Like A Rupert Scorned

For the last few years, the Murdochs have been attempting to engineer an Australian Fox News followership via their Sky content, which notoriously shifts from regular news in the daytime to shock-jock alt-reality at night. The domestic ratings are poor, but online it has extremist appeal, particularly in an American market always hungry for loud right-wing hate (about 30% of traffic in 2021), and with YouTube advertising bringing in revenue, the content is being more and more tailored - US conspiracist Alex Jones has shared Sky After Dark clips, and the hosts play up to that by feeding back Inforwars/QAnon buzzwords and concepts. According to The Guardian, by last year it had tallied more YouTube views than any Australian news outlet - something in the 500 million range. It's helped to spread enmity and conspiracies centring on Covid, race, women, education, sex, the environment, and any politics slightly more progressive than Atilla the Hun. Last year, a deal with Austereo saw this inflammatory, non-factual content extend its reach to regional free-to-air in Australia. The strategy goes beyond immediate profit from online-pandering, to the stoking of exploitable divisions intended to engineer governments that support both the Murdoch's tax-offshoring and dirty old-industry friends/sponsors. Rupert and Lachlan are currently attempting to set up another extremist outlet in Britain, too - same model, usual nutty hosts.

The wedge-driving in the US has been so "successful" that when it doesn't work here, things can get a bit embarrassing. And at the election a fortnight ago, the years of disinfo and six-week scare-crescendo decidedly did not work. It's fair to say Sky's After-Dark stable was apoplectic. Private schoolboy/advertising executive Rowan Dean is one of the station's dependable line-up of bile-spillers. The day after the election, he took to the air openly outraged at not having been obeyed by the voting public. Dean's tantrum ranged from berating the Coalition direct-to-camera for not following Sky's political instructions, to bizarrely branding Morrison's right-wing hardliners as "woke...bedwetters", fantasizing Labor as "hard-core left", decrying the very idea of decarbonizing, declaring the answer was a major Coalition shift to the right, & hysterically endorsing "Trump/Dutton 2025". It was the full Foxian fuse-blow.

If the rules for media ownership and content aren't speedily addressed in this parliament, there's going to be a lot more where this came from.

Anyway, in the spirit of celebrating a weekend where Australians mostly ignored Rupert's cynical venom, here's a recut of ranting Rowan, taking the Ragebot's overloaded circuits to their logical conclusion.

Sound up.