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March 20, 2013
Consumers are increasingly deserting the traditional news outlet of the traditional mainstream media and turning to other media sources on the internet for their information. There is lots of competition and lots of stuff to read as Mathew Yglesias points out at Slate.
Recent events in Australia provide a good example for this turn. Ben Eltham finishes his Conroy’s Crash Through Tactics at New Matilda by observing that:
There is a connection be made between the media's over-reaction on self-regulation and its fevered reporting on the shadow boxing over the leadership. Both examples show that journalists and editors are failing their audiences. The former reinforces the point that the media can't be trusted to report on itself. The latter again highlights the deficit of trust between ordinary citizens and press gallery journalists. Taken together, we're missing the bigger debate, about the merits and safeguards of the news media in a modern democracy.
I'd go further. The mainstream media's political reporting from Canberra has become akin to a gossip sheet. All pretence about being the fourth estate informing citizens so they can make their democratic judgements about public policy issues has been dropped.
David Rowe
The Murdoch media, around the world, sees freedom of the press as meaning the freedom to mislead, misrepresent, and outright make things up. They are engaged in a policy of destabilization of the Gillard Government; that is regime change in favour of an Abbott Coalition Government. They see themselves as king makers who have the rights of kings
We have to accept the decline of the mainstream media's political reporting into gossip but there is a need for the regulation of the media with penalties for wrong doing--ie breaking standards.
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Once Abbott is in place Murdoch's banking allies can raid the financial system and Gina and co can turn to reducing the country to servitude.
I suggest that in David Rowe's forthcoming Battle of Evermore, Truth will be the first casualty.