Australian Greens Building an Army of Know-Nothing Zombies

This sounds like a desperate campaign by far-left cranks to silence opposition to a hugely unpopular carbon pricing scam facing Australians come 2012. Those is power cannot handle the fact that people dare to have an opinion and make fun of them at every turn.

Now they're fighting back. Well, sort of.

THE Greens have launched another strike against the media, calling for volunteers for a rapid-response team to target "shock jock" and "hate campaigns" through talkback and letters to editors.

The call to action echoes Bob Brown's attack on the "hate press" last week and Twitter jibes at individual journalists from his director of media, Marion Rae.

"The Australian Greens are looking to build a national network of individuals who want to take up the challenge of responding to the misinformation and hate campaigns being waged by radio shock jocks and other sections of the community and media," says the party in an email.

So pointing out the failures of these meddling bureaucrats and doomsayers is a hate campaign?

The Democrats here have been doing this stuff for years. You can always identify them, as Rush Limbaugh is wont to do, as seminar callers. They have no idea what they;re talking about, but so sure of themselves. This part perfectly emphasizes you don't actually have to have a functioning brain to enlist in this zombie army.

It says there will be no need for the volunteers to actually hear or read the opinions and reporting to which they are responding.

So in effect they can be lamestream media types who regurgitate edited soundbites spoonfed them by party apparatchiks. Hmm. It all sounds so familiar. I wonder is Soros is financing this scheme?

Speaking of apparatchiks, it's worth noting what a colossal financial fiasco they've become.

First he points out that “What began in 2004 as a ten- persohttp://www.blogger.com/img/blank.gifn shop with a $3 million annual budget now has around 90 employees and plans to spend $15 million this year.” That is striking and demonstrates the enormous fundraising operation that they have created. But that is not translating into readers. With that budget and staff, they should be about the size of a site like Politico, but the numbers tell a far different story. According to web traffic evaluator, Quantcast, Politico averages 5.6 million monthly unique visitors, Media Matters a mere 646,200. Even if you give Media Matters the benefit of the doubt and double that number, they are still doing a fraction of the traffic of sites its size (at 1.3 million, it would still be far smaller than little Mediaite, with ten times the staff). That’s something that clearly should have been pointed out in the story.

Not exactly much of a return for a staff of 90 and a budget in the millions. It's worth noting that Quantcast number and the sites listed that Media Matters readers also like, including the far-left Democrat outfit Think Progress and even further left The Nation. Even Al Jazeera makes the list, which makes a lot of sense when you think about it.

Also worth noting is the Media Matters audience is predominately male and overwhelmingly white. They appear far less diverse than any Tea Party audience I've seen.