Pure Poison infiltrates the Battleship Australian

Pure Poison is a sub-blog of Crikey, positioning itself as a sort of textual and online counterpart to the ABC’s Media Watch. In recent times, The Australian has come under fire for going to “war” against the Greens and Pure Poison stands as one of several outlets that have objected.

The Australian’s defence to criticism of its war on Greens: stop oppressing us! stands as Pure Poison’s response to The Australian’s response to general media response to The Australian’s partisan coverage of many aspects of politics in the lead up to the election and the aftermath. That sentence may seem convoluted but so, too, do The Australian’s defences for their actions.

Author Jeremy Sear makes a great deal of the fact that The Australian has failed to delineate its reportage from its editorials. The most satisfying quote that one can pull from the article is “News Ltd has acted not as a trustworthy broker of information but as an advocate for the Coalition” – emphasizing specifically what responsible journalism is supposed to be about. If one cannot tell the difference between the editorial and news sections of a newspaper, then that newspaper has not done its job correctly according to the largely unwritten charter of professional journalism; it’s like journalism’s collective unconscious is uniformly failing to be tapped into by News Ltd.

Sear’s article is relatively brief but savage nonetheless. It pointedly mentions that The Australian wants to “destroy” the Greens and has ignored the meat of its criticism. It suggests that The Australian has undermined its own credibility in all future coverage of the Greens and the new minority government.

Pure Poison is the sort of thing that exists precisely because outlets like News Ltd and people like Andrew Bolt exist. Sear’s work will remain a sad necessity as long as news outlets like The Australian treat their readers with contempt.

Rise of the LOLBolts

Andrew Bolt is perhaps better known in Melbourne than he is in Sydney, but the thing about the internet is that it is the great equaliser: as such, we can read his venomous and under-inflated opinion pieces wherever we are in the world.

Bolt is a target ripe for parody, and as such a twitter account purporting to be written by the man himself appeared online. It was not until nearly 18 months into @AndrewBolt’s Twitter reign that the “real” Bolt acknowledged the fake’s existence.

The Fake Bolt responded to the real Bolt’s outrage through Crikey with the arch headline “Real Andrew Bolt is wrong, says Fake Andrew Bolt”. With one of the subjects of the article also being the writer of the article, there is a clear bias displayed, but this is irrelevant.

Fake Andrew Bolt is writing in a different register to his normal satirical mode; here he is explaining himself while simultaneously painting a negative picture of the real Andrew Bolt and his apparent lack of humour. The article works because of the place of its publication: Crikey balances serious reportage and tongue-in-cheek humour on a daily basis.

Fake Andrew Bolt isn’t as high profile as fake pundits along the lines of Stephen Colbert, but he operates to the same principle: that of “Poe’s Law”, which states that fundamentalism and conservatism are largely indistinguishable from satire and parody. (For a decidedly different reading of Poe’s Law, check the always confusing Conservapedia)

In Australian media and political discourse, Twitter is becoming an increasingly pervasive and influential tool. Real Bolt can try to dismiss Twitter, saying, “I don’t really need to tell people what I had for breakfast”, but it is difficult to deny the impact that Twitter has had on a media savvy subset of Australian citizens. That some people can’t tell the two Bolts apart really says all that needs saying.