Hello to all the righties who read this blog. I don’t know how many of you there are, and frankly, I don’t want to know.

But maybe I’m a bit harsh sometimes. I feel that after my “truths of the left” revelation, I should do another post to help you out. You need all the help you can get. Look at you. Are you licking the oil out of a sardine tin as you read this? Yes? Well, then listen up.

Many of you probably read right-wing blogs (like Bolt, Blair, AWH, RWDB, and Landeryou) and ask yourselves “How can I write a blog like that? And just why does this tin keep cutting my tounge?”. Well, I am here to answer one of those questions. The blog one. The tin one you’ll have to answer on your own.

Using examples from some of Australia’s most popular right-wing blogs, I intend to demonstrate how to write a self-serving, dishonest post with lots of blaming, leftie bashing, context changing and quote misuse.

1. Blame the left

For God’s sake, blame everything on the left. Right-wing bloggers blame everything on the left. From the War going badly, to David Hick’s lengthy incarceration, nothing is their fault. The idea that the left might have always been right on these issues is a scary one, so they merely turn to blaming when the heat is on.

2. Dishonesty

When quoting make sure you take it out of context entirely. Very rarely do the readers of Tim Blair actually click on the link and read the entire articles for themselves.
For example:

Fairfax blogger (and pal) Jack Marx:

“I think I’m losing my patience with the stupid … I’ve worked at some of the most allegedly foolish periodicals in the nation - The Truth, Ralph, The Picture - but it’s only at Fairfax that I’ve received such stupid correspondence from readers.”

There Blair ended the post, without even commenting on it, allowing for the false insinuation that Jack Marx thought Fairfax readers were of low intelligence. Had they clicked on the link themselves, they would have found Marx’s follow-on:

“I don’t think one can assume from this that the Fairfax readership is dim, but simply that it has a longer reach than the others.”

Bolt and Blair are especially notorious for this kind of dishonesty. When you are a true right-wing blogger, you will think nothing of twisting comments, quotes and contexts to create your own truths. Both of them are so convinced they are right, that they think nothing of this kind of behaviour as long as their original intention gets through - in Blair’s case, that Fairfax readers are stupid. Right-wing blog readers don’t question this kind of blogging as they want to believe it.

Another good example is a recent post on global warming by Bolt:

More than two dozen demonstrators braved cold, wet weather Saturday in Reno to attend a rally designed to draw attention to global warming.

You’d have to be puffin’ muffins, cuddling cactus and an absolute dingleberry to believe that any downward change in the weather cancels out global warming. Bolt knows this, but still writes dishonest posts like this in the (very likely) chance that people will read this and believe it. Again, he is so convinced he is right that he is more than willing to trick people into his point of view through dishonest methods.

3. Hate The Age

Australia’s best daily, The Age, attracts much scorn from most right wing blogs. Why? Because it’s left-wing, and there is no comparable right-wing paper. The Herald Sun is a joke. The Age has superior news coverage, a fact reflected in the right-wing blogs linkage to their website. In the case of Andrew Landeryou, however, the agenda is slightly murkier.

You see, Landeryou’s company IQ (which eventually went broke) was contracted to deliver sports statistics to The Age. They didn’t deliver, and The Age went elsewhere. Subsequently, Landeryou spends his life trying to pick fights with Age writers, claiming it’s a “vile, leftist rag” when in reality, his beef lies with the fact they fired him and his company.

Does he disclose any of this? No.

Gerard Henderson claims that The Age should move to the centre. He’d love that, as it would leave no major left-wing daily in Australia. Like many on the right (AWH, I’m looking at you) he spends his time extolling the virtues of free-speech, meanwhile speaking out against anyone who doesn’t share his view, demanding they should change (MediaWatch, for example).

4. Make false accusations about “The Left”.

Make sure you make those with left wing views sound like a monster that is about to tear down the city, and ruin your life and the lives of everyone you care about. Don’t refer to them as people, refer to them as “The Left”. Example, claim the left are “hateful”.

According to good ol’ Jonny Ray:

Leftists are great haters and to cover up their own hatreds — of America, the rich, WASPS, the bourgeoisie and anyone who is happily doing well for themselves.

Not true, of course, as many lefties live in America, drive BMW’s, are white and hell, some of us even work (unlike a popular right-wing blogger).

Of course, the right only hate people like minorities, atheists, anyone of colour, and lefties which is okay, as evidenced in this regrettable post by one Tiberius on AWH:

“The filth of the treasonous left has been allowed to fester for too long, and it has now become so bad that the wound can no longer simply be drained of pus. The whole limb must be excised.”

Not hateful at all. Now, please notice that all comments on that post have been removed.

Free speech, anyone?

5. Groupthink

Think only the left groupthink? Wrong. Spend your time linking to other right-wing blogs that share your point of view (but don’t actually explain why they have that point of view, like Blair), and all your little anonymous righty friends will post vauge attacks on the left on your blog.

So anyway, I hope this has been a help to any wannabe right-wing bloggers out there. If you have anymore to add, don’t forget to in the comments.

__________

The Editor Updates (17 April): Andrew Landeryou has emailed Lachlan Connor who has, in turn, forwarded the message to me. It reads in part:

Whoever is telling you that Fairfax didn’t want my little company providing footy stats when we pulled the plug on them is pulling your chain.

The simple truth is that we walked away from the contract, forcing them to negotiate with the wolves of News Limited who were their only other source at the time. And from memory, they were rather ruthlessly screwed by them on it. Apparently the Fairfaxistas came back to us several times but by then we’d moved on from the whole very labour intensive and not particularly prospective activity to focus on other ultimately not particularly profitable activities.

In the few years IQ dealt with them, the provision of footy stats being a pretty small part of the business and my contempt for The Age being much the same then as it now is, I never actually met with anyone from Fairfax. So your “explanation” of my dislike of them is in fact utterly bullshit. As is your claim that I hadn’t “disclosed” the fact that IQ had done business with them. It’s no secret, mentioned on my blog and in at least one Age story I can recall.

The email threatened that if a correction wasn’t published then Lachlan “must surely know what happens next.” I don’t know for sure but I suspect it has something to do with photoshopping a photo of Lachlan Connor into a compromising image of a man and a sheep. You know, the standard kind of thing that goes on over at Landeryou’s website. Lachlan tells me he’s suffering in his jocks.

GrodsCorp has always given right of reply to those who are featured in blog posts and Landeryou has now been afforded the same opportunity as everybody else. As Landeryou himself is so fond of saying: “we report, you decide.”

In today’s Age, otherwise completely devoid of anything resembling journalism in these silly summer weeks, Leslie Cannold ponders the role of blogs in the delivery of news and information. She’s quite cannily described a couple of bloggers you may or may not have read:

Personal blogs can be well written and provide considered and informed opinion by those with the experience and knowledge to offer consumers considerable insight into the subject to hand.

But once we get past the giddiness of the gateless access available to both writers and readers, we may be able to be honest enough to admit that some are semi-literate rants by myopic, racist, sexist and/or homophobic cretins with tickets on themselves and barrows to push. At least these are easy to spot. The blogs I worry about are those lacking the “danger Will Robinson” alert signs: written in spare and polished prose, posted on expensive well-designed sites yet evidencing what can only be described as a tenuous grasp of logic and a hostile relationship with the facts.

Can’t argue with that.

Australian bloggers shouted out in glee this morning when they took the three steps from their bed to their computer and read the news that a blogger in the USA has successfully sued another blogger for libel, winning US$5 million dollars in damages.

Within minutes, Australian bandwidth consumption skyrocketed as thousands of bloggers furiously travelled the internet archiving copies of their mortal blogging enemies’ web pages containing accusations against them of being “idiots”, “retards”, “lefties” and “Nazis”. At the same time, each of these bloggers was furiously trawling their own blogs deleting any insult they may have thrown towards their mortal blogging enemies, all the while nervously preparing defences for imagined court proceedings. By 9am this morning the Australian blogosphere resembled a desert with almost all content deleted and replaced by 404 errors, while emails were flying back and forth between Hotmail addresses to faceless pseudonyms threatening in illiterate blogging prose to “bring teh full forse of the law upon you becos of the outrite lies and unthuths youve been propegating about my charecter on teh internet.”

Make no mistake, threats to sue for libel will now become standard ammunition in any blog comments war, alongside Godwin’s Law which holds that most comment wars will end in a comparison of at least one party to Nazis. This new phenomenon will be known as GrodsLaw: As an online discussion grows longer, the probability of a threat to sue for libel approaches one.