The bitter, twisted, old hacks who compile this column have always accepted that the English language is a moveable feast; it is always evolving.

It’s one of the reasons they’ve stopped using a felt pen to take to the use of underway in print or electronic form and marking it as the two words it used to be. And have you ever tried to erase black marker pen ink off a TV screen?

Ditto with the way “examination” has dropped off the end of “post mortem examination”. It seems only our Media Glass House and Mediocre Bytes compilers long for the days when coroners didn’t do post deaths. And, heck and hell fire, they even remember when ledes were called leads.

And with all this is mind, those MGH compilers this morning still managed to bristle with indignation and shake their sorry heads over declining standards in the craft of journalism over the splash in today’s (Monday’s) The Sydney Morning Herald (at top and below) that suggested new Opposition Leader had been offered a lifeline from the results of the Herald’s overnight Resolve Political Monitor poll.

Our compilers are old enough and smelly enough to know what the word lifeline means. If there’s a lifeline in today’s SMH splash for new Opposition Leader Angus Taylor, it’s one made of barbed wire dipped in oil, offered one of our compilers.

Let us explain. Some sub at the Herald last night (Sunday) was processing that Resolve poll result that had One Nation showing solid gains over the past month to draw level with the current official LNP opposition and somehow saw that as a lifeline for Taylor. Yes, we know. Go figure! One Nation surges from 18 per cent primary to 23 percent, yet Gus has a lifeline to lift him and his party to safety. Well done, Angus!

Our intrepid sub also saw the poll result showing Labor improving its primary vote to 32 per cent over a Taylor-led Opposition as some sort of lifeline for the man who just about shit his pants at any prospect of debating Jim Chalmers.

And guess where this so-called lifeline was teased reluctantly from the Resolve results? Those polled put the LNP/One Nation primary vote tied at 23-23 if they factored in the new Opposition leadership; it was 25/20 if those canvassed considered Lee as leader and continuing to show her grasp of policy by criticising Albanese’s choice of T shirt and demanding to know why Penny Wong didn’t weep openly over the Bondi Beach murder victims. Cut-through stuff, Sussssss!

So basically there you have it. That fair and balanced sub thought Taylor deserved a lifeline because he wasn’t quite as bad as Lee. Well, not yet anyway. Maybe the next nine months of Taylor’s leadership will give voters a sense of what he’s truly incapable of.

By the way, our MGH staff haven’t subbed for a fucking long time but it took them about the time it takes to twist the cap off a Bundy-rum bottle to come up with a few heading ideas much fairer and balanced than the one used today.

It’s a topic for another day but this example of supposedly one of the better mainstream newspapers looking for pluses for a shattered federal LNP dovetails with the general trend ‘The Bug has monitored for a long time, namely that our woeful MSM thinks it has a role to play in helping the LNP recover ground by building it up. It shouldn’t. Manufacturing some sort of level ground through bias is not a role any media should take up, and especially our ABC who sadly appears quite prone to it.

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