Oh dear, it seems the monolithic hive mind is having another one of its glitches

Richard Cooke on News Corp Australia newspapers in this month’s issue of The Monthly:

… their voice is so uniform, and their agenda so clear …

Anna Caldwell in The Daily Telegraph,yesterday:

Bill Shorten’s live TV monologue about how his mother’s ambitions to be a lawyer were thwarted by her working-class roots has been hailed as an election-winning moment, but omitted the fact that she went on to enjoy an illustrious career as a barrister after a midlife occupation change.

Their voice so uniform … Andrew Bolt adding his two cents on the Herald Sun website, yesterday:

Bill Shorten is livid about The Daily Telegraph’s front page today. Despite being a Telegraph columnist, I must say this: Shorten spoke truly when he said his mother sacrificed her dream to be a lawyer, taking up teaching to help her siblings. There is no invention here. That she decades later, after a great career teaching, finally ­realised her dream has been well-­reported and does not negate at all her admirable sacrifice. I note that the Herald Sun, my employer, chose not to run this story. I support that decision. I point that out not least because there is an unfortunate tendency of critics to assume that what one paper does is part of a wider “Murdoch media” campaign. It is not.

Agenda so clear. Alice Workman on The Australian’s website, yesterday:

An emotional Bill Shorten has praised the life and career of his late mother, Ann, crediting her as the driving force behind his time in politics. In ­response to a story in The Daily Telegraph today that accused him of skipping over the “inconvenient truth” of her time working as a barrister during Q&A on Monday night, the Opposition Leader opened up in detail about his mother’s life.

Moving along. Ben Zimmer in Slate, on January 14, 2014:

In a recent “Word on the Street” column for The Wall Street Journal, I wrote about the rather evocative ­expression “screw the pooch,” meaning “to commit an embarrassing mistake” … We almost certainly owe the popularity of the expression to Tom Wolfe’s 1979 book The Right Stuff, which is about the Mercury space program, and its 1983 film adaptation.

In the movie, when Gus Grissom (played by Fred Ward) is about to ­become the second American in space, his fellow astronaut Gordon Cooper (Dennis Quaid) presciently warns him, “Just make sure you don’t screw the pooch, Gus.”

Scott Morrison doing his bit to keep the election nice and straight­forward, yesterday:

I’m pleased we’re having the third ­debate and pleased that the Labor Party eventually agreed to do that ­tonight. I’m looking forward to it ­because the debate once again, I think, reinforces this simple point: that is, at the election on May 18, it will be a choice about who you want to be prime minister. Do you want Bill Shorten to be prime minister or do you want me to continue to be PM? On May 19 people will get up, they’ll wake up, they’ll look at what’s on the front page of the papers and there will either be a picture of Bill Shorten there, who would be your next PM, or me as continuing as your next PM.

Chris Bowen’s office just not mucking around with a detailed transcript summary, yesterday:

Subjects: 2019 federal election.

Sydney continuing its quest to ­become a giant dormitory. The ABC, yesterday:

City of Sydney bans wine bar petanque game after noise complaints.