicist who has been described as the father of the atomic bomb, proposed a theory of a parallel anti-matter universe where there was a mirror opposite to everything in this universe. He hypothesised that if the anti matter came in contact with matter it would cause a massive explosion. It appears that in the opposite world  there is also anti truth.

A clear example of anti truth is the debate over a price on carbon. Climate scientists and conservationists are being to painted as self seeking destroyers of the Australian way of life, while the uneducated rantings of dollar blinded climate change sceptics and shock jocks is treated with reverence by the  media and especially by News Ltd.

In Australia right now there is a desperate campaign by right-wing politicians and newspapers to create another anti-truth. They are painting a new sanctified picture of serial abusers like the Sydney radio  shock jock Alan Jones, and his mate, Tony Abbott the leader of the opposition.

Those that were abused are now being blamed for objecting while the abusers are being presented as the victims.

The blatant dishonesty of this campaign would make Goebbels blush. As Goebbels would know this technique is not new. The Nazis used relentless negative propaganda to vilify the Jewish and other minority communities with slurs that were clearly untrue. To counteract the obvious truth, lie was layered upon bigger lie until the truth was perceived as a unpatriotic lie. These lies desensitized the public to the ethnic cleansing that followed.

After years of abuse and muck raking aimed at Prime Minister Julia Gillard, Labor supporters have hit back with a campaign highlighting Abbott’s thuggish behaviour as a student political leader. They linked this to his bullying and disrespect for women in and out of parliament. Abbott suffered a significant drop in the polls.

In response, Abbott’s minders have wheeled out his wife and daughters to tell Australians that Tony is not a misogynist and actually, Tony is a really nice bloke who even watches TV soapies with them. Desperate Housewives comes to mind. More was still to come.

Reacting to violent sexist commentary from Alan Jones against the female prime minister of Australia, thousands of outraged Australian women wrote to Sydney’s 2GB and their advertisers to complain about Jones’ comments. As a result many of the companies withdrew funding from his talk back program.

The loss of this substantial amount of money spurred the avaricious Jones and his backers to accuse the complainants of being a “lynch mob” who are” bullying” the people paying his wages.

These days the domination of the media by far right corporate interests ensures that the truth is reconstituted to suit their will. They value integrity and demand to be paid highly for it. In doing so the media have become the enemy of the people. A relentless ongoing campaign of lies and distortions is being used against anyone who threatens the profit or the political control being exercised by corporations.

For the past two years Rupert Murdoch’s Australian media empire has been on a mission to unseat the sitting government. However, their latest Abbott rescue mission is so hysterical and unbalanced that the once respected paper has used up the last remnants of respectability and will find it hard to survive into the future.

A bright light in all this murk and gloom is the emergence of online social media as a counter to the excesses of the corporate media. It must be clear to shock jocks like Jones and to Rupert Murdoch and his army of sycophants that their time in the sun is at an end. An army of women are ready to take them on.

When a great national icon loses credibility there is no easy way back to the days of glory. If that icon is Australia’s only national newspaper it is important for all of us that it should get back to some semblance of balance and not continue to behave like a print version of Fox News.

Nor should it be so heavily biased and in denial of evidential and scientific fact, that it loses touch with reality, and with most of its readers. The tipping point is when a newspaper becomes the butt of jokes rather than the chosen source of information for the educated public.

“The Australian” is a newspaper that has crossed the border of strong opinion into the realm of deranged hysteria that is the home of movements like the US Tea Party and the British National Front. It is now providing a strange mixture of high culture and jack boot politics.

The newspapers recent crusade in the defense of Opposition Leader Tony Abbott’s reputation after he was accused of threatening behaviour to a female political opponent has been hysterical and well over the border of high farce.

 The Australians leading journalists and commentators are beginning to sound more like Tony Abbott’s teenage girlfriends than rational reporters or commentators.

Foreign editor Greg Sheridan has made a heroic leap from his newspaper columns to television programs to defend his flailing “best mate” Tony Abbott who is sliding down the popularity slope to political oblivion. In the style of one of his heroes, Donald Rumsfeld,  Sheridan assures us Abbott is a “good bloke who wouldn’t threaten a woman as everyone who knows him knows”.

Bravely storming the enemy territory to appear on ABC’ Q@A program, Sheridan acted like a man who had combined Dutch courage with paranoid delusions, as he angrily denounced Abbott’s detractors for making “disgraceful slanderous slurs” that were, according to Sheridan, “inaccurate as well as ugly and sectarian”. Another panel member who also knew Abbott during his student years strongly disagreed.

Irving Wallach said that the Abbott that Sheridan describes is not the Tony Abbot he knew. Wallach’s Tony Abbott was an aggressive drinker and who was very physical at meetings. According to Wallach he was aggressive and disrespectful towards people he didn’t agree with and particularly towards women.

 Sheridan however, knows the bad stories aren’t true because he knows Tony really well and he is a good bloke who does things for charity. And we do know he does, because the TV cameras are always there to record his acts of kindness. In fact to ensure we all know of Tony’s kindness, his ministerial front bench have chorused an identical message of Tony’s feats to any camera that strays within range. Tony is, by their reckoning a modern day Jesus!

 Sheridan prefaced his remarks by saying he needed to be careful not to lose his reputation for fairness and balance. It is on this matter that he is most delusional.

 To any rational reader Sheridan’s reputation for balance and fairness has not yet bloomed in fact it is more like Monty Pythons parrot, its dead, snuffed it, an ex-attribute.

 In his columns Sheridan has lauded Abbott as having all the qualities required of a “great world leader” who can comfortably mix it with the international political elite.

In reality Abbott’s behaviour is more akin to a steroidal stunt monkey who keeps forgetting his lines, than an august statesman.

The Australian’s “Save Abbott Campaign” has even drawn in the veteran commentator Paul Kelly. Kelly who although having a tendency to pontificate usually keeps his commentary to the more rational side of the street. However, on the Tony Abbott defence he tries to deviate attention onto Prime Minister Julia Gillards sins by comparing the importance of the unproven accusations against Gillard to the unsubstantiated claims against Abbott. In his pontifical way he absolves Abbott and suggests purgatory for Gillard.

What Kelly is trying to do is to rationalise The Australian’s position which is to malign Gillard on the basis of 17 year old unsubstantiated rumours while furiously attacking detractors for criticising Abbott’s behaviour in the same unsubstantiated way. Sorry Paul while you have been clever in trying to put the focus back on the Prime Minister, it hasn’t worked. You are simply building on the impression that The Australian is an untrustworthy informant not worth reading unless your into rugby or ballet or weapons of mass destruction.

It is clear The Australian is following the lead of its American owner in trying to bring about a change in government by manipulating public opinion through a campaign of misinformation. Just like it has done in the UK, by going too far it has lost the battle and ruined its own credibility.

Greg Sheridan in the current Weakened Caucasian:

“ONE of the main reasons the Gillard government is so unsuccessful in selling its carbon tax is that its overall narrative is so utterly dishonest.”

Greg Sheridan has great insight into “utterly dishonest” narratives, as he himself pitches bullshit for a living. He was cheerleader for the illegal and immoral invasion of Iraq; an obsequious apologist for the likes of Bliar, Cheney and George Dubya Bush too. There’s obviously a dollar or two in spouting such craven tripe, and he probably keeps an eager eye on Woopert’s twitter rants for inspiration. 

Murdoch’s most unabashed, if entertaining retainer is Greg Sheridan, foreign editor of The Australian. On one his adoring trips to the United States, home of Murdoch HQ, Sheridan wrote, “The US is the greatest possible argument for media deregulation. Every morning, I flick between Fox, CNN and MSNBC as I eat my cereal… why did it take so long for pay TV to get to Australia?”. He was referring, as if instinctively, to his master’s pay TV company, Foxtel. As for terrorism, Sheridan blames “Pilgerist Chomskyism” for “ideologically fuelling the followers of Osama bin Lenin, sorry Laden.” (more at http://www.johnpilger.com)

To many people the killing of Muammar Gaddafi by the revolutionary forces was in itself a major story with significant ramifications for the Middle East and the world. It was an event any serious national newspaper would report soberly and objectively.

Clearly  not up to providing an  insightful article on the implications for Libya, Murdoch illuminati Greg Sheridan and John Lyon have joined the triumphalism in the death of Muammar Gaddafi by embellishing their stories with exaggeration and false statements in an effort to further vilify and diminish the dead dictator.

Sheridan claims that not only has Gaddafi’s life ended with a whimper rather than a bang it ended in a sewer while  John Lyon has reported in the Weekend Australian that “Gaddafi died a horrible death after being pulled from a sewage drain begging for mercy”.

While one can understand that a hotel dwelling foreign correspondent like Lyon may not know the difference between a culvert and a sewer, there are many who would claim that Sheridan is particularly familiar with sewers and should know what they look like. Here’s a clue Greg, they don’t go under roads and like the Australian they contain a great deal of unsavoury material.

Lyon is either psychic or must have been on the spot to hear Gaddaffi’s final words otherwise I am at loss to understand how he is able to know that Gaddafi was begging for mercy when pulled from the sewer. Perhaps he can lip read foreign languages or heard it in the bar. It is interesting that Lyons version is factually different from the Arab networks who say that sound recording from the video coverage indicate he was defiant till the end.

In his article, brave John chides Gaddafi for running into the culvert implying that he was reneging on his promise to fight to the death. Now I wonder if NATO aircraft had bombed John and his fellow Murdoch news crew killing most of them, would John sit in his vehicle sipping his gin or take cover in the only safe spot.

A good quality newspaper should be able to be used as a source to inform future generations about important events. While Gaddafi is not my idea of a hero we should expect that a newspaper that poses as a serious news source gives us facts about his life and death not the fanciful nonsense served up by the “ Australian”.

This page was intended to be a single post investigating a private sector funded “Institute” that appeared to be more a propaganda front than an educative body. It has instead unearthed so many links and threads that it started to look like a book. I have decided to break it up into a living series of posts with I hope some feedback and input from you on bogus front groups you have encountered. J2 

ABC Provides Platform for Propaganda and Misinformation

The Australian Broadcasting Commission has become a willing partner in the spreading of propaganda and misinformation for a sinister and malevolent organisation with an agenda to undermine democratic representation and to crush the political influence of Australian based NGO’s.

This organisation is funded by Phillip Morris, now known as Altria, and GM food companies, big polluters and not surprisingly, News Limited. It wields extraordinary influence on the ABC and other Australian media organisations and through them the Government.

In a speech justifying going to war against Iraq in 2003 John Howard praised the organisation commenting that they had “played a role in shaping, as well as articulating, our nation’s values.”

The organisation has only 45 members and by any measure cannot be said to be representative of the Australian community, yet its’ spokespersons get regular slots on ABC talkback and current affairs programs like the Drum and Q&A.  On many occasions they push tobacco and gambling issues into their debates to emphasise the evils of the “nanny state”, the primacy of individual rights, and to call for less regulation.

This organisation works hard to undermine legislation on smoking, on measures to curb excessive gambling and particularly on legislative measures to reduce carbon emissions.

To achieve this they have assembled a group of “retired experts”, most with strong links to mining interests. These “experts” flood the airways and newspapers with claims that the science used to establish human induced climate change is wrong.

Despite being proven to be factually incorrect and being sprung altering graphs to distort the actual climate impacts, and despite being made aware they are using data that has been proven to be wrong there is no apology or corrections made to their distortions of science. Instead they increase their propagation of this misleading material through the shock jocks and the onside newspapers owned by News Limited. Most recently this sorry group of fakes appeared together on the Bolt Show pushing their disproved and discredited theories.

Another one of their methods devised by the masters of manipulation Phillip Morris/Altria, is to create fake community groups to give the impression that there is community support for their views. The Australian Environment Foundation, which sounds like an environment group, is in fact an anti-environment group set up to support timber interests logging in native forest. Despite this agenda the organisation fraudulently applied to the former Liberal Government for Deductible Gift Recipient (DGR) Status which is awarded to not for profit charities who’s purpose is to help save the environment. This status was awarded.

Two other front groups are the Independent Contractors of Australia – which according to Source Watch, “campaigns for an end to workplace safety laws and a general deregulation of the labour market, and the ironically named Owner Drivers Australia, which campaigns against safety and work standards for truck drivers.”

What is very worrying about this so called Institute is that much of its agenda is driven on behalf of foreign corporations and in many cases is against the best interest of Australian citizens. Some of the corporations funding the institution have histories of anti-social and even criminal behaviour including convictions for racketeering. They also have histories of lying to regulatory authorities and providing the authorities with fraudulent research.

So what is this organisation and who are its operatives and financiers? What are its’ methodologies and which overseas persons and organisations is it working with?

The organisation is of course the Institute for Public Affairs (IPA). You are likely to have read articles by their staff in the Australian, the Age and many other newspapers and watched their performances on numerous television current affairs and news programs.

The IPA has morphed into an Australian version of the US corporate funded “think-tank”, the Competitive Enterprise Institute (CEI) which has the same basic structure and is carrying out an almost identical program as the IPA including front groups to carry out attacks on NGO’s.

The ubiquitous tobacco loving IPA spokesperson Tim Wilson uses the CEI front group Consumers Alliance for Global Prosperity (CAGP) propaganda to bag worthy  projects and organisations like Oxfam.

“It certainly has been the experience of Australian and US businesses targeted over the products they stock. A report, Empires of Collusion, by a US-based consumer group, last year found bad cop NGOs, including Greenpeace, targeted office-stationery retailers through the media and political action about the paper they stocked for sale and its origins.”

What Wilson does not reveal is that CAGP is not a consumer group. In fact the spokesman for CAGP is Andrew Langer, who is the founder and president of the Institute for Liberty (IFL), one of two listed supporters of CAGP. The other supporter is Frontiers of Freedom, a right wing front group funded by Exxon, the Koch brothers, and Phillip Morris.

Note the Phillip Morris connection with both the IPA and CEI. Could it be that the IPA and the CEI and even the Tea Party and the Liberal Party are much more closely related than they are letting on?

The ABC is failing to discriminate between blatant cash for comment PR and genuine debate and in the process is giving these anti-democratic phonies credibility and status they do not deserve.

My next posts will look at IPA and Liberal party  links with  American Legislative Executive Council (ALEC) how the same suspects are involved in the resignation of UK Defence Minister Liam Fox.

The Weekend Australian of September the twenty fourth features another of Brendan O’Neill’s heart rending defences of the tattered image of News Ltd. Brendan is furious at “bigwigs who will poke their noses into the behaviour and morality of the media.” Given that the Murdoch press was poking their noses into other people’s behaviour and morality in a way that made it a criminal act seems to have been missed by Brendan. Here’s a tip Brendan, when you commit a criminal offence you will get noses poked in your business. Another point is that if you lie about knowing about the committing of a criminal offence that too will be scrutinised and judged by people with big wigs.

Now Brendan it is interesting that you have dredged up John Milton to complain about the paradise that you have lost.  “If then his Providence – Out of our evil seek to bring forth good, – Our labour must be to pervert that end,” Perhaps Milton did have some premonition of the Murdoch press. However, I don’t believe he had any inkling at that one man could so dominate world media and thereby politics, so pervasively and aggressive that any opposing voice is shouted down and campaigned against using not reason and debate but by personal abuse as was hurled at Cate Blanchette.

Brendan claims “Milton argued that public discussion, the battle of ideas, did not require a referee, certainly not one as powerful and biased as the state.”  This paraphrasing is a rather imaginative extrapolation from Milton’s “Let Truth and Falsehood grapple,” and “Who ever knew Truth put to the worse in a free and open encounter?” While this is a noble statement it does not fit his argument as the Murdoch media is not prone to presenting both sides of an argument and as Brendon’s article shows nor does it stick to the truth. For example Brendon states “Not content with having brought about the closure of the News of The World, a paper read by7.5 million people, some campaigners seem to want to eradicate all publications they consider scuzzy and inferior.”

This statement is blatantly false. It was Rupert Murdoch who closed the News of The World in a desperate effort to limit the damage to the corporations credibility caused by that papers criminal hacking of phones and computers. The campaigners had nothing to do with it.

I note that Brendan presents himself as the “ordinary bloke” on the side of the man in the street. He bravely takes on the “elites” and the politicians and “celebrities’ and ‘bigwigs” and of course “academics”;  to whom he ascribes as exhibiting “eye swivelling snobbery”, whatever that is. This dislike of anyone who has intelligence or social status seems at odds with him choosing an archaic classical poet to give some credence to his defence of his master, who I might add, is clearly a bigwig.

Brendan’s ordinary bloke portrayal even goes so far as to use an identifying photo in which he has forsaken the usual business attire for the black tee shirt and facial stubble. One could easily imagine that it was snapped in his garage while he was tuning up his FJ Holden. There is a distinct odour of the Roger Ailes – Fox News resentment methodology in the Brendan O’Neill articles. Rolling Stone magazine wrote of Ailes “He takes the shame of people who feel that they are being looked down on, and he mobilizes it for political purposes. Roger Ailes is a direct link between the Nixonian politics of resentment and Sarah Palin’s politics of resentment. He’s the golden thread.”   Brendan is our own Aussie nickel plated version.

|