Dennis Shanahan has taken out The Bug’s Media Glass House Arse-Licker of the Month award for June 2024.

The Australian’s national editor based in the Canberra press gallery was easily our award judges’ choice for the article (below) but even then he was given the gong solely on the basis of his opening paragraphs that have surely left the cloacas of Rupert and Lachlan Murdoch with an almighty ring of confidence.

Here are those opening salvos.

Anthony Albanese’s weakness and lack of authority are on full display.

Whatever precious little prime ministerial authority he had left, he has shown he simply doesn’t know how to use it.

It’s either too much too soon, as in the Indigenous voice to parliament referendum, or too little too late, suspending Western Australian senator Fatima Payman from the Labor caucus indefinitely for defiantly declaring she would continue to defy the PM, government policy and her Labor colleagues.

Wow, our judges decided. You could eat a meal off the Murdochs’ arses after that tonguing masterclass that was absolutely rimming with confidence.

And why? Shanahan’s almighty putdown of Albanese shared a spread in the Oz with the results of Sunday’s Newspoll.

It takes a certain unembarrassed tongue flickery to call Albanese weak, lacking in authority and retaining precious little prime-ministerial authority on the very same day that Newspoll shows the LNP sloughing off three primary points to Labor’s one, Albanese ahead as preferred PM 46/38 (unchanged from three weeks earlier) and while Albanese and Peter Dutton both slipped on voter approval, Dutton went backwards by six points.

Summary: if Shanahan thinks Albanese has lost the plot, Dutton’s lost it more.

His article had to share a page on which even fellow fiction righter Simon Benson was having difficulty in putting a positive spin on the Newspoll results, as is his wont as a fellow LNP publicist.

In awarding the June Arse-Licker award to Shanahan, our judges made a simple point to the winner they’ve made many times before: “We don’t really give a flying fuck what you call yourself but please don’t call yourself a journalist.

“And we don’t give a flying fuck what you call The Australian as long as it’s not a fucking newspaper!

“It spreads shit, just like your tongue.”

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