It’s reasonably clear what’s happening.
Murdoch has a secret deal with Abbott by which he sells the ABC cheap to Lachlan.
The Secret Handshake
Leave a comment ?
Table Talk: Bob Ellis on Film and Theatre
Published by Boban Services Pty Ltd. ACN: 001516945
About Me
Name:
Bob Ellis
Location:
Sydney,
Australia
Cool, that is great news. Lachlan would do a much better job running it than the government ever could. Might be worth watching for a change.
Are you serious?
Please answer this.
he could be serious, in which case he would be a dumbo; probably he isn’t serious, but a Liberal troll, and so a dumbo
Yes, of course. The market forces of commercial ownership will mean the ABC will become what people want to watch, not what a small group of political activists want to watch. How can this be a bad thing?
Of course, you may have just completely made this up out of whole cloth. In which case I am disappointed in you getting my hopes up.
you mean porn? how asinine your position is
So .. the 80 percent of Australians who don’t want the ABC changed are … what … wrong?
Or … unrepresentative.
Please answer this.
me, Bob? or Bradney?
I don’t want the ABC to change, other than to stiffen its resolve not to bow to political pressure.
Living where there is no equivalent bbroadcaster, I really notice its absence. ABC TV and radio has entertained, educated, and occasionally employed me.
The same as Channel 10 eh Brad?
Bradney has found Embarrasing Fat Bodies such life-changing viewing, enlarging his mental and spiritual horizons beyond recognition, that he is determined that ABC-TV devote its entire resources to producing sequels - and a Murdoch is clearly the person for this task
Thank God if you are a believer, that Murdock don’t own face book He would >stuff< that too and use to influence governments
Just add it to all the secret deals Abbott has had to make to get where he is.
Up front?? Fair dinkum??
Come on now. I know this is Bob’s Blog, but really, do you have to take it so far as to move from satire to insanity?
‘Secret deals’ so secret that only Bob knows about them? On the stage (or ‘”Independent” Australia’) that might get the appropriate applause, but amongst adults?
what secret deal with Costello to elicit this mind-number?
Tony Abbott budget reply ‘the best in decades’, says Peter Costello
Murdoch won’t want the ABC. The inmates come with the territory. Why not sell the ABC to the Green Left Weekly for $1.
I’m serious. It’s a wonderful idea.
Abbott can then be free of funding it with tax payer dollars and the ABC can bask in the glow of of finding its true spiritual home and produce programs for its core constituents.
A quick flick through the Green Left Weeklys headlines will show the kind of programs the ABC is fit to make.
http://www.greenleft.org.au/
All the commercial interests hate the ABC. There is a demographic they cannot reach with their advertisements. A market they want desperately to exploit: wealthy, middle class and to date unimpressed with the commercial shit on commercial shit stations.
The plebs watch the commercial shit like good little consumers; the middle class do not. Abbott’s own heartland do not want any other arrangement, except for the noisy commercial interests.
As for the Left, it goes without saying. I will declare my own interest here : it is rare indeed for me to watch anything not on ABC or SBS, and to surf away the ads which do appear.
In short, though the Right will make noises threatening the ABC, and try to undermine it and bring it to heel, it is all noise and bluster, signifying nothing.
Expect more of the same, here and elsewhere.
Wrong, DQ. Middle classes do watch Channel Ten. Every time I pop into see my neighbour, an upper class English woman, a mother of barristers and diplomats, best private school students, is watching the bloody Channel ten…she also gave me a book by Cathy Lette, I thanked profusely and binned the book when I returned home…
And believe she is not the only one.
Poor Kathy! I knew her as a lad, and a fine girl she was too.
Her books summed up the youth experience of the seventies and eighties very well, but she seems to have got stuck somewhere around 1985. (sighs)
In his article What sort of prime minister will this man be? Tim Soutphommasane writes:
“Moreover, today’s conservatives frequently endorse a form of destructive radicalism towards public institutions and civil society. They admire someone like Margaret Thatcher, whose privatising reforms unleashed the market into all areas of British society and debilitated British communities. They lust for a new round in the culture war, for eradicating the supposed evils of elite political correctness (starting with the ABC and the Australian Human Rights Commission).”
http://www.smh.com.au/opinion/politics/what-sort-of-prime-minister-will-this-man-be-20130519-2juhq.html#ixzz2U9ZygClz
Abbott is Howard’s man, Murdoch’s bitch, and Pell’s servant.
What sort of PM?? A political whore, a capitalist lackey, and an Opus Dei pawn.
Just the sort of man the conservatives admire, then.
Dali, your populist slogans remind me of this student video clip I watched yesterday on Andrew Bolt’s excellent blog.
I recommend you watch it all the way through to see who is to blame for all the woes of the world.
(clue: Gina Reinhart)
Make sure you watch it all the way through because your argument will be shown and demonstrated to vanish like this morning’s dew.
You will see demonstrated in clear argument how your slogans have as much intellectual vigour and backbone as a jelly fish. hehehe…
“Andrew Bolt’s excellent blog.”
You do have a sense of humour, Frank, the above proofs it.
And, oh so poetic : “…vanishes like this morning’s dew.”
Frank, I get that populist slogans would put you in mind of Andrew Bolt.
As for the rest of your critique, it fails miserably. If you’re interested in debate, set out your argument for me to respond to.
Which argument in the video demonstrates which ‘slogan’ compares to a jellyfish backbone?
btw - don’t be so nonchalant about jellyfish if you ever take to the water.
You have ignored the collusion of Conroy in the ruining of public broadcasting, to the extent that those who once honoured the ABC and SBS now despise it.
What I don’t like about ABC are all those shows where five or six people sit in a row, someone utters something inane then everybody laughs out loud, very loud…and I can not hear or understand what was sooo funny….
Can’t they sell those shows to Channel Ten.
It is done because of politics and funding cuts- the two go together and are a central plank of neoliberal ideology.
The cheapies serve two purposes: one they save money, two they ensure that things like Attenborough, good
Aussie and Brit shows, broadsheet current affairs and documentaries are kept off -screen for the benefit of the those who seek a dumbing down of TV and its audience.
Stephen Fry is good, but not every night, please.
And then we have the Drum, every time I try to watch it, there’s that laughing out loud again; Oz politics is not THAT funny, and when everything else fails they put the dreaded Midsomer Murders on…
And why is the Australian story almost always about sports people, never about writers or artists…
Actually, just catching up with Media Watch, it was incredible to see just how deeply the corruption rot has set in as to sponsoring of “news” by private interests, with SBS named as a culprit.
It would probably be worth more if they did the retrenchments first.
Who, in particular?
Give us your list.
They could start with Mark Scott and that Kiwi bastard they brought over to do over SBS.
Liberals are such vile filth. Bolt is such a moron, he is the natural manure for the far right maggots.
come on, Richy, tell us what you *really* think
Does the Mudorc hate his idiot son so much as to bury him under the ABC obligations? Little things like being the emergency disaster broadcaster, stock prices, rural weather warnings, not to mention linking the Inland community, all 200K of them - now that is what would be a niche advertising market, worth precisely zilch.
It’s worth remembering that James Murdoch was in the process of developing a campaign against the BBC for damaging independent journalism (yes!!) when he had to close down his biggest newspaper and run back to Daddy in NY so as to be well away from the scene of his organisation’s many crimes.
The Murdoch’s want the competition killed
Selling the ABC has been in the Liberla DNA for decades. They cant stand it. You only have to chat to Piers Akerman. We need to pray that Abbott does not win September.