How will Peter Lindsay explain this to his troops as he's packing his bags

I've just finished watching Mungo MacCallum return to the fray on Q&A and on checking my in-box before bed found the follwing from another old war hourse, Richard Farmer (you can find him at the Political Owl).

I say "Bring back Mungo & Farmer - Australia needs journos who can drink and think at the same time!!"

Don’t let the facts get in the way of a good story.

This Labor Government is going down the gurgler of public opinion because of that Peter Garrett fellow and a jolly good read it is making. At last we journalists in Canberra can report a real election race so how dare that Gary Morgan fellow try and say it isn’t so. Simply don’t report the finding released on Friday that his poll shows Labor has re-established its huge lead in public opinion. That’s how to handle that.

I mean, how dare he say this when the collective wisdom of the press gallery is that Tony Abbott is making up ground and is now in with an excellent chance of winning:

The latest Face-to-Face Morgan Poll conducted over the last two weekends, February 6/7 & 13/14, 2010 shows the ALP (57.5%, up 1% since the last Face-to-Face poll conducted on January 23/24 & 30/31, 2010) maintaining a strong two-party preferred lead over the L-NP (42.5%, down 1%).

The ALP primary vote rose 1% to 47%, well ahead of the L-NP (37%, down 1%), while looking at the minor parties shows support for the Greens (9%, up 0.5%), Family First (2%, up 0.5%) and Independents/ Others (5%, down 1%).

Give us Dennis Shanahan’s view on Newspoll any day. At least he knows how to make things interesting.

For those of you who enjoy being kill-joys, here is the Morgan verdict: