Alan Jones (Image: AAP/Warren Clarke)

Sky-high snub News Corp has a new look website. The header proudly lists a series of publications, companies (such as Harper Collins or REA Group) and, below them, three bold words: Passionate. Principled. Purposeful.

News Corp Australia is there (natch), as is Foxtel which is 65% owned by News. But you may have noticed that nowhere do we see the 100% News Corp-owned Sky News. If Foxtel gets a mention, why not Sky News?

Perhaps it’s a touch of shame about the Sky after dark, which has been hacking away at the bottom of the barrel for some time now.  A week ago on Monday Media Watch pinged Alan Jones and Sky News for the retailing of lies about COVID and the Delta variant.

Even Ray Hadley — maybe liberated by the fact that he’s not going to run into Jones in the office kitchen — has started unloading both barrels on Jones, saying he “needs to be called out” for spitting poison everywhere like some kind of reactionary and increasingly irrelevant dilophosaurus*.

Jones’ hits just this week include a predictably sympathetic take on Saturday’s anti-lockdown protesters, a predictably misogynistic take on NSW chief health officer Kerry Chant (a “village idiot”) and, most egregious of all, suggesting the 38-year-old woman who died from COVID-19 at the weekend was actually killed by a stroke or heart attack. “Principled”?

Of course, News Corp’s corporate bywords ring a little hollow while it is still to this day paying financial settlements to people in Britain who said News Corp’s defunct News of the World hacked their phones. Just this week Irish pop star and former Australian TV personality Ronan Keating won a financial settlement against News Corp’s UK arm. 

Things combine to be bad in ways you hadn’t predicted (part 8000) From time to time we at Crikey like to reflect on the ways hitherto distinct modern trends can come together in unexpected and awful ways, combining like some kind dystopian strawberries and balsamic. Who saw smartphone-operated-enabled coffee machines demanding ransoms? Or cops using over-zealous copyright take-downs to escape scrutiny?

And now we have (we hope) the pinnacle, the salted caramel of this phenomenon: climate change-induced calamity joining with measures we thought would ameliorate climate-change induced calamity to make climate-change induced calamity worse. Per Politico:

The Bootleg Fire is raging through a project in southern Oregon, where 400,000 acres of forest owned by Green Diamond Resource Co are being preserved to compensate for greenhouse gas emissions elsewhere. Microsoft in February paid Green Diamond to offset a quarter million tons of the tech giant’s 2021 carbon emissions.

The party’s over Sad news for lovers of bananas minor parties. The Australian Electoral Commission has issued a notice to deregister The Great Australian Party. GAP counted among it’s high-profile members celebrity chef and guy who took the “cooked” part of his job description extremely seriously, Pete Evans, and former One Nation senator Rod Culleton, whose cunning plan to get back into the Senate involved proving that nothing that any court in Australia has done since 2004 has any legal validity.

This may turn out to be great news for the general level of dangerous stupidity in Australian politics, but it will be at the cost of lots and lots of lovely content.

Every silver lining With the new Victorian regulations allowing theatre venues with a maximum capacity of 100 to open, the Andrews government regrets to announce that you are now permitted to attend your nephew’s Year 11 production of Death of a Salesman/your cousin’s one-woman show about Virginia Woolf/stand-up comedy.

*Yep yep we know that was just Jurassic Park and dilophosaurus didn’t actually do that.