Sunday, December 1, 2013

Paul Barry vs Andrew Bolt; socialism vs capitalism

This morning on The Bolt Report, Bolta gave ABC identity Paul Barry a whack. In last week's episode of Media Watch the cadaverous finger-wagger had disclosed his own outrageously excessive salary, paid for by the long suffering Aussie taxpayer, daring the conservative to do the same. Today Bolt gladly revealed the amount he received from the same source: a big fat zero. This eloquently showed those lefty accusations of Bolta's "hypocrisy" for what they were: a beat-up based on a false premise. There's no value in comparing apples with oranges, after all.

Bolta pointed out that Barry didn't include the amount of money he'd earned from book sales, etc. If he had, the comparison might have had some validity. It would have been apples vs apples, then.

I thought this was an important point. Barry does make money from the free market. He is a best selling author after all, a fact he proudly states in his Twitter profile.

And there's absolutely no doubt that the extra exposure the ABC show affords him bolsters his market value greatly. Being so well known and, ahem, respected, he can sell more books and charge higher fees for subsequent media projects than if he operated solely in the private sphere.

And that is very unfair in my opinion. Barry, along with so many other posturing pinko parasites at their ABC, gets the best of both worlds. He is outrageously over-rewarded using money taken from those who have no say in the matter. In effect he promotes himself at our expense, not his own. That's one thing. But the very fact that he uses the very bully pulpit we are made to fund to sulk about the size of the pay packets of his ideological enemies is too galling for words.

Bolt, along with Akerman, Devine, Kenny and others, have earned their place in the market. Sure, they are extremely well compensated for their work. But if they don't keep producing content that engages and sells, their fees drop commensurately. And they may even wind up losing their jobs completely. That's capitalism.

Sure, it's brutal. And you can sneer that this process rewards the "lowest common denominator". But you can't deny that it has a certain justice to it. 

Bolt is paid well because he's worth it. Paul Barry, a journalist so sloppy in his approach that he can't even accurately type in a person's Twitter handle, has piles of other people's cash thrown at him because he dutifully parrots the PC party line. Not only that, Bolt is undeniably prolific. He produces more quality content in a week than Barry and his team of sneering hipsters can create in several months.

Time to privatize the ABC. Then Barry and his fellow travellers will have to learn to make it in a free market in which merit and hard work are rewarded, rather than slavish adherence to outmoded ideology.

5 comments:

  1. The fact that sneering, snivelling rightards like you think that Barry should be sacked and the ABC should be privatised is ample evidence that they are both doing a good job. Bolt is a hate-peddling propagandist who flip-flops between manufactured outrage and ridiculous hyperbole. He's spent the last six years dumping muck on the Labor government; now he's crying like a baby because the left-of-centre media are being nasty to his idol Abbott.

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    1. Actually, Bolt managed to piss off a fair number of conservatives - including myself - with his affection for the Labor government. He opted for Rudd over Howard in 2007. He cooed over Jooolya - for a while, at least. And then there was his unforgettable love song to Anthony Albanese. .

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  2. Bolt produces quality content (and does so each week)? Hahahaha

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    1. He does, for those who aren't hypocrites who favour words and seeming rather than deeds and doing.
      What's more, he has been Australia's top commentator for over a decade--but please do continue to insult millions of your Aussie fellows simply for wanting to hear two sides of the divide on matter of importance to them!

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  3. Thankyou Matt for pointing out one of the problems at the ABC. I see the dvd of Kerry O'Brien's Paul Keating interviews is now being advertised on the ABC. How does that work? Does Kerry's private company pay the ABC for advertisting? What profit sharing arrangements are in place? Surely these contractual arrangement between staff, their private companies and the ABC should be subject to some external scrutiny?. If it is in the public interest for us to know about what our spy agences are doing why not the ABC's hiring and tendering processes?

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