… as those who cannot see because of Murdoch’s arse!

We all get that Rupert Murdoch has a pathological hatred of the Australian Broadcasting Corporation.

He’s got that seething, redhot, hatred because he doesn’t own it and he can’t make money out of it.

It’s much the same reason why we get that Murdoch’s Newscorpse Australia mastheads are not really newspapers and why far too many of the people who work for them are not really journalists.

Which brings us to the winner of The Bug’s Media Glass House Arse-Licker for the month of December, Stephen Rice (at top).

The Australian’s NSW editor penned this front-page piece last Friday and if Stephen Rice thinks that’s journalism, The Bug’s Arse-Licker trophy judges are all former Mister Universe holders.

We really don’t need to ask Rice why as we know the answer anyway but let’s do it regardless.

In a 24-paragraph piece devoted largely to letting a federal Liberal MP sink the boot into the ABC over criticisms the Australian Communications and Media Authority (ACMA) did make of it after a year-long investigation into the Four Corners program Fox and the Big Lie, why didn’t Rice feel any professional duty whatsoever to report just a tiny little line that ACMA had also rejected most of Fox News’s complaints. Fox made eight complaints and six were dismissed.

Why did Rice find plenty of space to stress the adverse findings about the ABC but not that point for the sake of fairness and balance? Plenty of space for Sarah Henderson to sink the boot into Aunty and open up fresh lines of attack against the public broadcaster with personal attacks on two ABC staffers who happen to be married?

And we all know the answers. With his tongue giving Rupert’s ring a right working over and his face pressed up against Murdoch’s scrawny nonagenarian arse, there’s not much room left for balanced, professional, journalism.

Rice’s job was to go Aunty headhunting and he did it with gusto.

And in fact, here’s our best guess. If Murdoch wasn’t Rice’s boss, Rice would have been perfectly entitled to spend most of those 24 paragraphs concentrating on the absurdity of the three nit-picking adverse findings – three arguably minor subjective breaches – that ACMA cooked up to throw a bone at Murdoch and Fox News.

Were Murdoch not his boss, Rice would have been totally entitled to back the criticisms by Sarah Ferguson and others at the ABC of ACMA’s findings.

He would have been entitled to have some fun at the expense of ACMA Deputy Chair and CEO Creina Chapman (pictured) and raged for paragraph after paragraph over ACMA’s criticism of the program’s use of the word “mob” to describe those who stormed the Capitol building in January 2021.

Will someone please hire a lectern and a hall and let’s hear Stephen Rice explain for 90 minutes why those people storming the Capitol were not the perfect example of a mob.

The entire Bug staff would safely make this bet: there would not be ONE journalist who worked with any of them over the decades who would even remotely think of embarrassing themselves by trying to argue those rioters that day were not a mob.

But then again they were all journalists. Far too many people who work on Newscorpse rags in Australia aren’t and that’s the sad truth of it all.

EDITOR’S NOTE: We at The Bug strive always to be scrupulously fair and we accept that Stephen Rice’s original copy might have acknowledged the failure of the majority of Fox complaints and mentioned the brain-numbing stupidity of at least one of ACMA’s adverse findings about the ABC and that his fair and balanced piece has been poorly subbed, unfairly creating the impression that here, yet again, was just another commercially motivated anti-ABC tirade. Stephen, let us know if that’s the case and we’ll record it here.