The Bug has for a long, long, time described the News Queensland headquarters of The Courier-Mail and The Sunday Mail as The LNP’s Bowen Hills Branch. And for good reason.
Likewise, we have for just as long described what those two papers – in fact, all the mastheads under the News Corp Australia umbrella – are engaged in as long-term corporate suicide. Which is pretty amazing seeing that deliberate demise is being overseen by supposedly one of the great business minds of our time and the most powerful media mogul the world has ever known.
The truth is that Rupert Murdoch’s rotten rags stopped being newspapers long ago. They are shit rags whose politics reporters are primarily LNP public relations officers.
Perhaps the “sad” in the heading above is unwarranted. Does anyone give a rat’s arse if these shit rags die out as a consequence of constantly displaying their red-hot antipathy to Labor governments at any level of politics; their almost uncontrollable anger at any voters who elect such governments despite being told in no uncertain terms not to.
It won’t be journalism’s loss if they all eventually disappear, if not up Rupert Murdoch’s scrawny nonagenarian, money-hungry, unethical, far-right-wing arse in the short term, then his son Lachlan’s down the track.
We kept the “sad” in there for those “journalists” who still work for Rupe’s rotten rags. It will be sad, sort of, when they lose their jobs because their bosses seem incapable of taking the hint that what the Murdochs want is increasingly at odds with what Australians want.
We at The Bug might shed a tear when they walk out of these newspaper offices for the last time. Then again, we might sneer and shout a “fuck-off , goodbye to all you gutless pricks who could have collectively demanded better of your employer!”
It hasn’t been fun watching the political writers brownnosing away, supposedly as the only way they could keep their jobs, eschewing any commitment to the fundamental tenets of good journalism in the process.
The Courier-Mail is a prime example of the deliberate death spiral we’re talking about here.
That shit rag’s total commitment to the LNP at state and federal level is a fatal disease that flares up most at election times. It beggars belief that a succession of Courier-Mail editors, including the current LNP apologist Chris Jones, could see these examples from the federal election last May as fair and balance journalism. It is anything but, to most people who have plied the craft; veterans deeply saddened by what the Brisbane metropolitan daily has become.
Between elections, the paper’s need to do whatever it takes to bring down Labor governments remains bleedingly obvious, although its hatred between election campaigns is sometimes just a little more subtle. Take this example, from a few days ago, seeing its current focus is on destroying Annastacia Palaszczuk’s Queensland government, because it’s the next cab off the election rank.
Do any of you BUGers out there really believe that it was merely an accident that the splash had Palaszczuk (glum? embarrassed?) staring at the monster heading about that 13-year-old joyrider charged over the deaths of three women in Maryborough.
The subliminal message is strong: youth crime is out of control in the state and Palaszczuk and Labor are to blame for not eradicating youth crime completely. It was that day’s mainstream mediocre’s pitch du jour… it just wasn’t health’s turn, okay! Whenever The Courier-Mail bangs on about any of the anti-Labor topics, the commercial TV news bulletins invariably sing heartily from the same political hymn sheets the same evening.
If you doubt that’s the message the Courier intended with that splash, ask yourself this: would the same treatment be applied if David Crisafulli were Premier?
The Courier-Mail the next day came up with this health-issue shocker, castigating Health Minister Yvette D’Ath for supposedly showing a cruel and unforgivable indifference by not attending and listening to a meeting of new mothers at Gladstone Hospital, including the very sad case of one whose child was still-born.
Would Chris Jones and his senior editors have directed their art department to come up with that scandalous jockey line – STORY HEALTH MINISTER ‘TOO BUSY’ TO HEAR had an LNP health minister been involved?
We get it that Jones’s hatred of Labor and Labor governments is almost palpable. He probably hates them more than he hates his paper’s readers. We understand that he is the latest in a line of editors who have been left stunned after the Queensland electorate has rejected their paper’s demand – made clear through hundreds of biased, lopsided, unprofessional election coverage pages – at three elections now to do the right thing and vote in the LNP.
And therein lies perhaps the greatest irony of what the LNP’s Bowen Hills branch does and how the senior editors at both mastheads appear totally comfortable in doing their absolute best to kill them off. There is a better way; they are just too stupid or to scared to see it.
If, from this day on, all of Murdoch’s rotten rags and not just those at the LNP’s Bowen Hills branch showed some interest in practising real journalism and being fair to both main sides of politics in their news pages at least, their editorial views at election time – used sparingly and in the right place and clearly marked – might be of more interest to electors. Could actually sway some to their cause.
But they are not going to do that. They seem intent on maintaining a risible, highly regrettable, right-wing, approach as a matter of necessity; the need to show total loyalty to those cunts in New York by trampling all over the bare essentials the craft of journalism reigns supreme. There’s no rhyme or reason or logic to it but there you are. They seem hellbent on seeing their product die almost as fast as their fading, ageing readership. In return for their sizable salaries, they appear happy to see their presses fall silent sooner or later. It’s crazily insane but that is exactly what is happening.
And that’s all very sad and yet unsad at the same time. If they want to kill themselves slowly (in fact the process could be speeding up), should we fucking care?
Don Gordon-Brown
Want to be alerted immediately a new blog hits Australia’s longest running and most offensive satire site? Simply click on the Follow sign or the link below to be emailed new yarns the moment they are uploaded! The very second we go far too far – and trust us we will – you can then quickly unfollow via the three dots!
The Bug Online 