ABC's ratings drop due to rise of the right-wing blogosphere?

Just on this recent plunge in the ratings of several ABC shows -- most notably Insiders, which lost 14% of its viewers recently:  It's a pretty noteworthy drop, which makes me wonder what the main cause is. Of course the luvvies are saying that it's got a lot to do with the fact that people are preferring to watch the content on the ABC's other channels or iView. But I think it's much more than that.

It seems to me that even the ABC's traditional audience is starting to tire of the obvious and relentless bias in so many of its shows. And that's because they're finally considering other points of view.

In the past, there was a real lack of outlets with views different to the left-leaning ABC. Sure, the commercial mainstream media organizations were a bit closer to the centre, but they were still "soft left". Even the papers that the Left loves to demonize as conservative, like The Australian, included a range of opinions, much as they do now. The only overtly conservative, right-wing opinions could be found on commercial talkback radio (which was, and remains, concentrated in Sydney) and a few small circulation magazines, the most notable being Quadrant. 

In the last ten years or so we've had the rise of the blogosphere, where anyone who wanted to have a growl about politics was able to do so. While blogs are written from all perspectives, those from the right of the political spectrum have done extremely well. Part of the reason for that was because they were the most passionate and rebellious.

So the dreary PC perspective of the ABC has really had a shake up. Countless people who hadn't considered conservative viewpoints, or were just too scared to express them, were invigorated by the rise of the blogosphere. And this new found irreverence has bled into the wider culture, so that even tragic ABC-watching luvvies have started to think in new ways about the issues of the day.

This process has been magnified by the huge explosion in social media use. While Twitter is dominated by lefties in this country, RWDB tweeps are slowly gaining on them. And I think that on Facebook they actually have the upper hand over the Left. Just type the word Gillard into the Facebook search box and you'll see just how many pages there are devoted to sledging our PM.

Basically, all these factors are combining to increase conservative "mind share" in Australia. As a result, the relentless narrow-mindedness of those behind ABC shows like Insiders is now obvious to a greater number of viewers than ever before. And that's why so many of them are switching off.

What do you think? Is this the main cause or are other factors involved?

Final Hamster Wheel shows same old left-wing bias

In comedy and satire everything is exaggerated. So you can see the political subtext very clearly. Many satirists purport to dish out mockery across the board without fear or favour. But that's a crock. They're just as selective as anyone else. And it shows.

Watch anything vaguely humorous on the ABC and you'll see the same dreary left-wing bias every time. The writers and performers are clearly terrified of transgressing uber-PC rules relating to race, gender and sexual identity among other things.

Take the final episode of the Hamster Wheel, which was shown this week. Pretty much every sketch reeked of obnoxious undergraduate Bolshevism (as it always does). Kinda sad for many reasons, not least because the "boys" who write and perform the show are swiftly approaching middle age.

For example, there was a segment on some media beat-up by A Current Affair about the growth in the number of Asian shops in a shopping mall. It was an easy target that was predictably handled. But there was one little part of it that I thought was particularly interesting because it revealed a specific double standard often applied to racial politics in this country.

The boys were making fun of the fact that the tabloid show had hugely exaggerated the extent of the Chinese "takeover" of the mall in question, saying that according to the racists at ACA "just a tiny bit of Asianness makes something completely Asian".

If such a concept can be freely mocked when it comes to discussions of "Asianness" then surely it would apply to related aspects pertaining to Indigenous issues too, right?

No way. As we are all well aware, the official line is that just the slightest hint of Indigenous ancestry is enough to make someone completely and authentically Aboriginal. And woe betide anyone who dares suggest a contrary view.

Good to know that the Chaser boys observe this little legal idiosyncracy very carefully. Otherwise their show could result in even more wasted taxpayers' millions in the form of massive compensation payouts to people whose feelings they had hurt.

And it's not just the writers and performers who know what's required of them by the bullying Left. The audience are right up to speed on this as well.

The "standby eulogy" for Julia Gillard was a case in point. Apart from the fact that it failed to mention the AWU scandal specifically -- which would surely have been the biggest target by a country mile if they really were anarchic takers of the piss (I mean, if anything's gonna "kill" the PM, surely it's this!) -- the audience took offence at the lame, tame gags near the end and even started to groan. It's as if they were saying: "Boys, we chuckled at the beginning to give the impression that we can laugh at our own side. But mocking the Great Helmsperson's recent face plant was simply beyond the pale. You're seconds away from being officially deemed sexist and misogynist. You have been warned!"

Depressing stuff. And to think lefties believe they're the ones with the best sense of humour! What a joke.

Chaser boys sledge Alan Jones on The Hamster Wheel

I wasn't surprised that The Hamster Wheel really went to town on Alan Jones last night. Lots of gags about his off-colour comments regarding Julia Gillard's father's death, of course. But also some nasty stuff about his sexuality; stuff that would provoke howls of outrage and rampant accusations of homophobia if it were aimed at a darling of the Left (Bob Brown for example).

Of course PC lefties would counter that accusation of a double standard by saying that Bob Brown is out and proud. So he cannot be criticized. But isn't a person's sexuality his business? If he prefers to keep it private shouldn't "compassionate", "tolerant", "progressive" people respect that, regardless of his political affiliations. If they don't they're just subordinating gay rights issues to partisan politics, surely a backward step. What do they wanna do, take us back to the fifties? 

Still on double standards, and sexuality: If you're going to bring up the decades-old story of Jones being arrested in a public toilet, then why not make jokes about a much more contemporary scandal; one involving a very well known and successful broadcaster being sprung downloading thousands of images of kiddy porn, for example?

The story of former ABC celebrity Andy Muirhead's trial and incarceration has been hogging the headlines of late. If anyone's just askin' for a cruel piss-take it's that guy, surely. And the Chaser boys could really have run amok with their "collector" gags!

Gee, I wonder why they didn't go there? Aren't they fearless satirists committed to waging a "war on everything?" Was it because they're too gutless to show their employer in a negative light, therefore risking their jobs? Oh no, that couldn't possibly be ...

And the show is supposed to be political satire with a media focus, right? So why no mockery of the hilariously desperate and silly attempts by every Labor pollie and his dog (as well as some commentators) to link Jones's comments to Tony Abbott? Nope. Instead they just joined the pile-on on the conservative broadcaster. 

The Jones material took up a lot of the show. It was followed by a reality TV parody mocking Tom Cruise and the Church of Scientology. Good on them for taking the piss out of that organization, but if they want to find more locally relevant and extreme examples of group-think to subvert with their courageously irreverent humour then why don't they try looking a little closer to home? The retarded, inward-looking culture of the ABC contains an abundance of juicy targets for sharp-eyed satirists.

If they were to do this The Hamster Wheel might even draw a bigger audience. And it would be one containing fewer parasitic sneering hipsters, and more of the productive, thoughtful people the organization is purported to serve. What a heartening subversion of the dominant paradigm that'd be! They are the ones who are paying for it, after all.

Will Sasha Burden appear on Q and A?

You've probably heard of Sacha Burden, the uni student who anonymously dropped a bucket on the Herald Sun after doing an internship there as part of her course.

She's been publicly unmasked and mercilessly pilloried for what she did by the likes of Andrew Landeryou. Still, what does she expect? If you're gonna sledge people, then you should at least have the integrity to put your name to what you do. Actually, the affair probably wouldn't have garnered anywhere near the amount of meeja attention that it has had she actually done that in the first place.

Not surprisingly, Landeryou has received a lot of abuse as a result of his post on her. And he's gleefully returning the favour.

Burden's fellow travellers clearly believe that she (and they) should not be made accountable for what they do and say. They're forever smearing others with nasty, false accusations and they expect that the objects of their scorn should just go along with it and not bite back. Only spoiled children have such an obnoxious, born-to-rule mentality. (This is one of the leftist's key psychological characteristics: A gargantuan sense of entitlement combined with severe emotional immaturity.)

It's sooo annoying. Whenever I talk to lefties I'm forever biting my tongue because I just want to say: "Awferfackssake! Don't you get it? It's not about you. Stop whining and bloody well grow up before it's too late!" But I know that the vast majority of them will never do that. They are doomed to remain in that sanctimonious and stunted state their entire lives. Sad and scary all at once.

Not surprisingly much of the leftist squawkin' 'n' squitterin' in support of Burden has occurred on Twitter. And it has come mostly from tweeps who don't have the balls to use their own names.

It's such a pervasive phenomenon, this. Take Q and A. Whenever some tragic PC numpty like Jane Caro says something utterly cringeworthy and self-parodic a whole stream of suck-tweets will appear on the bottom of the screen. And almost all of them will be from tweeps with clearly fictional handles.

Really, the correlation is so noticeable it would be good fodder for a thorough statistical analysis. Some sociology student should do an Honours thesis on it, I reckon. (Still, she'd have to spin the study in a politically correct way so as not to be given a big fat fail. Perhaps she could hypothesise that it's because of fear of News Ltd unmasking them that they don't use their real names?)

But just on the subject of Q and A: Burden does strike me as being just the kind of sneering hipster the producers use to maintain their relentless left-wing bias. There have been many young, utterly clueless panellists whose inclusion was obviously due to the fact that they recently received meeja coverage for some idiotic leftist pronouncement or other. Burden might have to make more news to be considered panel-ready, of course. Still, she's got a meeja profile now, so she's well on the way.

I'm guessing there's a good chance that she will be asked on the show eventually. If and when she does appear, those anonymous suck-tweets will form a river, not just a stream.

Murdoch-hater Stephen Mayne on ABC News Radio

I just heard Stephen Mayne being interviewed on ABC news Radio about the crisis engulfing News Corp (no link available). He was introduced as a shareholder activist and founder of Crikey. Not surprisingly, he got stuck into the embattled media baron big time!

I thought it was pretty ironic to ask his opinion, considering that Mayne's Crikey was never known as an examplar of media ethics. And that reputation continues. You would think that the interviewer might raise this issue at some stage -- you know, in the interests of the "balance" the ABC claims to uphold -- but of course he didn't.

Sure, the phone hacking scandal is a biggie, but some of the things Mayne said were laughably extreme. He said Murdoch resembled an ageing dictator like Mubarak and compared him to "Comical Ali", the Iraqi Information Minister.

He also got stuck into The Australian's push for "regime change", as if it was some kind of scary thing for democracy. But as everyone living in Oz knows only too well, the paper is merely articulating what most Australians feel. This government is probably the most dishonest and inept one we've ever had, led by the most embarrassingly vacuous numpty ever to disgrace The Lodge.

Mayne clearly hates Rupert's guts. And the interview with him was typical of the kind of meeja bias that is far more of a threat to democracy than Murdoch represents.