Sure, they had to resort to Photoshop on Monday, but they knew that as the week progressed they’d be able to rely on all manner of ludicrous shots of the comically-bewigged MP the Coalition have suddenly now decided was a bit dodgy during many of the years they kept preselecting him. And oh, the wig puns. “Liberal turncoat Peter Slipper’s flipped his wig“, trumpeted the Daily Telegraph. “Bigwig Speaker Peter Slipper’s first-day slip-ups“. So many puns. (Well, two.)

Except that Slipper didn’t only not ever wear the wig, he didn’t even ask for it.

Which is why I’d like to extend a Pure Poison tip of the hat to Mark Knight of the Herald Sun, for not letting reality stop him drawing Slipper with the wig he’s never worn, days after it became apparent he was never going to. Here he is in Thursday’s edition, where the entire cartoon is about how much of a ludicrous figure of pomposity Slipper can be when you are happy to completely make things up about him:

STOP TRYING TO SET YOUR SON ON FIRE DENETHOR.

Here’s hoping Mark and his fellow tabloid brethren can keep creating silly pictures of a bewigged Slipper until it becomes as integral a part of his public image as his famous rodent whiskers and prominent front teeth.

DISCLAIMER: Sometimes your correspondent wears a comical archaic wig and barrister’s robes at work himself. But he does it mainly for comfort reasons.

Back in November we saw the Daily Telegraph cruelly holding the Samuelson family up to ridicule allowing them to complain about the fact that their $150,000 plus income meant that they would not be receiving the same level of compensation given to people on lower incomes to offset price rises due to the Clean Energy package. Now the Australian is having a go, this time taking advantage of a family in Adelaide who will lose government welfare payments if the 30% private health insurance rebate is means tested.

“It’s ridiculous – the better we do, the more the government takes,” Ms Richards said yesterday. “Every time we try to get ahead and don’t rely on the welfare system, we get a guarantee they’ll hit us again.”

It was nice of The Oz to allow Ms Richards to demonstrate that she understands progressive taxation, but a bit mean to make it look like she doesn’t understand that the private health insurance rebate is a part of “the welfare system”.

Without a government rebate on the cost of private health insurance how will this family afford protective equipment or shoes for their children?

Ms Richards estimates the family spends more than $2650 a year on private health insurance, including hospital cover and extras, with Medibank Private.

In all fairness, that is a lot of money. Without the 30% government handout they’re likely to have to find another $1100 from their family budget.

The couple, who own a commercial flooring business in Adelaide, earn a combined income of more than $258,000.

Mr Richards, an ironman triathlete, regularly uses his cover to pay for physiotherapy, and Josh has dental braces.

No new carbon fibre frame this year I guess.

It’s a bit nasty of The Australian to take a family who have an income well above average and make them look like a pair of whingers. And the final indignity is that the Oz once again tries to make their subject look ignorant.

“I think if they’re going to take away the 30 per cent, I would be looking at what we’d spent, what we received back with Josh, and whether we need it,” she said.

“Then the government would be looking at us and our use of the public system.”

Actually the government probably wouldn’t be looking at them, seeing as there’s no Medicare coverage for dental braces or for sports physio, and the well informed journalists at The Australian would no doubt have been aware of this, but decided to print the quote anyway. Shame on The Australian for using their broad reach to make this family appear entitled and ignorant.

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Sound editing by Jacob HolmanHarold Camping

Intro from “Theme for “The Mad Thinker”
Outro from “O Cérebro do Morto”
Both tracks by Dr Frankenstein and appear on the album The Cursed Tapes

Cut and Paste Trophy theme “cutnpaste” by Marco Raaphorst

LOLBolt Comedy Theme “Old Dutch” by Victor Herbert Orchestra

For your perusal:
Six Vintage-Inspired Animations on Critical Thinking

Earth Station: The Afterlife of Technology at the End of the World
Making the World’s Largest Airline Fly

The podcast will be up soon. Have a great weekend.

The responses sent in by various media outlets – particularly those with pre-moderation systems who nevertheless still regularly show up in our own Cut & Paste Trophy – are worth a read. I was curious to read that they don’t want to publish offensive comments, they just occasionally slip through. Which doesn’t really explain the sheer volume of the material we see – or how easy it is to find.

Do the tabloids in particular expect us to believe that they haven’t noticed by now which sorts of articles garner the most objectionable comments, or that if they have noticed that, they can’t allocate staff to moderate those threads very carefully?

Kudos to Fairfax’s Michael Gordon, then, for yesterday’s “Small fish in rough seas“, reporting on the cruel, ineffective, expensive, and ridiculously bipartisan policy of mandatory harsh jail sentences for crews on refugee boats. Definitely worth reading.

Only thing it didn’t do, sadly, was critically evaluate the Department’s claim towards the end that it runs “communications campaigns in Indonesia that aim to educate locals about the risks of getting involved in people smuggling and the offences that apply to people smugglers” – campaigns that appear from the anecdotal evidence to be clearly failing, and therefore hardly justifying the cruelty of the other part of the policy. I’d have liked to see their response to a follow-up question contrasting these “campaigns” with the reality. 240 million Indonesians to reach so that we can justify obscene mandatory punishments – just what kind of “communications campaigns” are we running, how much are we spending on them, and what percentage of Indonesians are we reaching?

Maybe that’s in the next piece. It’s reassuring to see actual journalism still happening. Michael Gordon, we salute you.

Contrasting articles by Lenore Taylor and Ben Eltham aren’t about the prospect of a Rudd challenge to the Labor leadership. They are about what the purpose of political journalism is: what it’s for, and who’s it for.

Via Andrew Elder

People in Sydney would have seen this image on their Daily Telegraph front pages as they walked to trains or into workplaces. It is based on a rumour that the new Speaker of the House, Peter Slipper, wanted to wear a wig as the speaker. The Daily Telegraph decided to revive their image from earlier of the “King Rat”, this time in a wig.

Via Preston Towers

“Quite a bit of the criticism is sexist and unfair and unrelenting and the Prime Minister needs a bit of a break from that,” he told journalists in Canberra.

“I just think the degree of relentless criticism on this Prime Minister coming from male commentators, it’s probably all subconscious, but is sexist and quite ridiculous at times.”

And the other night:

BOB BROWN: It’s not across-the-board, of course it’s not, but it needed calling for what it is and I think that will do no harm at all to the level of political debate and to getting back onto issues of the day and the direction forward for this country, which is where the Greens want to see the debate going.

EMMA ALBERICI: But people have been criticising her, including yourself, on policy matters, not on account of her gender?

BOB BROWN: That’s right. And Emma, I’m not saying that the – and never have indicated, and nor would I, that all the attacks are sexist. I’m just saying there is an added component of sexism in the attack on this Prime Minister which I’ve never seen with any other prime minister.

How inconvenient for those who’d LOVE to run a vacuous beatup about his remarks that he kept pointing out that he wasn’t saying “all” the critical commentary was sexist, just that there was a sexist undertone to some of it. Unsurprising – since Bob Brown is obviously a regular critic of Julia Gillard himself – but inconvenient.

But who cares about reality? Who cares about what Bob Brown actually said? Commentators… commence pretending that he said that “all” criticism of Gillard was “sexist”. “All” of it!

Sabine Wolff at ABC’s The Drum:

By suggesting that a subconscious sexism pervades all criticism of Julia Gillard’s leadership, Brown has effectively denied that there is any legitimacy to claims that Gillard has been a less-than-effective prime minister.

John Birmingham:

Seriously, Senator Brown? Dissing the Prime Minister is sexist now?

Meanwhile, Andrew Bolt does acknowledge that Brown has indeed criticised Gillard himself – which you’d think would make it obvious that he never said that “all” criticism of the PM was “sexist”. But if your readers already think Brown is an insane liar, then maybe you can get them to believe that he’s enough of a “hypocrite” and “fraud” to damn exactly his own behaviour!

BOB Brown is trying everything to save his meal ticket – like making himself look stupid and deceitful… Now such accusations – which he himself once laid – are just “sexist”. Heaven spare us such frauds.

Love the “meal ticket” bit, too, a nice little shout-out for those stupid enough to think that Brown really is the “Deputy PM” with some kind of extra salary for working with JuLIAR.

That’s the stupidest ranting on the subject I’ve seen – but I’ve been having difficulty with my Internet access because Telstra apparently can’t provide reliable 3G coverage to the Melbourne CBD, so I might have missed your favourite. Feel free to share in the comments the silliest efforts you’ve seen.

UPDATE: Not particularly impressed by this effort from our own parent site:

But it doesn’t follow that Gillard is currently the victim of sexist criticism from male journalists (for one thing, last time we checked, there were plenty of female journalists in the press gallery giving Gillard a serve).

It’s not male commentators that caused Gillard’s poor performance at the Labor conference in December, nor did they have a hand in her inept reshuffle soon after. They didn’t compel her to abandon her agreement with Andrew Wilkie. They didn’t dispatch her media adviser to play political games on Australia Day.

Did anyone listen to what Brown actually said?

And while we’re on the subject – women can be sexist about women. If a female journalist writes guff about empty fruit bowls or lack of children or whatever, playing on nasty stereotypes about women – and they do – how is it not “sexist”?

PS – for those new to Pure Poison:

What is the Cut & Paste Trophy?

It’s no longer really about News Ltd pretending that reader comments on the sites of other media organisations are “articles” which are equivalent, for whinging purposes, with actual articles written by actual staff.

It’s about asking whether moderators at major media sites should be filtering out more than just the merely defamatory. Are there other types of hateful, destructive comments that actually encourage more of the same? And, secondly, about wondering what the comments that a media site receives and chooses to publish tell us about just what kind of journalism they’re selling. What sort of ignorance do they appear to have fostered? Should they be concerned about their audience’s misunderstandings and what it says about how well they fulfill their role as disseminators of knowledge?

Apparently those messages have not yet been received. Let’s see if we can help these media companies out by pointing them to the most disturbing entries in the comments below.