Miranda Devine, the Australian Stephen Colbert!
For satire the US has Stephen Colbert but we have nothing to match it in Australia.
We used to have very good TV political satire but not any more. We had greats like BackBerner , but they burnt out. Then there was CNNNN, but they have now degenerated into a Jackass clone. Now all we have is The Australian Idol and Big Brother.
But all is not lost. Political satire in Australia has instead moved to the print media. For instance the Sydney Morning Herald (SMH) has taken the concept of the Colbert Report, a satire of a conservative talk show host, and applied it to journalism. At the SMH they run regular op-ed pieces by Miranda Devine who is obviously a well studied tongue in cheek satire of Australian conservative journalists (jurnos); e.g. Peirs Akerman, Andrew Bolt, Gerard Henderson, Janet Albrechtsen, etc.
Even if you’ve never read these “jurnos” you know the way they work. Their pieces are usually built around a “Straw man” argument, which of course involves some conspiracy of an unidentified world wide organization know only as the “Left”. They then show that their hard to uncover argument is totally wrong. In the process they prove, to their satisfaction, yet again that the Left is deceitful, lazy, stupid and cannot be trusted and the conservatives are the only decent, well meaning people around.
Devine has these people’s number to a tee. Her latest article is a true classic. As way of background you should know that claims were recently made that the ABC has been forced, via political pressure, to air a Channel4 documentary called “The Great Global Warming Swindle”. This particular documentary has been greatly discredited and some in the “Left” are said to not want it to be shown because it has misleading and incorrect information on Climate Change.Now Devine in her article claims that the Swindle is a valid documentary; which is just a hoot given the number of scientists who say it totally misrepresents their findings.
Devine claims that the ABC airing the program will be a good rebuttal against Al Gore’s documentary. Just great work, not only does she bring into the argument the person these jurnos love to mock but she makes reference to claims about the ABC’s bias; a pet topic of them all.
I should point out the ABC has never actually aired Al Gore’s doco so they don’t need to air a rebuttal. However, maybe they should show Gore’s doco after they air the Swindle by way of a right of reply, wouldn’t want them to appear biased would we?
Devine makes a lovely reference to Swindle’s use of ice core data to refute Gore’s arguments; of course she doesn’t mention that the Swindle is just that and its use of the ice core data has been discredited .
And on and on it goes one myth and conspiracy theory on top of another all backed up with doggy data. Solar activity linked to Climate Change; discredited. Volcano’s produce more CO2 than we do; discredited, we produce about 100 times more a year. Patrick Moore is even used as somebody who thinks that people arguing that Climate Change is real are Marxists ; however it didn’t prevent him from saying this in a presentation to the US Senate this year “The climate change debate has made one thing abundantly clear: Global Warming is an environmental reality that requires action.”
It’s really hilarious satire!
Ah, why aren’t you laughing … she is a parody isn’t she?
