Mass media icons the Daily Telegraph and Ray Hadley are enraged and pugilistic, writes Jonathan Green. What then to make of their campaign against social media trolls?

"The Daily Telegraph has today launched a petition aimed at stopping the vile and abusive trolls on Twitter, facelessly and mercilessly attacking not just celebrities and sports stars but other everyday users simply for the thrill."

It's truly hard to know where to start with this. Let's try here ...

The newspaper that publishes Piers Akerman and Tim Blair is up in arms about a lack of civility in public discourse.

Here's Piers earlier this week, writing on the weekend's local government elections. Clover Moore won. Piers was not pleased.

Unfortunately, the dog collar-wearing Lord Mayor of Sydney, self-styled progressive Clover Moore, was only bruised, not knocked off her mayoral bicycle.

Not that Piers actually intended to liken the mayor to a dog, or wish upon her any sort of presumably violent cycling accident. Of course not. Tim Blair was singing from the same sheet.

Creepy loser Greens took a beating in Saturday's local council elections, a promising sign of what may lay in store during next year's federal poll.

Tim's a big fan of Clover Moore's too. It's a Daily Telegraph thing.

But that's just their tone. The Telegraph employs writers like Akerman and Blair to provoke and stir. It fits with the house style of the newspaper: a campaigning, politically vigorous tabloid; a paper as likely to present agenda-serving distortions as the staid, reporterly record.

Which is not all that surprising: the Daily Telegraph is a newspaper that fits neatly into a modern, commercially pressed media environment that routinely uses anger, confrontation and provocation as the foundation of a populist business model.

The Telegraph is not alone, of course. A quick wander through the comment threads of Andrew Bolt's blog at Melbourne's Herald Sun gives plentiful evidence of a reading community in permanent lurid outrage, its thoughts published daily by one of the nation's most popular mainstream media outlets. As reported by @boltcomments:

Tick tock Gillard, the end of your dictatorship can't come fast enough.

Dead soldiers. Dead workers. Dead Australians on hospital waiting lists ... [Gillard's] father was a sick old man. NO COMPARISON.

[Gillard] should only have the industry standard bereavement ... leave. If a male was running the country would he be afforded the same ...

My empathy is for the Gillard families loss, not sympathy Julia's incompetence. (sic)

Anger, confrontation and provocation ... the three words are almost a position statement for most participants in the heated world of Sydney commercial talk radio. Coincidently, Sydney broadcaster Ray Hadley has also been the target of abusive comment on Twitter. As the Herald Sun reports:

A review of laws to tackle Twitter trolls who anonymously post abuse has been called for after radio host Ray Hadley and NRL star Robbie Farah became the latest high-profile cyber victims ...One user alleged Hadley was violent towards women. Although the radio host made a complaint to police and instructed his lawyers, he has not been able to track down the person making the "criminally defamatory allegations".

Ray is what they call a shock jock, a broadcaster who engages daily in vigorous argument and vituperation ... sometimes even in conduct that might reasonably be described as close to bullying. This exchange with a striking primary school teacher gives you a sense of the sort of willingness with which Ray can engage with his subjects.

Footballer Robbie Farah is mentioned in passing here thanks to some ugly tweets directed to him that referred to his dead mother. Farah's own Twitter conduct has been questioned, proof perhaps that trolling is as trolling does.

It is the attacks on the likes of Hadley and Farah that have so outraged the Daily Telegraph, a paper now profoundly, utterly incensed by the conduct of "vile and abusive trolls on Twitter". It has thrown its front page behind the campaign. There is an angry editorial:

Yet the freedom to engage via electronic media is clearly being abused by those anonymous cowards who use Twitter and other social media platforms simply to increase Australia's stocks of misery and distress.

The campaign has celebrity and political supporters, polling, commentary ... the full arsenal of a daily tabloid in high umbrage has been deployed. Never mind that Twitter is a self-selecting community, one that counts around 1.8 million Australian users, many of them corporate entities.

As Bernard Keane pointed out yesterday at Crikey:

The flaw though is that only 10 per cent of Australians, at most recent count, are on Twitter and it's likely to be lower in The Tele's heartland and among Hadley's audience. The only thing they're doing in demanding the regulation of a competing media outlet is giving it free publicity to people who don't currently use it and in fact may not even know what it is.

The likes of Ray Hadley and the Daily Telegraph have access to mass markets, huge sweeps of the population. They are in the position to bring great influence to bear.

It would be fair to say that their routine journalistic tone is hectoring, enraged and pugilistic ... these are the leitmotifs of a modern mass media that sees a future in venting at its audience and in encouraging a sense of shared outrage in response. It is a community built on anger and nameless omnidirectional dread.

It is also a mass media alarmed at the penetration and mainstream subverting influence of social media. The likes of Twitter are the first signs of a new medium based around individuals, not corporate entities. One that shares information nimbly and internationally. One that issues a very real and present threat to media models based on commercially controlled hierarchies of knowledge.

Hardly surprising then that those players dependent for their fortunes on old media hierarchies should be so keen to attack where they can, even if those same attacks see them treading on the verge of an almost bottomless pit of hypocrisy.

Jonathan Green is a former editor of The Drum and presenter of Sunday Extra on Radio National. View his full profile here.