wideEyedPupil-o_O

Well now you know how it works you know who to schmooze like everyone else. Make up for lost time.

There's also a great decorum about their press corp around the President and the Whitehouse spokes people. Take the matter of fact acceptance of WMD in Iraq and a supposed link to 9/11 attacks. Australian press can be more irreverent, when they care to be but seem to move in packs, at times myopically or sleepingly, as if there's something is in the Canberra Press Gallery water, or someone conducting the choir.

The Drum, Lateline, #qanda, John Faine even has a weekly Friday on-air appointment with IPA. Very regular access for people who never reveal whose shop they are spruking on any given topic. Margo O'Neil even concluded a global stalling meme story (which was problematic in itself) with Tim Wilson or someone from the IPA telling how it wasn't worth the candle doing anything about CC, since their 'position' is it's not happening but even if it was mitigation is too expensive. As Ross Garnaut would say "Well he'd know, wouldn't he". That's not balance that's denialist myth-promoting on our ABC.

Does it strike you as plausible that the Editor Rebecca Brooks and the Proprietor Mr Murdoch could be unaware of the business model you just described? I mean if you knew at the time (not sure that's what you meant though don't want to put words in your mouth) how could the upper management not understand the means of their, lets say, competitive advantage over the other UK tabloids?

The IPA is essentially a PR firm with extensive political connections (birthing the Liberal Party no less), a hidden list of clients and seemingly the out-sourced policy arm for the current LNC government. How do they manage to get so much gold plated access to the ABC news and CA shows compared to any other PR firm?

Supplementary: If they are there for balance, isn't the logical balance to what Vidal rightly called crypto-fascism a bunch of anarchists, militant socialists, deep-green environmental NGO leaders and activists, yet they rarely get a seat at the table, let alone a free feed.