Guest post by the philosopher Patrick Stokes!

Dear Rupert,

Look, I’m not going to hassle you about using your newspapers to try to push a blatantly partisan line, or for that whole “years of industrial-scale privacy violation followed by faux contrition” thing. Oh it’s all awful, but you’re Rupert Murdoch. We get it. We’re not expecting better.

And I also get that you sit at the top of a massive corporate empire; it’s not like you sign off on every little thing that your newspapers publish.

Even so, Rupert, I want you to do something for me.

I want you to explain this bullshit.

You paid someone to do this. You paid someone to sit in a room photoshopping celebrities into fruit. Twenty. Eight. Times.

And then you paid someone else to sign off on this, and some third person to put it on the website. That is a lot of people to pay to produce an article of visual puns that would offend the comic sensibilities of a four year old.

And then you expected us to sit there and read this article. You expected that we, living human beings with functioning central nervous systems and retinas, would click ‘next’ twenty-seven times before nodding in approval and saying, “Yes. This was an appropriate use of four minutes of my inexorable march towards the grave. I should purchase more News Corporation products and those of its advertisers.”

I don’t think that is a good use of your money. Or indeed of any money, or of the human bodies and brains and office chairs and carpet and oxygen and electrons that were involved in producing this.

But if you are going to pay someone to photoshop an orange into Angela Lansbury’s scalp in what may be the most desperate piece of forced wordplay anywhere ever, please pay someone whose work is a bit less perfunctory. I’m not saying I could do better. I’m just saying that if nestling Mandy Moore’s disembodied head inside a mandarin is something you want done, maybe find someone with a bit more aplomb to do it. Or, better, don’t. Don’t do it at all.

I think your artist realised about one celebrity into “Celebrities Who Are Fruit” that there wasn’t enough juice (ha! See what I did there? I am now the equal or better of at least one of your staff writers) in the concept to sustain a whole twenty-eight entries without doing violence to the words ‘celebrity,’ ‘fruit,’ or both.

Whether ‘celebrity’ survived intact depends on how you feel about John Mangos I guess. But I get why you felt the need to abandon ‘fruit’ almost immediately. And sure, nuts and vegetables are sort of like fruit, I guess.

But Gus van Sant holding a bunch of asparagus in his left hand is not Gus van Sant being asparagus. There are four words in the title of this article, and less than halfway in you have had to ignore at least two of them, one of which is a preposition. That should have been a red flag right there.

I don’t know what Christina Applegate ever did to you, but making her look like post-blueberry Veruca Salt with mumps seems unkind.

Also, depicting OJ Simpson as a bottle of orange juice would be clever, were it not for the fact that people called him ‘Juice’ in real life. So yeah, that’s sort of not clever. For the purposes of that last sentence, ‘sort of not clever’ means ‘as far from clever as one can get without starting to come back.’

I am relieved you captioned “Johnny Cash-ew,“ because I was wondering why I’d never heard of country music legend Johnny Giantscrotumjaw. And “Paw-Pawline Hanson” actually made me feel pity for Pauline Hanson. Fuck you for making me do that.

I could go on, but I’d really like to stop talking about these hideous images now. Soon night will fall, and soon enough I will be alone in the dark with the terrifying image of beloved opera singer Dame Kiri Te Kanawa morphing into a hellish assemblage of kiwifruit.

Rupert, I think maybe you have bigger problems than what the NBN will do to Foxtel, or the slow death of print media, or Leveson. “Celebrities Who Are Fruit” will not solve these problems, Rupert. “Celebrities Who Are Fruit” is the problem.