Category: [Media]

In the skin of a liar

So quite a while ago I reported that The Onion had bought Infowars in Alex Jones’ bankruptcy auction; there’s been a raft of further legal activity in the meantime that’s held them back, but finally they’re ready to take over. Alex is taking it well, obviously:

So that’s the comedian Tim Heidecker, who’s part of the duo Tim & Eric and who’s partnering with the Onion gang in their “hostel” takeover of Infowars (going to be creative director of the site). From what I can tell, Jones has been running old skits from the Tim & Eric TV show as if they were serious; the “actual mug shot” is from one of those skits, and the line about wearing Jones’ skin comes from an appearance on The Majority Report a couple of days ago (WARNING: video contains shirtless Alex Jones). Onion boss Ben Collins ponders what he’s up to:

Still, despite The Onion‘s decades of popularity and at least a year-and-a-half of legal sparring, Collins doesn’t believe Jones knows who or what The Onion is. Appearing on the Pablo Torre Finds Out podcast yesterday, Collins said, “A thing that I didn’t fully understand until midway through the day is that he had never heard of The Onion until it bought InfoWars. The concept of it was complete foreign to him.” But apparently, the whole conservative media apparatus didn’t seem to understand what it was. Collins also claims that, upon the acquisition, Fox News reported that The Onion had 4.3 trillion daily readers, “which is on our website somewhere, but I don’t even know where.”

This is really interesting, but I find something… unlikely about it. Little Alex is, I suspect, more in touch with consensus reality than he would like people to think, and I find it hard to believe that he knows so little about the people who’ve taken the precious from him. He knows who they are and what they’re about, and I think he knows this outburst of his is bullshit and he’s hoping that whatever’s left of his audience doesn’t know and will believe him.

Alternately, he could actually be that stupid and believe that shit himself. This is not one of the finest minds of the 20th century we’re dealing with here, after all.

2SERIP continued

So after the news broke of 2SER’s impending implosion, the station held a “town hall meeting” on Monday which… went poorly. I’d opted out of attending (there was a Zoom option to attend online) cos I had a feeling it would be a shit show and that was evidently how it turned out:

Following a week of media coverage over the embattled station’s financial position, the meeting on Monday drew approximately 300 attendees both in person and online, according to sources present speaking to Crikey.
Station manager Cheryl Northey and board co-chairs Chris Dixon and James Bennett answered questions from a crowd of 2SER volunteers, community members and station alumni, with many incensed at the news reported last week by the Nine papers that the broadcaster could close as early as July. Dixon serves as the Macquarie University arts faculty executive dean, and Bennett is dean of the faculty of design and society at the University of Technology Sydney.
A partial recording of the meeting obtained by Crikey paints a picture of a livid 2SER community. Organisers told attendees a recording was being made during the meeting, but 2SER declined to provide Crikey a full recording of the event, citing consent and privacy concerns. Attendees have since been directed by management of both universities represented not to share recordings of the meeting, which was accessible to the public and advertised as a public meeting.

I can’t imagine why they don’t want anything circulating from this publicly accessible gathering…

Anthony Dockrill, the 2SER program director for 17 years between 2007 and 2024, described it as a “really shameful place to be” for the station and the board, and again criticised the timeframe of approaches for funding on the part of 2SER management.
Dixon denied that the funding withdrawal was thrust upon station management, replying, “We started considering this two years ago, but that conversation was shared with others.”
Dockrill added in a follow-up, “If the board was serious about finding a partner for the station, it needed two years … that hasn’t happened.”
“And I think the station has been let down by that,” he added, to audible applause.

Oh. So Macquarie was considering this move two years ago, and this news was evidently hidden from the people who would be most affected by it. (Parenthetically, Anthony is another Celluloid Dreams alumnus, indeed he was on the show before I was myself AND we actually both overlapped at UNSW before that, both of us were doing the Theatre & Film course there in the mid-90s. I don’t think I knew he’d been the program director for as long as that, though, that was long service. He’s correct in what he says here.)

A longer question came from Chris Nash, a retired professor of journalism at Monash University, a Walkley winner in 1977 and one of the original 2SER presenters when the station first went to air in 1979.
“What I’m not hearing here tonight is any sort of passion or even vision about what role 2SER might play in a revamped environment … and so I support what the other questions have been here tonight about the timing, because we’re now in late April, there have been two articles in The Sydney Morning Herald this week, and then we get invited to a meeting tonight to discuss options, but we’re also told that July is pretty much a deadline. You can’t turn something around in three months.
“So it seems to me that this is a communications exercise, with all due respect … for a decision that’s already been made.”

Yeah. This kind of ties in with Anthony’s point about the board being serious about finding a new partner, which, frankly, they don’t appear to be. I’m increasingly thinking the people in charge of these things are actually OK with SER shutting down and would rather it did so without this much fuss.

Meanwhile, in the online chat forum where questions were being asked by remote meeting attendees, tempers flared. Among several less-than-flattering responses was one made by an award-winning journalist at a major broadcaster, who said that Dixon was “not answering questions”.
2SER alumni and ABC broadcaster Robbie Buck asked: “How much is the managing director on?”, to audible gasps from the in-person audience and a concerted effort to move on from the panellists.
“It’s fine to ask the question. I think it’s also fine to not answer it,” came the response from the panel’s table.

Oh, Robbie Buck is pissed about this. Which, you know, he’s right to be. Funnily enough, around the time Macquarie were apparently initially planning their withdrawal from 2SER, this was also happening:

National Tertiary Education Union members at Macquarie University have taken the extraordinary step of passing a motion of no confidence in a senior university leader.
Macquarie is planning to scrap hundreds of casual academic roles, forcing huge workload increases on permanent staff.
Under the plan, Staff would be restricted in taking long service leave during teaching periods.
The Department of Critical Indigenous Studies would no longer be a stand alone department, losing independence and financial autonomy.
NTEU members on Wednesday unanimously voted for a no-confidence motion in Executive Dean of Arts Chris Dixon.

Yeah, THAT guy who was apparently getting tetchy at the Monday meeting about people asking him about the delay in publicising the news of MQ pulling out. A popular chap, by the look of things, whose brief seems to have been mostly to cut the arts faculty to ribbons, with 2SER being part of that. Even back in My Day, I remember hearing about MQ grumbling about funding SER and not getting enough of their shows in the program grid… fairly sure this wasn’t the solution, Chris. Cunt.

2SERIP?

Looks like my old stomping ground is in deep shit:

One of Sydney’s leading community radio stations could be closed as early as July, as the station scrambles to solve a funding hole caused by the exit of one of its financial owners last year.
2SER, or Sydney Educational Radio, is owned by the University of Technology Sydney (UTS) and Macquarie University, the latter of which announced it would withdraw its funding for the station this year.
In an email to station volunteers seen by 702 ABC Sydney, 2SER station manager Cheryl Northey said the station understood UTS could not fund the station on its own.
Cheryl Northey told staff and volunteers that without secure funding, 2SER could close as early as July this year. (Radio National: Sophie Kesteven)
Ms Northey said it was trying to avoid closure, but the station needed to find a way to make up for the shortfall caused by Macquarie’s exit.
“Should the station close this year, which could be as early as July, 2SER must do the right thing by our staff. A decision to close would not be taken lightly, and work is being done to avoid that outcome,” Ms Northey said in the email.

Now I’m admittedly long out of the loop with SER, having left back in 2013, but I’m kind of astonished it’s taken me this long to discover Macquarie had pulled out of the partnership after all these decades. I’m guessing that this was not a casual decision on Macquarie’s part, and I presume there was some discussion with UTS about it for a while, so that the whole thing wasn’t actually as abrupt as it appears in the news story. Remember when FBi were in dire straits in 2008 and they were upfront about it? Would’ve been nice of SER to do something similar. The ABC article cites Robbie Buck, who was an SER presenter before he took off on Triple J, but he’s also cited in the Herald news story where I think he’s more pertinent:

Buck, a lifetime paying member and former staffer, told this masthead that he and others were perplexed to see the real possibility that an “institution and pillar of Sydney culture” could be wound up in just a few months’ time.
“The question we have is, how did it get to this without anybody in the community realising how dire the situation was?” Buck said.
“UTS is a billion-dollar-plus enterprise. The funding from UTS is less than half a million dollars per year. We see no reason why even after Macquarie has pulled this funding, there couldn’t be a paired-back version of 2SER that continues with just UTS funding until further funds are found.”

Yeah, there’s been major fuck-ups behind the scenes, I just don’t know if they’ve been perpetrated by SER management or higher up at UTS. Apparently Macquarie pulled out last September but it was only about a month ago that they finally started hunting up new partners. WHAT THE FUCK. And according to the SMH piece, SER was actually about eighty grand in surplus in 2024. What went wrong? And why were they apparently determined to hide it from the members until it was too late?

Continue reading “2SERIP?”

How the “mighty” have fallen

Ah, Buzzfeed, once upon a time you were so ubiquitous… now you’re just catastrophically in debt, and you should be:

In January 2023, BuzzFeed CEO Jonah Peretti announced in a memo to staff that the company was making a hard pivot to AI — years before the word “slop” was added to the public lexicon.
In the memo, which was published roughly two months after OpenAI unveiled its groundbreaking ChatGPT chatbot, Peretti said BuzzFeed would be using the software to enhance the company’s infamous quizzes by generating personalized responses.
The company’s stock price jumped aggressively, from around $3 per share to north of $15. But longer-term, neither insiders nor the public were particularly compelled by the move. Nonetheless, Peretti doubled down, promising in May 2023 that AI will “replace the majority of static content” on the site, just a month after shuttting down its Pulitzer Prize-winning BuzzFeed News division.
Reality soon set in. The AI quizzes were underwhelming, and the site was soon caught publishing entire AI-generated articles that were sloppy and repetitive. After the initial spike in enthusiasm, the company’s stock took a massive beating; as of this week, its shares are hovering around 70 cents.

Woof. I think Buzzfeed was already long past its peak anyway when Peretti was making the shift to AI, and the latter clearly failed to achieve what I assume was the goal, i.e. get people interested in BF again. The company has now admitted outright that they probably don’t have the wherewithal to meet its financial obligations over the next twelve months. And, as the first article ominously notes…

The brutal reality check seemingly hasn’t put Peretti off from pursuing AI, though. He now says he’s hoping to bring “new AI apps to the market” this year.

…Peretti doesn’t seem to have learned anything from the last few years. If Buzzfeed does go under, it will have deserved it if its founder couldn’t come up with a better idea…

JOOOOOOOOOOS!

Obviously I haven’t felt much like writing stuff in the last few days, which is not to say that at least some kind of fun stuff has happened amidst the horrors… and right-wing media’s meltdown over the legacy of Charlie Kirk has been one of them:

Now, this is in some respects just a continuation of the existing feud between Klandace and Benji Bear, but even so it’s kind of amazing just how far the former is willing to push it. The general right-wing freakout about the Charlie Kirk aftermath and what’s happening at Turning Point USA is too silly to talk about—it will fill books in years to come, but I can’t be arsed right now—but seeing all these dreadful people losing the plot is rather lovely. Ben has been losing it as much as any of them, of course, though certainly not as much as her… I mean, Candace is the person who said Hitler would’ve been perfectly fine if he’d just limited his ambitions to Germany, but I feel this is her going far beyond her personal issues with Boon Shabibula and her beef with the state of Israel, both legitimate targets, into hatred of Jews in general, not legitimate targets. She’s an even better useful idiot for the far right than Ben is, really, and her “black people’s problem is not white people” bullshit in this video is going to age VERY badly if the racists she’s pandering to ever get that ethnostate they want, even worse than his will…

Book ’em!

So the Channel 9 website had this story…

…Which, as the headline suggests, is about bookshop workers striking for better working conditions. Why, then, is the story illustrated initially by this video of police officers patrolling some shopping centre on a mission to crack down on violent crime? How is this connected to the story? Are we supposed to associate justifiable strike action with violent crime? Actually, probably…

Goodbye world

John Laws is gone at last. Did you know he was still alive until now? I certainly didn’t. I suppose this is what happens when you don’t listen to AM talkback radio stations that struggle to get more than a few thousand listeners, you don’t realise what coffin dodgers are on them… Anyway, nothing of value, etc? I don’t know. Nothing if not a fantastic voice, obviously, iconic figure and all that, and most charitably called “problematic”:

Laws did not achieve his fame and success without controversy. In 1999, he was at the centre of the cash-for-comment scandal alongside his fellow 2UE broadcaster Alan Jones. The pair were accused of accepting payments from companies in exchange for favourable on-air commentary. Both denied any wrongdoing.
“Nobody has suggested I have broken any law. But you would think from the controversy that it was first-class industrial espionage or industrial rape,” Laws said at the time. […]
He was found in contempt of court for interviewing a juror in 2000 and received a suspended jail sentence. In 2001, his show was found to have breached the rules around decency and the treatment of suicide. In 2013, Laws asked a tearful female caller describing her childhood sexual assault if she might not have been at fault.
Two years later, he told a distressed older male listener who had called in to describe his childhood sexual abuse to “go to the pub and have a lemonade” and, although he had been empathic, Laws was criticised for his lack of awareness. In 2015, the former Socceroo Tim Cahill hung up on Laws after he repeatedly questioned him about his wealth.
In 2021 he was found to have breached the commercial radio code after calling a listener “mentally deficient” and urging them to “say something constructive, like you’re going to kill yourself”.
“I’d hate to think I was very cruel. I’m certainly rude and I’m certainly impatient, intolerant and a lot of things I shouldn’t be” he told Studio 10 in 2017.
He called his producers “handmaidens” and insisted they wear skirts or dresses to work although at least one former female employee maintained he was always a courteous boss and said “his old-fashioned manner felt respectful” to her.

His Wiki entry further notes:

In 2004, Laws and rival talk-back host Alan Jones were accused of taking payment to make favourable comments on products and services under the guise of merely expressing personal opinion, after entering into deals with Telstra. The ABA subsequently found that Laws’ deal constituted cash for comment but Jones’ did not. Laws, apparently angered by what he saw as inequitable treatment, launched stinging attacks on Jones and the ABA’s head, David Flint. In an appearance on the ABC’s Enough Rope, Laws accused Jones of placing pressure on Prime Minister John Howard to keep Flint as head of the ABA, and made comments that many viewers took to imply a sexual relationship between Jones and Flint, and broadly hinted that Jones, like Flint, was homosexual.
In November 2004, Laws and 2UE colleague Steve Price were found guilty of vilifying homosexuals after an on-air discussion about a gay couple appearing in the reality TV show The Block. They described the couple as “young poofs”. Laws had previously apologised for another incident in which he called gay TV personality Carson Kressley, of Queer Eye for the Straight Guy fame, a “pillow-biter” and a “pompous little pansy prig”.

So another dinosaur bites the dust (along with Graham Richardson, who popped his own clogs just the other day). Nothing else to say about the tedious old git.

Sure, why not

Yeah, that’s an actual Infowars article and the actual photo therein. Apparently Youtube was offering amnesties to channels it removed in the golden age of Covid-19 for spreading Covid and election lies, because the policies under which they did so have since lapsed. So Alex tried… and Youtube promptly banned him again. Same thing happened to Nick Fuentes, though I don’t think the latter has gone to the extent of, you know, this facial hair in “protest”. (I assume that’s because Nick has trouble growing facial hair, though, and that he would if he could…) Alex’s own direct comment was this:

Interesting choice to snipe at the Democrats when the Republicans are the ones actually engaging in censorship at the moment, of course…