THE FOURTH ESTATE:

News Corp Australia executives in Sydney have put on hold their search for a new editor of The Australian amid growing dismay as they realise they are probably never going to find someone of the calibre of Christopher Dore.

Dore recently relinquished the helm at Australia’s premier national broadsheet daily to spend more time with his potty mouth and his liquor cabinet.

One of the executives told The Bug this morning: “We accept that being the editor of the Oz is not an easy task. You’ve got to blindly support the Liberal and National parties at federal and state levels as they are the only parties totally committed to protecting the commercial fossil-industry, nuclear-power and tax-evading interests of our owner.

“You’ve got to have the guts and the determination to stare down the younger members of staff – we’re going to have to put on some eventually – who will see that the 2020s have finally put the LNP behind them and that the the Liberal and National parties are a dying political cause for a number of reasons.

“Christopher’s name first came into our calculations years ago when as the editor of The Courier-Mail he penned in November 2013 a two-page piece condemning Stuart Broad for not walking on “a dark day in July” in a previous northern Ashes clash and declaring that the player’s name would never be mentioned during the current Gabba Test and he would be referred to only as that ’27-year old medium pace bowler’.

“When Christopher wrote this – ‘It’s not that Broad nicked the ball to the keeper and stood his ground – that’s cricket. It’s that he actually middled it to first slip, an entirely foreign concept in the general debate over walking, and stood sporting a docile look of bemusement at all the fuss. Perhaps Broad was as shocked as everyone else and frozen in fear after failing to immediately retreat to the dressing rooms’ – we knew we had a future Oz editor on his hands.

“Apart from being a totally childish stunt, it was all bullshit, of course, because Broad had edged finely to the keeper, with the ball then deflecting to first slip. Broad had every right to wait for the umpire’s decision; most Aussie batsmen would have done the same.

“Most people would have thought: even if Broad had edged straight to slip, who really gives a flying fuck if he waited for the umpire’s decision! But not Christopher. He saw a chance to create an England villain while at the same time increasing the paper’s circulation by handing out more free copies than normal at the Gabba!

“By that two-page effort, Christopher had shown himself brave enough to ignore the fact that he was making an absolute fool of himself with staff, and not just with the paper’s cricket writers, and with grit and determination proved he would always put the paper’s promotion first and foremost with no interest whatsoever in its reputation for accuracy and fairness.

“We also admired his efforts afterwards through forced crowd shots of a handful of people wearing Ban Broad T-shirts that sought to show the paper’s no-name-shame of Broad had worked a treat at the ground where in reality few cricket fans hopped on board the silly, stupid, childish stunt based on a lie. He then had to double up with the claim that when Broad came into bat, the ground rang all round with a “You are a 27-year-old medium-pace bowler wanker!” chant.

“And how about those two Courier front-pages in a row, the second with Broad’s image whited out after Broad cleaned up the Aussies. Childish stupidity heaped on childish stupidity.

“Here was a News Corp editor who knew instinctively that once he started digging a hole he shouldn’t have begun in the first place, he just needed to dig deeper and deeper.

“That’s the sort of person we are looking for to take The Australian forward – someone who instinctively knows they must put logic, commonsense and journalistic skills aside and go by their own gut feeling of what Rupert Murdoch wants them to write – and, sadly, no-one to date has come close to matching Christopher Dore’s abilities.

The Bug understands that among those interviewed so far was Brisbane journalist Peter Gleeson who looked promising enough but was discounted when he would not commit to writing his own editorials.

FOOTNOTE: Christopher Dore no longer works as a newspaper editor while Stuart Broad a decade on from shamelessly refusing to walk is still trundling in with 566 Test wickets to his name and a proud reputation as one of the finest England speed bowlers the game has produced.