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Margo Kingston attacks Daily Telegraph editor David Penberthy:

MARGO: Well look, David Penberthy is too young for the job, there is no doubt about that.

Is Margo advocating a minimum-age qualification for editors? The woman is opposed to anti-discrimination law! Why, next she’ll be ranting about Jewish conspiracies and using the n-word. She continues:

Imagine how his staff are feeling – he’s got a number of his staff who, at least one of whom witnessed it, they decided not to run it, the story is run by Glenn, within a day John Brogden resigns as leader and resigns from the front bench, and it’s almost as like a young man said “Oh dear, we’ll make up for it, now that he’s dead meat, we’ll start running unsubstantiated allegations about his previous life”. Now, what more can John do, that is my first point, on what basis can David possibly justify sending his attack dog in – no doubt Luke McIlveen is a machine man for Murdoch when they want things, when Murdoch editors want things done –

FRAN KELLY: Mm hmm

MARGO: - to trawl around when a man is at his most low and has virtually resigned from public life and say that’s in the public interest, and more than that, and this is where I used to blow up Crikey, this is where Glenn and I agree very strongly, if you’re going to run allegations of a sexual, generally private nature, which will – or defamation imputations, whatever - which are almost certain to fatally damage someone whose aim in life is about to be destroyed, what they’ve worked for all those years, to run those allegations without putting a name to them – if a person’s going to make ‘em, and break someone’s career, please, don’t report that without the decency of putting a name to it. I think David Penberthy is not fit to be Editor, for many reasons –

FRAN KELLY: Margo, I’m going to have to wind you up there ...

Thank God for that. Meanwhile, things are running as smoothly as usual over at Margoland, where yesterday this “do not publish” instruction was accidentally, er, published:

DNP - Kerri - don’t want to engage with Tim Blair stuff 

A comment was subsequently cut—only to later re-appear. It’s almost as though Margo’s activist army doesn’t know what the hell it is doing. Let’s see them answer Fearless Leader’s challenging questions:

When did the powerful, those whose role in our society it is to make prudent long term investments in our children’s future as Australians, decide to forget their duty to all of us? When? Because when we know when, we’ll be able to freeze frame the perpetrators, those who lost their ethics by selling them for cash. How many people will we be be looking at, I wonder. Most of us? All of us? So what do we do now we KNOW the Emperors have no clothes? What will you do?

You can sell ethics for cash? Excellent—more money for bold tags.

UPDATE. Margo’s throwing her money around:

I hereby commission a piece on questions to you media and a piece on questions to you pollies (thanks yet again, Jack Robertson!). $1.00 a word, 800 words. Due by midnight at the latest. First one of each I like gets published as the conversation starter.

Whoa! 1600 Margodollars! She must have sold her car.

UPDATE II. Skip:

Clearly what has happened at WebDiary with the comments disappearing an re-appearing, is that WD Team Gamma has taken their eye off the ball. Their mistake was missed by WD Teams Theta and Omega forcing the WD Special Emergency Team Epsilon to erase any mention of Tim Blair from the WD site. Unfortunately no one told Team Omikron who re-published the comment. We can expect severe repercussions from the Black Shirts at Team Kappa.

Posted by Tim B. on 09/06/2005 at 10:39 PM
  1. Imagine how his staff are feeling – he’s got a number of his staff who, at least one of whom witnessed it, they decided not to run it, the story is run by Glenn

    Goodnees, her spoken comments are even more like gibberish than the stuff she posts on Webdiary.

    Posted by PW on 2005 09 07 at 12:17 AM • permalink

  2. You can sell ethics for cash?

    That explains so much!

    Um, and, uh, where do I sign up?

    Posted by Pixy Misa on 2005 09 07 at 12:17 AM • permalink

  3. The wheel’s still spinning, but the hamster’s long since died>

    Posted by Toryhere2 on 2005 09 07 at 12:17 AM • permalink

  4. Wrong again, Margo.  Penberthy’s age has nothing to do with it.  In twenty years he will be even more cynical and unethical.

    Posted by reverse_swing on 2005 09 07 at 12:18 AM • permalink

  5. About that last bit - do lefties ever speak concretely? Ever?

    Posted by Dave S. on 2005 09 07 at 12:19 AM • permalink

  6. Fun comment from the WD thread Tim linked:

    ed Kerri: Hi, Phil. Margo is having a day off the computer and is not available to reply today.

    The vapors, I suppose.

    Posted by PW on 2005 09 07 at 12:21 AM • permalink

  7. Well look, Margo Kingston is too ugly for the job, there is no doubt about that.

    And while I’m here, is there a level of incoherence to which this woman can sink that simply defies all existing rules of speech? At what point does one’s speech become totally unintelligable, as opposed to, well, unitelligable… Forget I asked that.

    Posted by Hanyu on 2005 09 07 at 12:37 AM • permalink

  8. Margeux’s still got spellin’ issues and stuff - this is from one of the links that T/B posted above. “Club Chaos Perth, led by the reboubtable Jack H Smit, will host the Western Australia launch of the independent Webdiary in Fremantle on Friday, September 23”.  Reboubtable?

    Posted by Lucky Nutsacks on 2005 09 07 at 12:39 AM • permalink

  9. I love these Margo Mayhem threads. I don’t even need to visit WebDiary.

    Is she really so far off this planet or is she having a lend of us all?

    Posted by Nilknarf Arbed on 2005 09 07 at 01:12 AM • permalink

  10. Margo comments elsewhere in her ethics thread:

    ...would it be fair to say that an essential aspect of our identity as Australians is that ‘we don’t kick a man when he’s down”? I always thought that phrase means the equivalent of stabbing someone in the back.

    Maybe it’s just me, but I think ‘stabbing in the back’ and ‘kicking a man when he’s down’ have different meanings.

    Posted by Villeurbanne on 2005 09 07 at 01:22 AM • permalink

  11. “FRAN KELLY: Margo, I’m going to have to wind you up there ...”

    I think she may have already been a little wound up. Her words were well in front of her brain.

    On the other hand “DNP - Kerri - don’t want to engage with Tim Blair stuff.” actually shows a modicum of common sense although thats very likely just co-incidental.

    This still seems much more likely to be a spoof but I have come to realise that Truth is very much stranger than Fiction.

    Posted by Mick Gill on 2005 09 07 at 01:24 AM • permalink

  12. I can’t believe Fran Kelly was the first person to ever put the wind up Margo…

    But Margo should meet this guy

    Posted by richard mcenroe on 2005 09 07 at 01:26 AM • permalink

  13. I have actually seen Margolia on the Fairfax smokers Balcony (you can imagine how ugly that place is right? makes abu Graib look like club med) but nothing can prepare you for Margo in in 3D dragging on a cigarette like it was Che Gueveras trouser snake

    OT - did Media Watch follow up on their threat to Mark Steyn this week?

    Posted by knuckleheadwatch on 2005 09 07 at 01:39 AM • permalink

  14. BSG - Re Mark Steyn : Nope. Quelle Surprise.

    Tim… look, there’s such a thing as shooting Fish in a Barrel. Imagine if WebDiary didn’t exist. What would we do for entertainment?

    Posted by Zoe Brain on 2005 09 07 at 01:49 AM • permalink

  15. Straight from Margovia:

    Ed David: hey, Peter, HTML close tags go </b> not <b/>

    Noooo comment.

    Posted by P. Froward on 2005 09 07 at 01:50 AM • permalink

  16. Come off it Tim- this sweet ride has gotta be worth more than 1600 beans, what with the sidecar and afterburners.
    Maybe she’s been moonlighting, hanging around the eaves of assorted cathedrals?

    Posted by Habib on 2005 09 07 at 01:52 AM • permalink

  17. I guess Margo isn’t paying people to fix up the bold tags anymore, so the editors are now leaning on their demented commenters to not screw them up in the first place.

    Posted by PW on 2005 09 07 at 01:52 AM • permalink

  18. The hapless “Peter” will probably now use </b> for all close tags. Somebody should show him <br/>. He’ll be ruined for life.

    What percentage of Margo’s hits are from here, by the way?

    Posted by P. Froward on 2005 09 07 at 01:58 AM • permalink

  19. Gawd, she can’t even speak grammatically or make a sensible, simple verbal statement.  This is appalling.

    Here’s the odd thing – when under the safe umbrella of SMH, as a consultant, she relied entirely on her retinue of “amateur journalists” to write for free, since she was too busy reading emails to ever write a piece herself.  Now that she is “independent” she is still outsourcing ALL the writing to other people, but now finds herself having to bribe them with money.  How does that work?  I don’t get it.

    As a “senior” journalist, she can’t whip-up 800 words covering questions she would like to ask politicians?  Followed by another 800 words covering questions she would like to ask her colleagues in the media? 

    Someone set me straight here:  I thought the core job of a journalist was to firstly ask questions, and secondly to write stuff.  Margo, now by her own admission can do neither, otherwise she would have started and completed the task, long before midnight, and could have paid herself $1600.

    PS - Prof Froward - they are measuring by page view only, so their figures are highly distorted.

    Posted by Ck on 2005 09 07 at 02:10 AM • permalink

  20. Someone *ahem* ought to forge an e-mail from TypePad to Margeaux detailing the new pricing structure for including bold, italics, underline, and strikethru tags on all TP sites…

    Posted by david on 2005 09 07 at 02:13 AM • permalink

  21. Oh goodie!  A contest!

    What’s the best archive of the Brogden story so far on the net, Webdiarists? Please post your nominations in the comments box. The Webdiarist who chooses the online archive I reckon is the best wins something. I can’t tell you what but it’s worth less than $50, I think.

    I don’t know if he even wrote on the topic, but it’s still tempting to submit Harry Heidleberg

    Posted by debo.v2 on 2005 09 07 at 02:21 AM • permalink

  22. On second thoughts, I’s say it’s only worth a grand tops- it looks like its had Marilyn Shepherd in the passenger seat, and while the stains might come out with industrial solvents, there’s nothing you can do about the bite marks.

    Posted by Habib on 2005 09 07 at 02:48 AM • permalink

  23. I thought Fran had been winding her up quite well, really.

    Posted by mr magoo on 2005 09 07 at 02:50 AM • permalink

  24. I’ve read that interviewlet twice now, and I have to say that I have absolutely no idea what that person is talking about.

    I carry with me still some resentment from a comment in another recent thread wherein one of you Aussies complained about what we Yanks have done with the English language.

    Ahem.

    Posted by zeppenwolf on 2005 09 07 at 02:52 AM • permalink

  25. According to one of the Margoids, pege views over 24 hours amounted to 6000.

    From experience with my own blog, that would translate to roughly 4000 unique visits in 24 hours. Also from my experience, a link from Tim generates over 1000 unique visits per 24 hours.

    So, at a conservative estimate, I would say that at least 25% of the visitors to Webdiary come from Tim’s blog.

    Posted by Evil Pundit on 2005 09 07 at 02:56 AM • permalink

  26. Margo, I’m going to have to wind you up there

    I don’t know, man, it sounds like Margo is wound up about as tightly as she can go without popping a spring.

    Posted by Aaron - Freewill on 2005 09 07 at 03:11 AM • permalink

  27. Margo’scar?

    Posted by Nic on 2005 09 07 at 03:23 AM • permalink

  28. Mr Evil - I find the figures possible, but not probable or plausible, by which I simply mean that greater transparency of the data would be needed to know the number of unique visitors.

    This is particularly so if you take into account the number of threads at any given time, and take into account that only a small number of people contribute to threads (teeny weeny proportion, relative to readers - but that is common for blogs, as you know), and they often contribute upteen times per day to multiple threads, and they have to keep manually checking if anyone has responded to any of their comments (no nice little notification like this site).  So, all in all, the conversion to unique visitors may be lower, given the set up of their system, and given that the same people are hammering away at comments from dawn to dusk.

    Of course, when you discount the T.B factor, and the business he sends their way, as well as the novelty of the “oh my gawd, it’s a car wreck” factor, the figures would be rather different.

    Posted by Ck on 2005 09 07 at 03:36 AM • permalink

  29. Good points all, Caz.

    As I said, 25% seems a conservative figure. It could be higher.

    Posted by Evil Pundit on 2005 09 07 at 04:17 AM • permalink

  30. The numbers may be why Margoyle is so reluctant to rely on advertisements as a source of revenue, as she would be forced to show how much of a failure WebDiary truly is.

    Posted by david on 2005 09 07 at 04:29 AM • permalink

  31. David: I doubt anyone there has actually worked the math to reach that conclusion.

    Posted by debo.v2 on 2005 09 07 at 05:20 AM • permalink

  32. Zoe re #14. We’d shoot fish in barrels.

    Posted by CB on 2005 09 07 at 05:28 AM • permalink

  33. Clearly what has happened at WebDiary with the comments disappearing an re-appearing, is that WD Team Gamma has taken their eye off the ball. Their mistake was missed by WD Teams Theta and Omega forcing the WD Special Emergency Team Epsilon to erase any mention of Tim Blair from the WD site. Unfortunately no one told Team Omikron who re-published the comment. We can expect severe repercussions from the Black Shirts at Team Kappa.

    Posted by Skip on 2005 09 07 at 05:42 AM • permalink

  34. For a group of people fixated on transparency in every organisation under the sun, how come none of them give a shit who’s funding this new sandbox?

    Posted by Hanyu on 2005 09 07 at 05:50 AM • permalink

  35. In regards to the update…..Margo is buying readers?  Is this the on line version of vanity publishing?

    Posted by The_Real_JeffS on 2005 09 07 at 06:15 AM • permalink

  36. “FRAN KELLY: Margo, I’m going to have to wind you up there ...”

    No-o-o-o! Don’t wind her up! Let her run down!

    Posted by m on 2005 09 07 at 07:37 AM • permalink

  37. Hey there’s audio! pnm://media.abc.net.au/rn/breakfast/m1112869.ra paste that in your real player.

    It’s difficult to say exactly what it’s about but ``blurring the lines’’ came up a lot.

    It has an erudite sort of sound to it, Wm. F Buckley without the vocabulary.

    Margo is undirected leftist dot connection force that will probably save the universe from expanding indefinitely in the end.  Additional dark matter is not necessary.

    Posted by rhhardin on 2005 09 07 at 10:27 AM • permalink

  38. Over at Margoland, they’re asking “Is New Orleans the beginning of the end of the war in Iraq?”

    Just the usual tripe: ‘Bush should be impeached’, ‘Halliburton has repair contracts on the levees! Bastards!’, ‘the whole army was in Iraq, none left for New Orleans’, ‘neocons hate poor blacks’, etc, etc.

    I’m an Aussie, but I was genuinely astounded by the anti-American venom in this thread, even by the woeful standard typical of Webdiary.

    Oh, and the blissful ignorance. Among other amazing new facts I learned:

    - the population of N.O. before the hurricane was 500,000.  Strange, all other outlets have been saying it was about 1.5 million. Must be a neocon-murdoch conspiracy…or something…
    - Because of Katrina, the USA press will be busily scutinizing Bush’s “third term agenda”.  Three terms?  Isn’t that unconstitutional?
    - And, of course, Louisiana Gov. Kathleen Blanco “shoot-to-kill” statement was repeatedly attributed to Bush.  (Because only evil-jewish-neocons-big-nasty-meany-heads are capable of saying such things presumably…)

    And Marilyn Shithead acted like a usual, well, shithead.  But then again - that last statement was redundant.

    Stuard Lord, C Parsons, Jay White and a few others - I tip my hat to you (I now you read here too) for being willing to wade into that sewer of ignorant hate and argue back.

    Posted by ekb87 on 2005 09 07 at 01:36 PM • permalink

  39. er, that should be “I know you read here too”....

    Posted by ekb87 on 2005 09 07 at 01:39 PM • permalink

  40. $50,000 for a journo, $1,600 for commissioned stories?
    OK, is someone bankrolling the Margster, has she found her sugar daddy?
    Or is she just doing the typical evil capitalist thing and trading while insolvent?

    Posted by Harold on 2005 09 07 at 06:27 PM • permalink

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