Public Opinion

September 20, 2005

media and democracy

I interpret this image by Cathy Wilcox as an interesting attempt to connect the public image of Mark Latham the politician to the person:--a homedad in a Sydney suburb who is doing a bit of writing that reflects on his experiences as leader of the federal ALP in 2004.

True, Wilcox does not gesture to the tabloid image of the Latham as the mad dog:--she gives us the more sophisticated paranoid and narcissistic personality image. This gives rise to a hater who cuts a path of waste and destruction to all around him in the ALP. From the ALP side Latham's Diaries stand for betrayal of trust and political bastardry.

Wilcox's cartoon misses the mediating role of the media between the hater image and the stay at home person entirely. She publishes her cartoon in the corporate media, but she does not reflect upon the role of the media as a player in the political process.

Very little of the journalist commentary around the Latham Diaries concentrates on the role of the media in our political culture. Paul Sheehan is an exception. He says:

Latham's behaviour is not so far removed from what the media serves up every day as it subjects politicians and the electoral process to an unremitting campaign of belligerence, cynicism and ridicule. The media condescends towards democracy because it competes with democracy. It competes for power and control of the national agenda. The biggest contest in Australian politics is thus not between the Coalition and Labor, but between the elected and accountable against the unelected and unaccountable.

The broadsheet journalists are not watchdogs of democracy. They (eg., Glen Milne) are players in the political process, and they are very partisan in both a party political and a party factional sense.

They are publicists writing for a political cause and their sources are drip feeds, anonymous backgrounders, rumors and leaks from their political contacts. The journalists in the corporate media are maintaining a collective silence about Latham's exposure of the way they trased the objectivity ethos of journalism they profess to uphold. They are players, not defenders of the public interest or democracy. They are playing very hard to demonize Latham. They want blood. They have closed ranks.

We have to start talking otherwise about the media: maybe about the independent media in contrast to the corporate media. An independent media that picks up Latham's truth telling, and then develops it to help us to understand our political culture better. A media concerned with enlightening citizens and not mass deception.

Posted by Gary Sauer-Thompson at 10:39 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

July 27, 2005

media: changes on the way

There is no need to comment is there?

The Howard Government's proposed new media laws will decrease the diversity of the media. The reforms will scrap foreign ownership, allow TV networks to offer viewers multiple digital channels, and give pay TV the right to broadcast more major sporting events.

This deregulation of the media industry will enable media companies to control more than one form of media in the same metropolitan market. Does that not mean increasing concentration of the media?

The Communications Minister Helen Coonan says that she intends to introduce a "diversity" rule that would ensure there were five large media companies in each capital city. Crikey's Daily Report points out that five large media companies in each city means greater concentration, as there are currently nine large media companies operating in Sydney and Melbourne.

That means the changes in existing media rules are not going to disadvantage the big media companies and owners.It is to be expected as that is the rules of the game.

No doubt this means even greater scope for the partisan commentary of the Murdoch media, (The Sun, Fox News, Daily Telegraph), and using the various media outlets in Australia, the US and the UK as pro-war propaganda machines in the war on terorism. Crikey debated this reecently, Stephen Mayne said that:

"Fox News is not journalism. It's propaganda that has blindly endorsed the Iraq war strategy and amazingly misrepresented the Australia-US alliance."

In response, Christian Kerr said:

Fox News not journalism?...All commercial media is a product flogged to consumers to get advertising to make a profit. Always has been, always will be.. If people don't like Rupert's products, then don't consume them...This is business. Fox has a winning formula. If it goes out of fashion, no doubt it will change.

Kerr says nothing is wrong about mass deception or the way that Murdoch is a part of the counter enlightenment. It is just business. Money is all that matters. Anything else is being idealistic for Kerr.

Nothing much in this debate about the media, democracy, public debate there. Mayne suggests that propaganda by the media is wrong as it is not journalism. But he does not explicitly connect the failure to be balanced in their coverage to the importance of public debate on public issues in a liberal democracy.

Posted by Gary Sauer-Thompson at 08:55 AM | Comments (3) | TrackBack

July 01, 2005

media & democracy

Sushi Day has an Op.Ed in The Age about media spin by the government and its management of the news. Sushi's account of her experiences of dealing with spin and management in Victoria highlights the role played by the media advisors. She says:

I understand they [media advisors] earn between $60,000 and $120,000 a year. In other words, the government uses our taxes to pay media advisers to obscure the truth, block access to ministers and protect politicians from scrutiny. It keeps the public in the dark. It's worth asking: what are the accountability mechanisms for media advisers? Can they be hauled before committees for questioning like ministers and public servants? Exactly who are these people?

Ex journalists Sushi. That then raises questions about journalism, does it not? These ex-journalists have few qualms about producing media-ised politics. That means they have been well prepared in terms of writing spin whilst they were journos. That suggests something is wrong with the media in Australia.

Let us pose the question: is the mainstream corporate media failing?

Sushi quotes John Lloyd, editor of London's Financial Times magazine on this issue. He says:

"We have created a system in which both parties (politicians and media) collaborate in producing media-ised politics. The problem is that the medias continue to report politics as if they were a neutral, almost invisible observer."

Lloyd argues that as the media co-command the stage with politicians, so any narrative of politics must also contain some kind of narrative about the media.

So true. Do we have that kind of narrative in the Australian media? If so, what sort of narrative would that be? Is 'narrative' appropriate here in a postmodern world?

Sushi rightly says an independent fourth estate is a vital component of democracy, and that ultimately, the news media are essential for our freedom. Just the news media? Surely it should be broader than than news media, if we are talking about narratives, power and political freedom? And where then is that kind of watchdog journalism to be found?

I reckon that many more questions need to be asked about journalism and the corporate media in Australia. Are the journalists asking them? Do they reflect on their own lapdog practices of being on the government drip feed. Do they reflect on how they talk about the news media but write interpretative op. eds?

Update: July 2nd
I've just noticed this op.ed in The Age by Margaret Simmons that defends fact-based journalism. The title says it all: 'Opinion is cheap. Facts rule, OK?' Simmons fails to see the usual contradiction of writng an op ed in defence a fact-style journalism. Her talk is cheap.

Simon's crude empiricism, which resolutely ignores the way facts are culturally constructed, continues the conservative media's attack on bloggers and the alternative media. Simmons says:

The cheap start-up costs of internet publishing have led to publications, such as New Matilda, which was established last year, in the words of the founder John Menadue, in response to "the greatest institutional failure of our time: the media's failure to take its responsibilities seriously".I have sympathy for Menadue but I worry that New Matilda has so far published mostly opinion and little research-based journalism. So too all the bloggers, radicals and others who criticise and attempt alternatives to the mainstream media. This is understandable. Most alternative media survive on the smell of an oily rag and opinion is in every sense cheap.

Talk is only opinion.

Is it? What about interpretation and analysis eg., of the crisis facing the ALP? Or the state of the economy? Or the way Treasury understands healthcare?

Simmons analysis of the Australian media is very confusing. She mixes up facts, news and information; collapses opinion and analysis and is blind to the idea of interpretration and public conversation. See Road to Surfdom for a more thorough account of the confusions. Simmon's dualism---a fact-based journalism that describes society to itself and opinion journalism that interprets society to itself---ignores the role of rhetoric in public life.

Posted by Gary Sauer-Thompson at 12:07 PM | Comments (2) | TrackBack

June 25, 2005

Is the ALP big on hope?

I've been reading Media Tarts by Julia Baird on the plane whilst doing the recent Adelaide, Canberra, Sydney, Canberra, Adelaide trip. It is about how the media frames female politicians in terms of a reworking of the classic goddess/whore duality and the old gender double-standard being alive and well.

The best chapter is the tragic one of Cheryl Kernot as the leader of the Australian Democrats, her transition from the Democrats to the ALP, her affair with Gareth Evans, and her eventual departure from politics and Australia. In this chapter Kernot is quoted as saying:

I knew that what affected my performance as a shadow minister was Labor's unwillingness to include me in anything that mattered...I considered myself as an ideas person, I went into politics for ideas, and as soon as I went to the ALP I had no intellectual respect...and that damaged me a great deal.

That passage caught my eye because it is the ideas that have been lacking in the ALP of late. There is something about the culture of the ALP that is disturbing. Is it being backward looking? Or lost in the policies of the past?

From where I sit the ALP is not putting out much in the way of new policies, and it appears to be in a period of policy drift. It seems to have fallen back into its old pattern of awaiting on the Howard Government's stride to falter (an arrogant and incompetent government); for the economy to go bad; or for the voters to become enlightened about the Howard Government's mass deceptions spun over Tampa, Iraq and interest rates with the help of a compliant and biased media.

Let's face it. The ALP is now a bystander in some of the current policy debates. The changes in mandatory detention system made that very clear. This status will be reinforced during the sale of Telstra as it is the Nationals who are the effective opposition.

Now the core strategy of senior right-wing ALP leadership, led by the glimmer twins, Wayne Swan and Stephen Smith, is that the Howard Government is pushing Australia down the low-wage low-skill road, and that the ALP stands for greater investment in skills and training, knowledge nation and infrastructure rebuilding. This implies an acceptance of the global economy, the new enterprise culture and a high skilled middle class with its individualist ethos.

Yet this core strategy was effectively undermined by the parliamentary tactics of the poorly-performing, glimmer twins of blocking of the tax cuts. The ALP was seen to be saying that the more highly-skilled middle class should pay more tax, whilst defending the genuine need for the low skilled battlers to have much greater tax cuts.

Maybe the ALP Right are hoping that the slash and burn tactics of industrial relations reforms being pushed by Kevin Andrews, the Workplace Relations Minister, will give them the momentum they need to stop, and reverse, the current downward spiral? It is about all they have going for them at the moment.

Yet the defence of the unions means that the ALP is seen to stand for strong unions, centralized wage bargaining and fixation, higher taxes, tough regulation and a large public sector. This tactic undermines the defence of an open global economy, market competition and the self-employed and independent contractors.

Posted by Gary Sauer-Thompson at 04:02 PM | Comments (2) | TrackBack

June 22, 2005

media diversity?

Alan Mitchell has an op. ed. in the Australian Financial Review on media ownership laws. Suprisingly, there is much in it that I agree with. Mitchell, who is the economics editor of the AFR, says:

The history of media regulation is a litany of anti-competitive deals between media and politicians. For example, the Hawke and Keating governments delayed (and then heavily regulated) the introduction of pay-TV in order to protect the profits of the free-to-air telecasters. As a result Australia was one of the last industrialised countries to get pay-TV.

The Howard Government is no different:

The Howard government has managed the introduction of digital technology for precisely the same reason. For the free-to air television oligopoly, the most threatening feature of digital TV technology is its economical use of the spectrum: it allows more TV station and, therefore, more competition....But like Hawke and Keating before him, Howard has twisted and turned his policy every way to preserve the profits of the incumbent television stations.

So Australian governments are protecting the profits of their friends not the public interest.They are managing the development of the media in a way that favours a few established media producers.

The policy response? More competition, more media diversity and more consumer choice, says Mitchell. I agree with him. The market should be given a far greater role in this area.

Posted by Gary Sauer-Thompson at 06:05 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

June 07, 2005

media politics: burying liberalism

It's odd isn't it.

The existence of detention camps in liberal democracies and the incarceration of Australian citizens is pretty much accepted by many sections of the Australia media. It whips up a storm over the innocence or otherwise of a women who was found to be smuggling drugs into Indonesia, until that campaign clashed with commercial interest.

Funny how the conservative media accepts concentration camps with hardly a murmur. As does Gerard Henderson and many in the Liberal Party.

The media does not appear to question its feeling of being relaxed and comfortable, despite the connections and similarities of the camps of mandatory detention to the camps in totalitarian states, such as Fascist Germany and Soviet Russia. Last time I checked Australia still had a commitment to individual liberty that this commitment is at odds with incarcerating innocent people fleeing persecution and oppression and then treating them cruelly in the camp.

I guess the conservative media would say that the fundamental rights of liberalism are for burning. It is only utility and patriotism that matters, after all. Power rules.

That is probably not quite fair. We can say that Australia has the right to maintain the integrity of our borders. Since Australia is a sovereign nation, it is acceptable that our elected government makes laws concerning who can enter Australia and who can stay in the country. However, border protection is quite a different issue from asylum seeker protection.

Can conservatives see and accept the difference?

Maybe. Gerard Henderson is now saying that the lock and key approach towards asylum seekers needs a cultural shake-up. That says no more than the Minister of Immigration

And the liberals in the misnamed Liberal Party who have a commitment to individual liberty. What of them? AS far as I can make out they are in the process of becoming politically homeless.

Posted by Gary Sauer-Thompson at 11:24 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

May 24, 2005

ABC on journalism v blogging

I haven't been watching the ABC's Media Watch of late. I've often found its critique of the media to be thin, conservative, narrow and nitpicky. It rarely uses its research resources to engage with, and help us to understand, the deeper currents transforming the media in Australia. Though their watchdog ethos promises a lot, the show delivers little of substance by way of a critical reading of the connections between the media and democracy.

I scolled through the newly designed Media Watch website this morning because I wanted to have a look see, as I'd missed the show last night. Surfing around I came across this post on blogging credibility. Now I only vaguely know the background to the tiff Media Watch is having with Janet Albrechtsen. Then I noticed this statement:

"The Australian newspaper thinks we have been unfair to Janet, but we think it's important to distinguish between blogging and journalism, and we've called in someone they know to explain it."

Yes there is a distinction between journalism and blogging and the distinction is important. So how does Media Watch understand this distinction?

They tell us by introducing a section from Rupert Murdoch's speech, rather than argue their case in their own words. Fair enough. It is a good and interesting speech. Murdoch says:

"...we may want to experiment with the concept of using bloggers to supplement our daily coverage of news on the net. There are of course inherent risks in this strategy —— chief among them maintaining our standards for accuracy and reliability ... But they may still serve a valuable purpose; broadening our coverage of the news; giving us new and fresh perspectives to issues; deepening our relationship to the communities we serve, so long as our readers understand the clear distinction between bloggers and our journalists.

What is most suprising is Media Watch's comment-- a minimal "Absolutely Rupert". That little remark amounts to an appeal to authority, as we are not even given an argument about the distinction between journalism and blogging. "Absolutely Rupert" functions to close the debate as it provides no space for us to engage.

What then is Media Watch saying is the clear distinction between bloggers and journalism? It's not clear. We have to dig. What does the "absolutely" refer to? We have to reconstruct their argument.

My interpretation of Media Watch's argument buried in its interpretation of the Murdoch paragraph is this: professional journalism operates within the values of accuracy and reliability and amateur bloggers do not. Therefore, journalism is good because it is accurate and reliable, whilst blogging is bad because bloggers are inaccurate and unreliable.

Consequently, blogs do not deserve journalistic credibility. Since blogs should not have journalistic credibility conferred upon them, it is wrong to do so. That means bloggers must work to become worthy of the same journalistic standards.

Is this plausible account of the distinction? Tim Dunlop, for one, is not convinced. I'm not persuaded either as it does not make sense of what is actually happening in the media world.

In appealing to authority--the owner of The Australian and Fox Television--to make their case for them, Media Watch shows no awareness how that appeal contradicts their "absolutely". It is well known that Fox has broken with the objectivity of reportage to embrace a partisan conservative commentary. Their coverage of the Iraq war was not known for its accuracy or reliability.

So what does accuracy or reliability mean in the light of that?

Presumably, Media Watch still thinks that journalism is reportage (mirrors the facts) whilst blogging is deception (opinionated prejudice). That claim ignores how a lot of print journalism is commentary on, not a reportage of, public issues; it ignores the way that Media Watch is a commentary on media events (interpretation) and not a reportage of them; and it overlooks the way that bloggers, as citizens, are engaged in a critical interpretation of public issues that concern them from their different perspectives or point of view.

What does accuracy and reliability mean in the light of all that interpretation? Should accuracy and reliability be the only values when a lot of journalism is interpretation?

You have to admire Media Watch's lack of self-awareness about their understanding of the media. What this episode illustrates is the deskilling and intellectual poverty of journalists. When are they going to become more critical of the gap between their positivist ideal and their actual interpretive practice?

Posted by Gary Sauer-Thompson at 12:13 PM | Comments (4) | TrackBack

May 16, 2005

Forum on the media

Jay Rosen, who runs PressThink, was in Australia recently to participate in the 2005 Alfred Deakin Innovation Lectures in Melbourne. He joined Lance Knobel on the May 11th program, 'Reporting Change: the media and innovation' at the Melbourne Town Hall.

Lance argued that something fundamental has changed in the media world. Lance says that the media finds itself in a period of rapid, dramatic change. He charts this change in terms of the new tools such as blogging, google, the wiki and RSS feeds. This is a description of the tools. Lance calls them the tools of media democracy as they enable more of us to become users rather than consumers or managers of news.

So what are people doing with these tools?

Lance says they hold out the prospect of users moving in a more creative direction. How so? He describes this trajectory in term of weblogs being information nodes that actively filter and retransmit knowledge. This gives them the potential to enable citizens to navigate through the thicket of information. So webloggers are in a position to become trusted intermediaries for diverse consumers of information.

Fair enough. It is nice reporting of the changes that are happening in the mediascape. But we kinda knew that already. Moreover, webloggers do not just filter and retransmit what is provided by the corporate media. They also comment and interpret, shape the public conversation on issues the corporate media ignores, and often send that conversation in different directions.

What did Jay Rosen say?

He talked about each nation having its own press and the press as a circulator of public argument, pushing ideas against events to create editorial traction and grab attention. He says that the great migration to a new platform, the Internet, is being made. This means that the very media tools once commandeered by professionals fall into public hands and that the technology platform on which mainstream journalism has rested for so long---the "one to many" media system---has ended. Jay adds:

Many sharp people have noticed that we are living today in a great era of pamphleteering made possible by the Internet, along with one of its native forms and most powerful inventions-- the modern weblog, which is only an aspect of an even more powerful invention: the interconnected sphere of weblogs.

Okay we know that too. It is the corporate press who are slow on the uptake in Australia.

Jay point that:

..each nation will shortly have a chance to re-establish or overhaul its own press. Or to create one anew.

is a good one. However, he doesn't say how is Australia doing that. Presumably that is up to Australians.

Alas few are considering thisas the corporate media is not very self-reflective. Even Hugh Martin offers little on this, as he just reports and links.

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May 05, 2005

the media: democracy's watchdogs?

In her Deakin lecture Michelle Grattan writes about the relationships between information, government and the media. The issue is an important one as the media is now a part of the entertainment business. And the Murdoch media is increasingly become partisan rags disguised as news sources. These support President Bush no matter what, whilst their media dogs work away at arousing, then moulding, fear, anxiety and hate.

Grattan begins by constructing a powerful image of the Howard Government's media management:

A modern government operates like a powerful hose, designed to get the message out in a forceful, directed and managed way. Leaks are anathema, and the system is strongly reinforced to prevent them, although this never works totally.

Government's try to achieve the 'message-in-a-hose' model as best they can. One way to ensure this spin is to muzzle the bureaucracy. As Grattan points out:

Today's problem is not so much that the bureaucracy has been politicised, though there's that, but that it's had the fear of God put into it. Many professional men and women have been turned into mice, afraid of what should be a useful and non-controversial role in helping inform what the media convey.

And the media? How does it fit into the hose model? Or does it oppose it? Should it become part of the drip feed?

It should be deeply critical according to the watchdog model of the media. Grattan is critical of the media because it has accepted the muzzling of the bureaucracy:

The media must also take some blame for the failure to extract information from the public service. Once, print journalists would be constantly nagged at by head offices for not getting into the bureaucracy enough. Now, this would be seen as more likely to produce "incremental" stories, dismissed as boring and not worth space in tight newspapers.

The inference it that the media have dumped being the watch dogs of democracy. The dumbed-down media is no longer interested in providing information and knowledge for democratic citizens to make their judgements.

If the media management of the hose model is basically anti-democratic, then how can things be changed? Grattan's argument is that the media should recover its watchdog role:

I think the media should be simultaneously more constructive and more critical - and that this is not a contradiction... On the whole, I think we could do with less trashing of politicians. On the other side of the coin, eyes should be sharper and should be more rigorous...Political investigative journalism is not strong. Where, for example, is the expose of the culture of the Immigration Department?

This means that the media becomes more self-critical about its own practices and understandings.

There are gaps in Grattan's lecture. Which media are we talking about in this? Presumably the corporate media. And the mainstream media? Is it just the quality broadsheets given the partisan nature of the Murdoch Press? Does it include the tabloids who do entertainment? Where does the internet figure in this?

Suprisingly, nowhere in the lecture does Grattan link 'the media' to democracy and citizenship. These are notable by their absence. So what are the media watchogs for? Who are they defending with their sharper and more rigorous eye? Are they just watching themselves?

Posted by Gary Sauer-Thompson at 11:29 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

April 17, 2005

clever

I watched the ABC's Insiders this morning. It is something I rarely do as I hardly ever watch the Sunday morning current affairs shows on free-to-air television. I'm generally online reading this kind of material.

Most of the commentary on Insiders was devoted to the Medicare backflip and the implausible justification given by the Government about just becoming aware of the "economic blowout" of the Medicare safety net and the Government needing to be economically responsible.

There was a section on Insiders called Talking Pictures which discussed the week's political cartoons with Bruce Petty. That is innovative section as some of the best commentary in Australia is by the cartoonists. Why not bring in cultural studies academics to comment?

Matt Golding

Very clever don't you think?

The significance of the backflip is pointed out by Michelle Grattin in The Age. With control of the Senate, the Howard Government, "is not just determined, after July 1, to get through legislation that's been rejected; it will feel free, when it chooses, to unpick and redo things previously legislated after compromises." It's called rollback.

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April 14, 2005

Murdoch, media, internet

I came across a recent speech by Rupert Murdoch over at Margo Kingston's Webdiary, along with comments by some US bloggers.

The speech to the American Society of Newspaper Editors makes some good, informed points about the digital changes taking place in the mediascape. This is a world in rapid flux, despite the Howard Government's fetters imposed on digital TV to protect commercial free-to-air TV.

Murdoch's primary concern is with the survival of newspapers in a digital world. He opens by saying:

What is happening is, in short, a revolution in the way young people are accessing news. They don’t want to rely on the morning paper for their up-to-date information. They don’t want to rely on a God-like figure from above to tell them what’s important. And to carry the religion analogy a bit further, they certainly don’t want news presented as gospel.
Instead, they want their news on demand, when it works for them. They want control over their media, instead of being controlled by it. They want to question, to probe, to offer a different angle.

The corporate media have been slow to respond to this critical way of reading the media. Hence their declining circulation, the constant staff downsizing, the dumbing down of reporters into hacks and their decreasing relevance in a digital world. Thus a new publication in Adelaide, The Independent Weekly, which aims to provide a different approach to Murdoch's tabloid Advertiser in South Australia, has no substantive online presence. It's irrelevant to me.

The solution?

As you would expect Murdoch is up to the challenge. He says that today's newspapers (eg., The Australian and The Age are just papers. Tomorrow, they can be a internet destination. By this he means that instead of people traditionally starting their day with coffee and the newspaper, in a digital world they will start their day online with coffee and a newspaper website.

That's me now. I start at 6.30 am. I basically see the journalists and the op.ed commentators as a starting-point for a discussion about on-going topics.

What I find offered by The Australian broadsheet is pretty thin web presence. I scan the site in minutes then move on. Some newspapers (Australian Financial Review) are even locking up their online content behind paid registration walls, instead of freeing up archives for use in the public domain.

Murdoch, to his credit, realizes that a poor web presence is not god for business. He responds in two ways. He says:

"..we have to refashion what our web presence is. It can’t just be what it too often is today: a bland repurposing of our print content. Instead, it will need to offer compelling and relevant content. Deep, deep local news. Relevant national and international news. Commentary and Debate. Gossip and humor."

Well compelling and relevant content is not happening. However, the internet site will have to do still more if it is to be competitive with news aggregators, such as Google:

For some, it may have to become the place for conversation. The digital native doesn’t send a letter to the editor anymore. She goes online, and starts a blog. We need to be the destination for those bloggers. We need to encourage readers to think of the web as the place to go to engage our reporters and editors in more extended discussions about the way a particular story was reported or researched or presented.

I guess that is the democracy bit. That is not happening at the moment. The public conversation is fostered by bloggers and Webdiary. The Australian's reporters and editors are not interested in more extended discussions with bloggers. They continue to pretend that blogging does not exist in Australia; or if it does exist it is of no relevance. Their boss thinks otherwise.

Murdoch makes a suggestion that the Sydney Morning Herald is moving towards and The Guardian is already doing:

"...we may want to experiment with the concept of using bloggers to supplement our daily coverage of news on the net...[bloggers] may still serve a valuable purpose; broadening our coverage of the news; giving us new and fresh perspectives to issues; deepening our relationship to the communities we serve. So long as our readers understand the distinction between bloggers and our journalists."

So The Australian on this has a long to go if it is become internet destination in the digital media world. It is more likely that the newspapers will transform their offline classified businesses into online marketplaces. But the flow of online advertising depends on the newspaper being a successful internet destination. To achieve this requires a complete transformation of the way newspapers think about their product and their readers.

I cannot see much of newspapers reshaping themselves to become part of a digital world in Australia, can you? Me thinks we have to build on the new digital forms to develop the public conversation on issues of concern to us citizens.

Posted by Gary Sauer-Thompson at 01:48 PM | Comments (6) | TrackBack

March 20, 2005

shifts in the mediascape

I started reading Catharine Lumby's Gotcha: Life in a Tabloid World on the way back to Adelaide from Canberra on the Thursday shuttle service. The text feels dated--1980s--despite its easy style and its successful bridging of the academic/popular divide.

The text is basically a defence of the tabloid world and a criticism of the elitist views of the old liberal quality media who see themselves acting as watchdogs for democracy. Lumby highlights, and defends, the television-style tabloid rhetoric--emotion over abstract reasoning, images over discursive analysis, narrative over analysis, entertainment over information etc. Lumby displaces high culture in favour pop culture, and she celebrates the diversity of voices, forms, readers and ideas created by the tabloid media.

Fine. We now live in a postmodern world where tabloid is everywhere, the old modernist values are crumbling, populism drives the content of showbiz politics and we are all fans of celebrities. The text looks old fashioned because it underplays the way the media landscape is changing, as the underpinnings of the old media order weaken. Some indications:

#the big mainstream free-to-air media is losing its dominance, due to challenges from the new media technologies of cable TV and the Internet.

# weekly magazines such as The Bulletin are declining.

#the understanding of journalism is changing as its classic definition of objective, neutral reportage gives way to the partisan politics (rightwing) ideology (free market + one nation nationalism) of Murdoch's Fox News and Australian.

This shift in the mediascape is more than tabloid versus broadsheet, television versus print. A new mediascape is in formation. This is going to be deepened and broadened by the forthcoming changes in media ownership.

Update: 21/2
Les Carlyon has an op.ed. on journalism in The Age entitled, 'The write stuff'. He says:

The main troubles with journalism are sloppy writing and sloppy editing, advocacy masquerading as reporting, gossip masquerading as reporting, stories that abound in loose ends and cliches, stories that are half-right, stories that insult the reader's intelligence..In other words, most of the problems of journalism are our fault. They're matters of craft, not ethics.

Carlyon, a former editor of The Age, says that the problems of journalism come from the inside not from outside.

The op.ed makes no mention of the way that the changes from reportage journalism to political weapon journalism are being driven by the new kind of media and the partisan practices currently exemplified by Murdoch. Carlyon's op.ed. also looks dated.

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March 17, 2005

tabloid politics

I've came across an article written by Piers Ackerman in the Sunday Telegraph (March 13, 2005, p. 9) on the Macquarie Fields riots in Sydney.I read it whilst having a glass of wine in Manuka, Canberra, after I flew in on the shuttle service from Adelaide.

Entitled 'We must never tolerate the mollycoddling of criminals' it is, as you would guess, a criticism of the kid-glove approach to the police to the Macquarie Fields riots, and the political authorities in the ACT to the Rebels bikie gang.

The piece is more than a loud beating of the law and order drum.Piers says:

History is littered with the wreckage created by those who have said it is better to appease evil than confront it. The graves of millions have been dug by smug handwringers who believe that good intentions will prevail but strength will alway fail.

Goodoh. I can follow that. Then we are off talking about Churchill and Hitler, Stalin, Arafat and so on. Huh? Oh, I see the tacit link. Those rioters in Macquarie Fields are the new brownshirts.Piers goes explicit:

The ignorant gang tossing molotov cocktails in the streets of Macqauarie Fields is not that different from the gangs that gathered in the beer halls of Munich to support Hitler.

Similarly with the Rebels bikie gang in Canberra. Why fascist rather than thug? An argument is not required. Emotion is what counts.

Ackerman then says that these fascists have to be confronted with force and the most severe penalties because there can be no excuses for those who choose to break the law. The fight will be tough. But it is a fight for freedom and the prize is worth it, etc etc. It's the Iraq line. One quickly gets the drift.

This, I take is an example of political sense-making in the tabloid world: what Catherine Lumby in Gotcha calls a visual montage of paragraphs and emotional outbursts within a fragmentary, contradictory and discontinous discourse.

I read it as entertainment. I had a good laugh over my chardonnay. It lightened my depression. People looked at me. 'It's Piers Ackerman', I said, and pointed to the newspaper. Everybody smiled.

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March 08, 2005

Media and critical thinking

This article in The Age suggests a poor understanding of how the media works by the Australian Broadcasting Authority. In upholding some of the claims of former communications minister Richard Alston's that the ABC was biased and "anti-American" in its Iraq coverage.

David Nolan comments:

Take the ABA report, for example. If one follows its logic, journalists should present information from press briefings, but should not question the motivations behind them."Spin", so central to modern warfare, can only be presented as information, even in a current affairs program - if, that is, it comes from our side.

Presenters cannot, it appears, ask probing critical questions to elicit information and analysis from those "on the scene", whether guests or journalists. Rather they must ask them to simply describe what they see, without touching on critical issues at stake.

That implies that critical thinking is not a part of the media.It cannot critically comment on what others are saying.

Nolan draws this conclusion as well. He says:

Most disturbing, however, is what the ABA deems to be illegitimate journalism. Journalists cannot ask critical questions of reporters "on the ground", even if they reject what the interviewer proposes.

As the ABC argues, this finding "has the potential to seriously undermine the role and practice of current affairs broadcasting". And, we might add, informed public debate.

Today critical thinking is suspect. Have you noticed the recent trend of attacking critical thinking and celebrating the prejudices and bigotry of commonsense.

That view bodes ill for our liberal democracy. Our democracy depends on the critical and enterprising journalism of a public broadcaster willing and able to make a major contribution to democracy.

Strange how very little is said about the mass marketing assault every 10 minutes on commercial free to air television and its mass deception.

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February 15, 2005

media and democracy

This is an interesting article on the media and democracy by Michael Gawenda in The Age. Refering to recent changes in the America media he says:

If the US is a divided nation with the virulent Bush-haters matched by equally virulent Bush supporters on the other side of the divide, the American media increasingly mirror this division.

In the punditocracy, the battlelines are clearly drawn--in newspapers, on TV and on radio--and as far as this correspondent can tell, especially on television, no one has anything surprising (or nuanced) to say.

The mediascape in the US is a battleground between conservative and liberal. What has been dumped is the old liberal ethos of objectivity, neutrality and truth by the media acting as the watchdogs of democracy. Gawenda says:

...increasingly, commentators and journalists who write for newspapers are paid by the TV networks to do battle on their so-called current affairs shows, and they are not paid to say the world is a complex place and that sometimes Bush is right and sometimes wrong; they are paid to be partisan. They are paid handsomely to yell at each other and over each other.

Is this the future of the Australian media after the crossownership laws are changed post June 30th by the Howard Government?

Update: Feb 16
An example of a journalist doing battle is Alan Wood from the Murdoch Press. Writing in The Australian about Kyoto he says the following:

TODAY the Kyoto Protocol on greenhouse gas emissions comes into force. If you believe the climate change propagandists, it is the first step in saving the world from the terrible consequences of global warming. The truth is Kyoto is a joke.

Note 'propagandist'. That means untruths, lies and deceit for political purposes.

And then:

...the Australian approach risks pouring a lot of taxpayer's money into dubious renewable energy projects and doubtful technologies. With Kyoto dead in the water, it is time Australia rethought its approach, including its unquestioning acceptance of the science behind greenhouse, which is being challenged on several fronts.

Note the 'dubious' for clean energy technology and 'unquestioning' for climate change scientists.

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December 09, 2004

media, politics, democracy

There have been several opinion pieces on the relationship between the big media/political party currently floating around cyberspace. None explore the relationship between the media, democracy and political parties in a post election Australia; the role of the media vis-a-vis democracy with the Coalition controlling the House of Representatives and the Senate after June 2005, a deregulated media market after the abolition of the cross-media laws and the media wars.

None of the op-eds engage with the insights developed through Margo Kingston's Webdiary about the concentration of media ownership, the political connections between the elites of Big Parties, Big Business and Big Media, and the implications for our democracy.

The significance of these opinion pieces is their acknowledgement of the reality of a partisan media in Australia. The fiction of a neutral, objective media has well and truely gone. What the opinion pieces do is begin to explore the consequences of a partisan media.

A couple of days ago Tony Abbott wrote about a partisan media in The Age. He observed:

"It's not odd that journalists should favour Labor when the ALP is politically ascendant. What's odd is that political journalists should support Labor even when the federal parliamentary Labor Party looks like a bunch of professional losers. If it is self-evident that an Anglo-Saxon police force can't deal with ethnic crime, or that English-speaking-only administrators can't mastermind the reconstruction of Iraq, or that a celibate priesthood can't fully grasp the stresses of family life, why isn't it equally self-evident that a left-leaning media will never really understand the workings of a conservative government or the instincts of a conservative electorate?"

Abbott says that as recent elections show, media partisanship does not stop the Coalition winning elections. Instead, the media taking sides rebounds on the liberal media because it deprives journalists of contact with the "enemy" running the government.

This account is coy, as it overlooks the politicans media management of a partisan, media that will become even more deeply split between conservative and liberal over the next decade. Abbott neglects to say that the Coalition has fostered this division; that it has a very clear strategy of favouring, and working with, the conservative print, radio and television media; and that its media management involves attacking and undermining the independence of the ABC as a public broadcaster.

The relationship between the big media and political parties is more complex than Abbott makes out. Thsi is indicated in this account by Derek Parker of how the Canberra Press Gallery works in The Australian. Parker says:

"Politics may be a game of swings and merry-go-rounds but at the moment Mark Latham must feel that it is mainly about slippery slides.Only a few months ago, key members of the Canberra press gallery -- the self-appointed judge and jury of Australian politics -- were among his biggest backers, some even proclaiming the race all but over and consigning John Howard to the scrapheap of history. Now the only real division in the gallery is between those who think Latham's leadership is in serious trouble and those who think he is, to use Michael Costello's phrase, a 'dead parrot'".

Parker refers to the herd mentality of the Canberra Press Gallery. He characterises this as operating in terms of consensus (groupthink); making a distinguishing mark by going a bit further than everyone else but in the same general direction; and simple momentum of each step being a bit more extravagant than the last. So Latham is on a downward slide and the Canberra Galley keeps pushing him down.

Canberra is a hothouse bubble and the Press Gallery has become an inhouse echo chamber with the focus on the nuances and rumors of the politics inside the hothouse. What is lost is the idea of the media defending our democratic freedoms.

The other opinion piece is this one by Peter Murphy in The Age. He says that left-leaning media bias is hurting the Labor Party, and that media bias is irrelevant to electoral outcomes.

A left leaning media hurts the ALP because:

"Parties need tough love. Yet friendly media live off hope. Rather than unsentimental assessments, we get sly assertions of faith. If the faith is questioned, the price is excommunication....That's the problem with media bias. If only your friends write you up, you'll always be a shining knight - until you crash and burn. What are required are lots of contrary devil's advocates to test whether you have the right stuff."

He is right. But then politics is the conflict between friends and enemies.

Murphy assumes the media has the capacity to play devils advocate. That is questionable. We have the deskilling and dumbing down of the corporate media in Canberra. Many hack journalists in Canberra do not understand the policy issues of the day; whilst those who are interested in, and do understood policy issues, face editors who do not allow them to be too controversial. Being too critical means that the editors face presusre from, and the wrath of, big business and big government.

Murphy's reason for saying that media bias is irrelevant to electoral outcomes is this:

"Mark Latham was the media's candidate. John Howard won the election - and the Senate. The brutal fact is that media gatekeepers matter less and less in elections. In the internet age, people prefer information to opinion. They make their own judgements. They smell a rat when opinion is wrapped up as news."

True. But being inside the Canberra hothouse means that the public issues that concern ordinary citizens are not on the radar of the Canberra Press Gallery. The Canberra Press Gallery has problems. It is in need of reform. It has to find ways to reconnect with informed citizens.

The significance of a partisan media is that there need to be a shift away from the closed mentality partisan media to political deliberation in a democray-- to a deliberative conception of democracy, not just a liberal one. We need to find, and create alternative spaces for political deliberation by citizens concerned about the fate of our democracy.

Posted by Gary Sauer-Thompson at 11:36 AM | Comments (3) | TrackBack

November 08, 2004

watching the media

I have rephrased this question from one asked by Jay Rosen at PressThink on November 3 post entitled, 'Are We Headed for an Opposition Press'? I do so in the light of the forthcoming changes in media ownership that will soon pass through the Senate.

"Will we see the fuller emergence of an opposition press, given that John Howard and the conservative Coalition are to remain in office another three years? Will we find instead that an intimidation factor, already apparent before the election, will intensify as a result of Howard's victory?"

One scenario is that the cultural divide that is increasingly defining Australian politics will also begin to define Australia media. We can see this with the conservative Murdoch Press, the Packers and the liberal Fairfax Press.

I do not see the other alternative mentioned by Rosen---Big Media successfully holding itself back from politics with the major news sources remaining non-aligned, officially neutral--as a realistic possibility in Australia. The way politics is done today is to attack and defend the media, or to mount a claim that the media is the opposition.

You can see that with the Howard Government's attacks on the ABC. You can see that with the cultural right's struggle with the liberal media and a growing feels that the cultural right is now the ascendant party. You can see it in the way the division of the political universe between the good conservative guys and the bad liberals ----the political--- intrudes into the realm of "news" and commentary. You can see it in the way that the old media as the Fourth Estate, and the watchdog's for democracy is becoming increasingly irrelevant. You can see it in the way that the Canberra Press Gallery increasingly relies on access to the drip feed, rather than being an adversarial press.

There is little doubt that political discourse has moved dramatically rightward—visible in the TV networks, talk radio, the print media, even the Internet—to the point where “liberalism” has become something of a terrible stigma avoided by all but the most bold-spirited of politicians.

After the changes in media ownership laws we can expect the rise of a political media empire with television stations that is built to prosper in the conditions of the great political divide, is steeped in the culture war and has a self-conscious political identity.

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October 18, 2004

a partisan media

We increasingly live in a media-driven, commercial culture, where it's hard to escape the ever-increasing waves of advertising and infotainment. And our public spaces are eroding as our schools, museums, libraries, parks become sites for commercials of the media/entertainment industry.

The corporate media is becoming increasingly partisan. Witness the denunciations of "liberal bias" in the media, that indicates "a political strategy" to something that was wrong with news media--that somehow, somewhere bias found its way into reporting. An elite liberal bias. That strategy means that it is the conservative media which appear as balanced and fair, and not partisan. Fox's entire editorial philosophy revolves around the idea that the centrist mainstream media have a liberal bias that Fox is obligated to rectify. The centrist mainstream media just don't tell the conservative side of the story, and the country has grown so accustomed to the left-leaning media. So says Fox.

Fox is a central hub of the conservative movement's well-oiled media machine in the US. Together with the GOP organization and its satellite think tanks and advocacy groups, this network of partisan outlets--(including the Washington Times, the Wall Street Journal editorial page and conservative talk-radio shows like Rush Limbaugh's) forms a highly effective right-wing echo chamber where GOP-friendly news stories can be promoted, repeated and amplified.

The rhetoric is based on the proven populist formula of waving the flag, hitting the hip-pocket nerve, banging the drum for anti-intellectualism, mocking liberals and playing on suburban fears, prejudices and frustrations. It is practised well by Andrew Bolt, Alan Jones and Tim Blair in Australia.

In the US the world of right-wing corporate media in the US is dominated by Rupert Murdoch's News Corp. and its cable mouthpiece Fox News. One gets used to the spin and rightwing punditry in magazines such as the Weekly Standard. What sits behind this political spin is the aggressive political stance of an ideologically conservative media corporation, which recycles the media bulletins from a Republican Whitehouse. This challenges the persistent view that the Murdoch media is committed to "fair and balanced" reporting. It is this disingenuous claim to objectivity that corrodes the integrity of theMurdoch news business. Fox refuses to admit its political point of view.

We do not have an Australian version of Fox News full of tabloid sensationalism. But we might well have with the media consolidation arising from the proposed changes in the cross media ownership laws.

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September 13, 2004

too much about nothing much

I missed the headline event on Channel Nine apart from the last few questions on education, and the summing up by 60 Minutes crowd and Annabel Crabbe. So thankfully, I missed all the performance stuff about national security and economic management. I reckon that would have been rather boring with the absence of cross talk (arguments).

But then again the media event is all about how the performers present themselves despite the built-in stiffness stuctured into this show. It is about a look not about substance.

The little that I saw was enough. It was all too packaged, controlled and corporate. It was about spin and marketing the package for specific audiences within a media that stifles policy debate for sound grabs and appearance.

However, political surface is everything in television.

What I saw was a reality televison show with lookalikes. Latham looked good at the expense of Howard, he had better lines and more personality. But Howard looked safe and comforting. Different strokes for different folks. As for the audience you can have some laughs by reading the 'we wuz robbed, its all been rigged ' comments here.

Petty

Over a third of the show was devoted to the war on terror. We do have the worm's interpretation of what this meant in terms of its effects. But who knows what is going on with the worm, without us having an indication of the composition of the swinging voter audience. Is the worm an expression of our deepest fears and anxieties? How does it compare to this kind of survey? I do not know. What we have is surface, surface, surface.

So what does the spectacle mean in terms of reversing the ALP's drift of momentum? Who knows. That way of understanding what is happening is the interpretation of the Canberra Press Gallery. Yet more coded surfaces, images and desires that often bear little relation to the lived experiences and desires of the suburbs.I don't know much about either.

So how did the media event play in the diverse marginals around the nation? I haven't a clue. How would people in the marginals critically read the media spectacle? Few people really know.

But the ALP crowd just loved it. Their guy did well.

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August 20, 2004

Media: its failure

There is a good article by Max Suich,The Independent Monthly, on the Australian media in The Age. he argues that there is a large

"....problem in the Australian media and, in particular, in the serious press. Political news reporting has become little more than the official account of the interminable singles tennis match between John Howard and Mark Latham. This dull fare is sexed up with opinion articles from the tribe of staff commentators, opinion-page columnists, talk jockeys and current affairs interviewers and analysts."

A lot of reporting is a recycling of media releases. Media releases are designed so that journalists dump them in. Hence the idea of the drip feed. There is very little thinking going on. Many journalists have no understanding of the issues they are reporting on, nor are they encouraged to do so.

Suich then goes on to connect this to parliamentary politics. he says:

"Where newspaper specialist reporters find out something, beyond the official line, they often place it in their personal columns or commentaries. Here it often fails to meet the arbitrary rules for setting the news agenda of TV news, radio and rival papers, and so, despite its importance or interest, is ignored. The result is that the simplicities of the parties' sloganeering dominates the news agenda.

As the politicians move into a formal election campaign, it will be the objective of both the Howard Government and Latham Opposition to maintain this straitjacket on the media. The whole of their strategy is concentrated on achieving that end."

Most of the news reporting is boring. That is why people turn to commentary and the conflict about the meanings and interepretations of the news.

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July 26, 2004

Reality television

Nicolaus Mills' article, 'Television and the Politics of Humiliation' in the Summer edition of Dissent, says that at a time when the election debate over the economy should be about the race to the bottom that is occurring as a result of the outsourcing of middle-class jobs and the growing number of families facing increasing costs for "universal" health care, reality television culture is telling us that empathy has no place in our lives or culture.

An example Mill's mentions is the Survivor programme. In this game show:

"Contestants are placed in an exotic wilderness setting, usually a South Pacific island, with which they and their audience are unfamiliar...the contestants are divided into teams and pitted against each other in challenges, typically canoe races or building a shelter, decided upon in advance by the show's producers. The losing team must send one of its members off the island, and the climax of the show comes when a vote is taken and viewers get to see who has failed to make the right friendships (contestants are encouraged to form alliances with each other) or told the best lies (one contestant tried to win sympathy by claiming that his grandmother had just died). There is no waiting cab for the losers. They are ushered out...into the night...[with] the money shot...built around exclusion."

It is a hard mean competitive world. We have to do what we can (a bit of nip and tuck) to get by and become successful. Losers are elbowed out of the way through the rules of the game.

The same ethos runs through Big Brother and Australian Idol. Life is a performance. In the former show the contestants live with a bunch of strangers, watched by hidden cameras and recorded by tiny microphones.I find it sizzling in a boring way but I could not help note the high degree of surveillance; much higher than the surveillance of the American embassy in Canberra. Big Brother says surveillance is normal and perfectly acceptable.

Maybe Channel Ten will come up with a reality porn show; one based around watching porn on the Internet, with the contestants saying that it's life, not porn.The ethos of this reality show would be that porn is good.

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July 07, 2004

The politics of smear

I've refrained from commenting on the politics of dirt based on rumor and innuendo that has been filling the pages of the media this last week. Since the politics of dirt has taken on a life of its own, some comments are needed beyond all the nonsense about character in politics.

There is certainly a bit of this:

Alan Moir

As an ambitious NSW right-winger on the make, Latham has form when it comes to dealing in political dodginess. He's good at biffo. So he has been forced to confront the rumor and innuendo and prevent the mud from sticking. However, much more is going on than a political past in local council politics returning to haunt Latham.

Michelle Grattan's article is about politics being out control--- for which we read Latham. Latham is emotionally caught as he is letting the smears run whilst crying for the cameras. It's soapbox stuff sailing close to entertainment.

If politics is out of control it is not the Howard Government that It's "character campaign" is chipping away at Latham's personality creating doubts about his capacity to control his violent streak.

Cathy Wilcox
The "character" campaign, which has been flooding the media headlines for days, is trying to erode the ALP led by placing Latham's "character" into question. Families in the marginal seats will make the judgement.

Is the character campaign working? Is it clawing back the ALP preference lead in the marginals seats, now that both major parties are running neck and neck on primary votes? What other strategic alternatives to a dirt campaign does the Howard Government now have? We will see.

What is missing in Grattan's account of politics being out of control is a critical reflection on the role of the media- in all of this. Why is the media not seen to be out of control? Is this another case of journalists not reflecting on the role of media in political life?

In the Sydney Morning Herald Louise Dodson notes that "Politics turned into Hollywood-style celebrity life" but fails to analyse the media's role in this politics. Paul Kelly in The Australian attacks the media:

" The media's obsession with such issues [character] betrays not just a nasty streak but the way the cult of celebrity debases our journalism. This obsession with private histories coincides with the media's stunning lack of interest in Latham's substance and his policies (notably his refusal to define his main policies). The character issue is a cover for the trivialisation of political analysis and a decline in our public debate."

The politics of spectacle and entertainment is usually dismissed as tabloid with the quality press being above it all.

But the quality press are running with the rumors and innuendo just like the rest, and they doing it without engaging in a serious investigation of the rumours about all sides of politics: how is the campaign organized, how does it works, why does the media swallows the bait, why does the media spend all their time spinning around on rumor and not on policies. Why does the media feed on itself?

This is more than the media wars. The articles have become a simulacra; that is the substitution of the signs of the real for the real.

What does suprises me is the naivety and gullability being displayed about the media about the way that it is a player in politics. Catherine Lumby has talked about the politics of the media agenda. True, we don't hear much about the day-to-day economic issues - child-care costs, healthcare bills and higher education fees. Things have become so frenzied from rumors that some parts of the media start swallowing anything. Jokes and rumors become the real. The Sunday programme, which said it would expose all, was a beatup by the National Nine Network's pre-publicity machine for ratings. Then we have Crikey.com being ironic and postmodern: it is criticising the media for running the rumors whilst it is active in spreading the rumors.

Is not all of this the new politics within the politics of spectacle and entertainment?

Update
Chris over at Backpages asks: "So where does Jack go now? The treasury's spent, the armoury's empty and the adverts are on the nose." He says that he can't see that Howard has any good moves left. The implication? All Latham has to do is hang on. There is no need to block any moves cos there ain't any. Sounds a tad optimistic to me.

Posted by Gary Sauer-Thompson at 09:33 AM | Comments (2) | TrackBack

May 28, 2004

Iraq: media and democracy

Apart from the conflict between the Defence and the State Department I don't really know the ins and outs of Washington and I have no idea of the current state of infighting. I have no idea who is to trying to pin the blame on whom, or what caused the downfall of Ahmad Chalabi, not so long ago the administration’s hero-darling-in-exile.

Nor do I have much idea of the role played by Israel and Iran in Iraq. I have only a vague sense of the effects of Iraq on domestic American politics and know next to nothing about the effects on the inter-ethnic and inter-religious relations in across the wide arc of nation-states in the Arab world:----Israel, Turkey, Iran, Afghanistan and Pakistan

My concerns are more humble. As we all know The Australian was, and is pro the war with Iraq. It's editorials and copy made the case for overthrowing Saddam Hussein, often in the face of strong anti-war feelings in their countries. It's editorials lent credibility and moral support to the White House's claims that the U.S.-led war had international backing and to John Howard's support for, and involvement in, the imperial presidency's war.

The Australian was not a watchdog for democracy. It was one of the Dogs of War, as it played the role of “threat inflator” big time; a role that had its roots in the cold war era.

Now that the case for war has unravelled, the imperial Presidency has badly mismanaged the occupation and there is civil war in Iraq, will The Australian acknowledge its role in deception? That it had spun madly to persuade Australians citizens that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction, or that Iraq had extensive links to Al Qaeda. Will it acknowledge that it spun the false claim that Iraq posed a substantive threat to Australia as the pretext needed to invade, conquer and occupy Iraq? The crude security arguments were used to justify the need for pre-emption and national missile defences.

Sorry, the national missile defence scheme was to protect us from a drought- ravaged North Korea raining nuclear missles down on our cities, wasn't it.

Will The Australian acknowledge that this, and the attacks on the critics as appeasers, was an example of bad journalism. That its editors and journalists routinely skewed information in an on-going and effort to swing Australian public opinion in favour of the war and the Bush Administration? That it advocated Australia blindly trail along with the US repulsing any critical thoughts about being a deputy sheriff in the Asia Pacific region as unAmerican.

As the fires of war burn in Iraq The Australian'sstance becomes a touch critical. The reality is that in the overall war on radical Islamic terrorism Iraq represents failure with a capital F. The reality is that the US is bogged down with insurgencies that its forces can barely contain, let alone permanently defeat. I know that The Australian will not acknowledge that it got it badly wrong on Iraq.

Posted by Gary Sauer-Thompson at 08:42 AM | Comments (2) | TrackBack

May 01, 2004

dead meat

This guy is dead meat, politically speaking:

Tandberg

He is Professor David Flint, the Chair of the Australian Broadcasting Authority,--the regulator of the communications market. He has been writing fan mail to Alan Jones, a shockjock over at 2GB, (Sydney Radio) on the ABA's letterhead. Just a little example of the way Flint acts without integrity and impartiality when the ABA was investigating the issue cash-for-comment. There are other examples.

Alan Jones' breakfast radio programme at 2GB wields a lot of power because of its daily audience size, Jones' easy access to senior conservative politicians and his ability to set the political agenda in Sydney. So federal conservative politicians--eg., the PM--- bypass the Canberra Press Gallery filter and appear on the Jones breakfast programme. Jones is seen to be the King of Sydney broadcast radio. Good to have on your side.

Howard, Flint, Jones and Laws. A tight media/political circle. One with lots of reverberation. This is what Bob Carr, the Premier of NSW, had to say to the ABC about Flint, as reported by Crikey.com

“I think he's too partisan, I think he's involved in arguments about national affairs from a partisan viewpoint. I don't think anyone would seriously argue anymore that he would carry public confidence. If John Howard is a conservative, has respect for our institutions, and that by definition is what conservatives believe in – a respect for our institutions – he should say to Professor Flint, you've been too partisan, you've embarrassed the Government as it happens, but I've got to have an ABA that can command respect.”

A regulator (the ABA) that commands respect is one that it is distanced from government, consists of persons whose duty is to further the public good not foster partisan interest. It is also one that needs powers. As Richard Ackland observes, the rorts in the cash-for-comments indicate the need to strengthen the power of the regulator. Ackland says:

"...the ABA recommended that the Broadcasting Services Act be amended to give it power to remedy this form of fudging. It called for proper sanctions so it could properly respond to serious breaches of the code, it asked to be able to enforce advertising-free periods, it wanted the power to ban presenters from broadcasting, it sought to be able to require on-air corrections, or the findings of the ABA to be broadcast, the power to impose civil penalties, and injunctive relief where there have been breaches of the act."

The partisan Flint, of course, dismisses the claims about his conflict of interest as mere lefty elite chatter in the twilight of the (social democratic) idols. However, it is just a matter of time before the compromised Professor Flint goes. Twilight is falling around this particular conservative elite.

Will Flint fall on his sword? Will he cut his wrists and let the blood drip on the sandstone during a glorious sunset? Will he ritually disembowl himself?

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April 22, 2004

when news isn't news

It is strange isn't it. News is generally what the politicians say on an issue. When they don't say anything it is not news. Energy policy is a good example of this. The journalists covering this story are waiting for the Howard Government to make an announcement on energy and greenhouse. Until then there is no news. So you wait for the peg or hook for the story.

An example of this is the current vaccum of news on energy policy, apart from the energy intensive industry saying no to green energy and they need even more corporate welfare to keep them internationally competitive. They always get their spin in the media as they seek to create policy in their sectors favour. The sping advocates a "new realism" in energy policy, where priority is given to clean coal above wind and solar. Wind and solar are "special interests" whilst the coal industry represents the "community." The government should not pander to "special interests" at the expense of the "community."

To understand what is going on here I've been digging around looking for some commentary on the way the Australian media works. In looking for the critical reflection on the Australian media, I came across this by Antony Loewenstein. He says that "Australia is currently experiencing a divergence in information dissemination, and a lesser reliance on the printed work to get informed." Then we have some choice quotes from Margo Kingston over at the innovative Webdiary:

"[We] are under constant pressure to write what the powerful want written, and not delve into what they don't...the spin-doctors have got us by the short and curlies at the moment. They understand how our news judgement works and how decisions are made and exactly what form news stories take. Mainly because they've all worked in the media and they're all bloody traitors. So they understand that if they actually don't answer or don't take calls or blow shit of you and hang up, there is actually no story, you're actually relying on them to get the impetus or the peg for the story."

It's called media management inside Parliament House. Don Watson in Recollections of a Bleeding Heart describes it this way:

"Hungry journalists need feeding. The bigger ones need bigger serves and more. Friendly ones need occassional rewards, unfriendly ones inducements to come over. The food is stories. Stories contain varyign degrees of factr and interpretation. Many require modification, known as spin. Some require both spin and lunch."

Margo then makes another point:

"I don't blame the journalists because they're dealing with massive structural problems....The main one is the sheer lack of space. The space problem has been growing in the last 10 years. It's all supplements and advertising ratios. Their main thing is how much profit are we making a page."

The journalist covering energy issues is stuck. They have little scope to question the rhetoric and spin of the intensive energy industry. That is not news.

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April 17, 2004

blogging in a media-driven culture

After listening to this story on blogging on Radio National yesterday, I came across this media manifesto this morning. That was after I had flicked through the pro-war pages of the Weekend Australian. It was filled with the rhetoric of 'we fearless warriors gotta fight the terrorists to the death, and we have to take out all those who dare resist US power.'

Like Rebecca Blood I am 'disappointed by press coverage of current events. Too often, journalists unskeptically accept whatever "facts" are given to them by authorities without verifying that they are true.' My disappointment is more than just that. Despite the many examples of excellent journalism, many journalists often do not understand the issues they write about, and most fail to deconstruct the political rhetoric of the day.

The Alternet manifesto says that we live in a media-driven, commercial culture, where it's hard to escape the ever-increasing waves of advertising, infotainment and spin. A lot of this, it says, can be attributed to the privatization and deregulation of the public airwaves. It has lead to media moguls like Rupert Murdoch of News Corporation. News Corp has turned journalists into attack dogs for a partisan (right-wing) political cause, defines the liberal media as an enemy and sees televison as a form of entertainment that has no need for ethics.

Consequently, the media has become a battlefield for those who hold that a healthy, participatory democracy requires noncommercial access to the tools of communication. This requires battling the free marketers who want to end all restrictions on media ownership and to privatise public broadcasting. The other strategy is to create spaces for independent media (eg., online media) to produce good quality civic or public journalism and for the deliberation about public policy by citizens.

Despite some bloggers seeing themselves as proto-journalists, many of us are writing against the established journalists in the corporate media. As Jay Rosen, from the New York University Department of Journalism says we bloggers are writers in the public forum who are using a democratic media tool to participate in the formation of public opinion and shape the public conversation on public issues.

We are critical readers of the media and we do not see ourselves as working within the institutional conventional standards of professional journalism. We are more like democratic citizens deliberating on public issues, engaging in public debates and decoding the political rhetoric of the day.

Blogging is not conventional journalism, says Jay Rosen and Rebecca Blood. Yet there is a lot of mix and match going on between these different kinds of writing, as JD points out over at New Media Musings. And a lot of journalism has little to do with the conventional understanding of journalism.

What is of concern to bloggers as active citizens is the quality of political debate in Australia. As Christopher Seith, writing over at Margo Kingston's Webdiary, points out:

"Debates which appear ultimately to bog down in finger pointing do little to achieve a better world. There is a tendency to characterise political arguments as some kind of Manichean struggle, “good guy” versus “bad guy”. We seek to prove how disconnected our opponents are from us and from reality, rather than seeking to understand the points of connection. We have turned both our political and intellectual processes into adversarial forums where both sides arm themselves with their own self righteousness. We are more intent on “I told you so” than analysis. Little wonder that our “analysis” leaves us feeling more scared and alienated."

Changing that political culture in Australia is a big ask.

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April 10, 2004

Murdock quits Australia

So the Murdock's exit Australia for domicle in America. Well gone are the days when the foundation stone of the media empire was a now defunct afternoon tabloid in Adelaide.

David Rowe

News Corp is a local company that became global, shed its original nationality and reinvent itself as American. athe strategy makes sense. Most of News Corp's income comes from the US--It is a $60 billion global heavyweight with a global pay TV network.

So what does that mean for media ownership on Australia? That Murdoch judges that there will be no lifting of the media ownership rules in the near future? That Murdock will offload the Australian arm (News Ltd|) of News Corp? Or make News Ltd a separate entity? That it will buy out the Fox partners?

That it will loose favoured status in Canberra? No more special deals for an American-owned News Corp? No more looking sideways as News Corp buys Telstra out of Foxtel? NO more helping News Corp acquire a fourth televison licence. No more watering down the anti-siphoning laws in favour of pay TV.

Will the Murdoch papers continue to savage a Latham-led ALP?

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April 03, 2004

Parliament & the media

The fray over the Leader of the ALP opposition saying that he would withdraw troops from Iraq before Xmas on a radio interview caused a political storm in the Canberra hothouse. By the weekend the storm had pretty much blown itself out.

The after image from the storm is this:

Nicholson

Of course, that is how the conflict looks from the outside looking through the media prism; the broken window onto a despised breed of men behaving badly. Inside the institution the conflict is experienced quite differently. What the public see as real from the outside when it is but the theatre of political combat. And Don Watson adds, thanks to the short carefully edited grabs of the media, the public just see the theatre when it is real combat.

The media must now be rubbing their hands with glee. When the oomph is back in politics, it means increased ratings for the networks. They have something to sell in an election year. The media prism is increasingly turned onto politics. Profits will flow from reshaping the political combat as spectacle and tapping into, and feeding the public's loathing of politicians behaving badly.

Hence the media's focus on Question Time in the House of Representatives and ignoring the good second reading speeches in the Senate. The consequence of the media's prism is the evacuation of meaning of the combat and less and less understanding of the political traditions that inform and give the substance tot he combat. All the media shows us is the drama and the spectacle.

The media now determines the form, and increasingly, the content of the political debate.

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February 23, 2004

Tim Blair's darned sock

I'm currently reading Don Watson's Death Sentence:The Decay of Public Language. It got me thinking about writing a post on the eloquence and inventiveness of Australian journalism in reshaping our language. It was to be a little something that played around with the metaphor of electrify, as in madness.

Then I came across this passage in Watson's text:

"Pictures rule. To the extent that TV rules, pictures rule; and to the extent that TV is the most important medium of public life, the public language is at best a secondary consideration, and at works indistinquishable from the language of marketing and entertainment." (p. 64).

And I was sidetracked. I thought: Tim Blair! Our man from the IPA is a classic exponent of marketing and entertainment that disguises itself as good journalism.

Truth is something you don't think of when you read Tim. His words kinda ring true in a strange way, but the rhetoric of truth disguises the political purpose that drives his work.

But I'll give him something though. Fluent Tim is more than a medium for the flows of entertainment. His 'soft talk' markets American Republican politics in Australia with far more finese than we find in Murdock's ragtag Australian. And our Tim is not all gloss. He loves to coerce you into believing that there is no choice but to buy the Republicanspeak and product he's hustling in the media marketplace.

You can't really say that his stuff is as nourishing as mother's milk. Too cynical. It activates our instinct to distrust. Nor does the jokey rhetoric take wing and soar, for all its stylistics and self-concious poetics. It's more a bit of this and that gone stale. Short on depth and ideas, you might say, after a few South Australian wines have made you feel relaxed and comfortable.

After a few more SA wines (ugh the salt!) whilst watching the father of the nation on television expound on nothing in particular, and you start to see that Tim's finely honed words are linked by bits of barbed wire. You detect the dog whistling behind the craft. This is what Watson calls the "...trick of tapping the political potential of suppressed prejudice, fear and envy through apparently harmless but carefully 'coded' words and turning it against the rest of the country."

A few more wines and you start thinking of darned socks, unwashed.

And so it goes........I'll spare you the drunken shift to Bataillian imagery.

You see, I got side tracked. And the stock stuff does not sit too well with petrol, carbon fibre, rubber.

I should have stuck to my post about the filtering of truth in Australian journalism.

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February 06, 2004

Media: lapdogs, watch dogs, attack dogs

We live in a culture of media spin by the media companies (Packer, Murdoch and Fairfax) as well as a culture of political spin. Liberal democracy is a world of public relations as well as media wars.

Larry Sabato, an American political scientist, devised an evolutionary account of US journalism to describe what happened to US journalism before and after Watergate. His account is a three stage process of the meda: from being a lapdog (1941-66) to a watchdog (1966-84) to an attack-dog (1984 onwards).

Can we apply this account to Australian journalism? I'm not sure as I do not enough about the history of the Australian media. What I can do is give current examples of the different kinds of journalism.

This is the attack dog. More here.

A lap dog.

A watch dog

Each reader would have their own examples of the media's relationship to political power in our liberal democracy.

My own sympathies lie with the media as a watchdog since this connects with the role of citizenship in a democracy. I recognize that most of the media in Australia does not play this role anymore. Hence the narratives about the decline of traditional journalism the decline of the public sphere and the hollowing of citizenship.

The media are more concerned with their own power than truth these days with most commentators thinking of the media in market terms: the media are commerical enterprises and readers are consumers. Deliberative democracy is an alien concept for many.

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February 03, 2004

Media wars

I do not normally read Philip Adams, that darling of all those right thinking conservatives who take a concerned interest in the world around them. What he normally says is not of much interest.

I confess I did read his Messenger shot in war sideshow article this morning. This is part of the fallout in the media wars. We have wars when Australian commentators write that the "BBC, in its overweening institutional arrogance, killed David Kelly." That punk journalist Tim Blair loves the snap in the standard Murdoch line.

Recycling the scripts of others as their own work seems to be standard practice of Australian journalists and the Howard Government's spin culture.

Someone has to pick Adams up, now that Tim Blair has taken his eye off the ball and let it wander. Tim noticed the article, but his imagination got side track into some strange stuff about war and apologies that only he and his readers inside the culture of contempt can understand.

More recycled lines?

I found a bit in the Adam's text that was of interest because it develops yesterday's deeper issues post:--especially the conflict between the public broadcaster and the free marketeers. On this Adams says:

"The Beeb's critics don't like the way the organisation enjoys comparative freedom from government by having an income stream from licences. They'd prefer to have the organisation on the drip, so that it can be punished for perceived misdemeanours. In much the same way as funding has been employed to bully Australia's public broadcaster. But for others that's not enough. The organisation's competitors are calling for the Beeb to be sent to the scrapyards, for it to be dismembered and/or privatised."

Similar calls get made in Australia re the ABC.

Adams is fairly upbeat about the outcome of the media wars in both the UK and Australia. He says that the dismembering or privatisation of the public broadcasters:

"....won't happen there – and can't happen here – because of a small problem. Overwhelming public support for the principles – and the practice – of public broadcasting. In its analysis, its findings and its recommendations, the Hutton report is inept. Either extraordinarily naive about the way media operates in a democracy or a piece of deliberate malevolence. Either way, a clear majority of the British public isn't buying it and there's a growing backlash."

This is too upbeat in the light of this account by Michael Wolff over at New York Metro.com Michael says:

"....The historic polarity in British society has been upper class/lower class, Labor/Tory, Thatcher/anti-Thatcher. The polarity was now more precisely BBC/Murdoch. But the themes were the same. The BBC was the Establishment. Murdoch, the rude insurgent. With a certain historical inevitability on his side. Indeed, the success of Murdoch’s multichannel BSkyB—not just a satellite operation but a Murdochian news and entertainment network—was possibly the most significant business development in the UK since Murdoch and Thatcher together broke the unions."

The source of the animus to the BBC (and the ABC) is statism. As Michael says its "a consumer thing. A big-government thing. A fuck-you thing. A tax thing." He adds that it’s a fight for the public heart, control of a big bureaucracy and a fight for opportunities to get a bigger piece of the pie.

And a fight about Murdoch’s piece of the media pie.

In the UK Blair and Murdoch have allied, with the BBC’s battle with Blair being just another proxy battle with Murdoch. However, in Australia, it is not clear that Howard is lining up with Murdoch to give Murdoch a greater slice of the pie through dismembering the ABC (or killing off Fairfax).

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February 02, 2004

BBC & deep conflicts

The conflict between the Blair Government and the BBC over the Hutton Report is still simmering. It is now far more than the BBC (ie. Gilligan) getting it wrong with his ad-libbed comments to a small audience at 6.07 on the morning of 29 May 2003; the slack editorial procedures; the BBC refusing to apologise for that mistake, Gilligan betraying David Kelly, or the BBC reporters and editors needing to do their jobs better.

For its part the BBC is still
not happy with the Hutton Report. It argues that the Hutton Report is deeply flawed.

However, deeper issues are involved than Hutton's rough treatment of the BBC, or the need to reform the BBC. At this stage it is unclear what the deeper issues are, over and above the Blair Government not being trusted by British citizens. But they have to do with how liberal democracy is functioning and the inter-relationships between its different institutions.

Here are two suggestions about the deeper issues. The first is by Peter Preston writing in The Observer. He argues that it is about media freedom:

"....once the BBC is covertly cowed, once the Ofcom sector pauses for breath and goes quiet in turn, then the press itself sees its own freedoms curtailed - not just in some courtroom drone about defective systems, but in a broadcast reluctance to pick up and follow through newspaper stories which, yet again, break news in the public interest. Anybody want to take on another Tory treasurer? Anybody give the Times a helping hand?"

Preston says that he does not belong to a fixed camp in this conflict. He adds:

"Hutton is pretty convincing on Downing Street's bumbling honesty over the naming of Kelly, the relative blamelessness of Geoff Hoon, the irrelevance of what the Prime Minister said in the Far East. But he is absolutely unconvincing when he seeks to champion the cause of free journalism. He seems to come from a different age and a different culture. If he is allowed, egged on by government triumphalism, to define the boundaries of proper investigation, then media freedoms - already shadowed by an unending war against terrorism - face an ice age."

This suggests it is a conflict over the nature of media's role in a democracy when the government of the day placed fast and loose with its intelligence reports on Iraq's WMD's.

Nick Cohen offers another account of the deeper issues buried in this political conflict fingers the judiciary. There is a history in Britain of law Lords rarely fingering the state in their judicial inquiries. Often the judiciary turns away from facing the truth of the matter. The classic examples are Lord Denning's inquiry into the Profumo affair; and Lord Widgery's inquiry into the shooting dead of 14 unarmed demonstrators in Northern Ireland in 1972, which exonerated the Army.

Cohen argues that Hutton is now being judged to continuing to work in the tradition of judges turning away from the truth to please their political masters. Cohen says that:

"His Lordship has invented a novel gambit which Denning and Widgery might have applauded. He used his terms of reference like a mugger uses a doorway. When the BBC walked by, he leapt out and gave it a kicking. When the big boys from the Government turned into the street, he hid in the shadows".

Others concur, including Ron Liddle in The Spectator. How did Hutton manage to pull the above trick? Cohen says:

"....look what happened when Hutton was presented with apparently incontrovertible evidence that Gilligan and Kelly were half-right and the dossier was sexed up. His court heard that the Government knew the intelligence about Saddam having chemical weapons ready to fire in 45 minutes concerned puny shells which could travel a mile or so. But the Government said Saddam had missiles which could hit Jerusalem, Tehran or British bases in Cyprus. Was the misinformation a mistake or a deceit?

The judge refused to pass judgment. Examining how the Government sexed-up the dossier wasn't his job. 'Not my subject, old chap. Outside my terms of reference, don't you know.'"

Hence we have double standards in Hutton's Report. The feeling is that what he has done simply isn't fair. It was unbalanced. Hence the judiciary is now under question.

A third account holds that the deep issue is BBC versus Murdoch.

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January 31, 2004

popping champagne corks

How sweet the victory for the Blair Government in its fight to the death with the BBC. Lord Hutton came up with goods. He delivered the BBC's head to them.


Steve Bell

Here is a defence of Hutton from the Daily Telegraph with some misgivings. Hutton's brief was a narrow one.

Blair is losing the public relations battle. It is not just lefty journalists calling the Hutton Report a whitewash. It is also public opinion.

The next step in the media politics is clip the wings of a public broadcaster. The free marketeers are eager to have a go at slashing the BBC's body---just as they do in Australia with the ABC. Only, in Britain, the conditions are more conducive for a dismembering since the BBC is preparing to renegotiate the renewal of its charter.

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January 01, 2004

Media: the big lack

I've been digging around in the archives searching for accounts that make sense of why we citizens are disatisfied with the media. That dissatisfaction was very clear with the coverage of the Iraq war. I've been trying to link that dissatisfation to the decline of the public sphere, the rise of tabloid journalism the emergence of public journalism, the decline of the ABC as a strong national public broadcaster and the shift in reportage/journalism from the objective (the emphasis is placed on the fact) and the interpretive (the emphasis is placed on the story) in the early 1980s.

I came across this old interview on the ABC's World Today with Catherine Lumby, Associate Professor of Media Studies at Sydney University. She says that she was very disappointed by Australian newspaper coverage:

"....it's very clear that we get images on television live, we get a lot of factual information from television, and then secondarily from radio. And ...most of us would be, looking to our broadsheet newspapers in particular for some really good hard analysis of the political rhetoric, and certainly analysis of the options that America wants to pursue and its allies...I wouldn't call it analysis because I've, there's very little I think that I've detected which critiques the terms on which this response is being mounted.The very simplistic black and white good versus evil kind of rhetoric coming out of America has received I think very little hard analysis. I think Margot Kingston's been particularly good in the online section of The Herald."

Lumby says that we watched that spectacle of the war unfold on television and that we went to the newspapers for something different. But we're not really getting the something different. She then adds:

" ....But we must remember that in a new media era there are other sources of information. The Internet can be an invaluable tool here for getting alternative points of view and information out. And I think that the media, the mainstream media needs to use those sorts of tools more in this situation."

Maybe a new form of online media will develop to fill the lack that many citizens experience? One thing is for sure, filling the lack will not come from the tabloid media.

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December 22, 2003

Lefty magazines need to lift their game

Both John Quiggin and Chris Sheil have been reflecting on the left magazines they subscribe to and read. They mention Australian Options (Adelaide) Dissent, (Canberra) Eureka Street, and Arena (Melbourne).

Nothing from the Emerald City. Is it still all froth and bubble there?

I used to read those little magazines too. I considered them to be a vital part of a critical public sphere; even more so with the death of the liberal university.

And now? I've changed my mind. Some are not worthwhile. Australian Options has not published since Issue no 31 in November 2002.

These lefty little magazines may still be crucial to a criitcal public sphere but I do not read them anymore. They are either not online at all (Dissent); minimally (Arena); or partially (Eureka Street). What is online at Eureka Street is thin pickings indeed. It is little more than a shopfront. It should be following the mainstream media and be online---well, the back issues at least. Why not the back issues?

The literary/political magazines are not much better. Meanjin is not online at all as what is online has not advanced beyond being a homepage. Similarly with Overland Both have fallen way behind the Australian Book Review.

And Arena Magazine? Chris waxes lyrical about the flagship of the postmodern left and Guy Rundle as an essayist. To give them their due, they do understand the effect of the globalisation of the economy on Australia, on its class structure and culture, and the impact this is having on our different modes of life. We are living in a network society in postmodernity.

There is content here in Rundle's editorial to Issue 67. The ALP in NSW (and SA) has become a right-wing, openly authoritarian party tapping into the worst of its historical traditions and this Bataillian observation on culture:

"Shows such as Australian Idol have none of the bumbling amateurishness of earlier talent shows such as New Faces. This makes them more watchable, but it also dedicates them to turning music from a Dionysian spirit of release and celebration to one of disciplined, individualised career obsessiveness, half protestant ethic, half New Age pop psychology. It does not succeed — the realm of excess will always escape attempts to govern it — but it does its work in transforming the personality and behaviour of those who like music, the young."

Then we have some advice to the ALP.It should begin

talking about society again about and weather the increasingly worn-out baiting of the tabloids, to promote a new social vision — one that recognises the joys and advances of a network society, but also reminds people that it is cast on a bedrock of common life. It needs to talk not about ‘social capital’ — often a term used for ‘society’ by people who don’t believe it exists — but about ‘social plant’: the investment in hospitals, schools and services that have been run down as a deliberate attempt by the Coalition to create a privatised society."

That's good philosophically informed commentary.

And that's it. The lefty magazines do not offer much to sustain a critical public culture in a postmodern network society do they?

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December 21, 2003

Selling the imperial presidency

The sell is by the New York Times. The journalism piece attached was positively supportive. It celebrates mission accomplished without a touch of irony.

This is the liberal media in the US.

I know that Fox Television is the unofficial media arm of the Republican Party. But the NYT licking the boots of the imperial presidency?

I thought that the NYT was the bastion of American liberalism that Republicans love to hate.

On the other hand, we can read the image critically. It shows the staged nature of the whole media performance thus disclosing how much of politics is theatre.

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December 17, 2003

it's much ado about nothing

Some off the beat comments.

Digital TV is just around the corner. The regulatory hurdles on digital transmission have been cleared. Consumers are going to be offered a veritable suite of services. And the new digital electronic guide is going to be oh so user -friendly. Everybody is bubbling over with optimism.

As I understand it from the various sound bites Foxtel is still not making money. for Telstra, News Corp. and PBL. Foxtel has a low market penetration in Australia and has been running at a loss since its inception in 1995.

Meanwhile the free-to-air television continues to decline in quality.

Why these comments about nothing in particular?

I'm plain tired of the media flows about the capture of Saddam Hussein. It's a media spectacle. Pages after page is devoted to nothing much in particular. The much ado about nothing is little more than publicity designed to boost the electoral stocks of Bush, Blair and Howard. It's the security card being played from the White House.

Maybe I should have written about optimism and the stock market. That too would be much ado about nothing.

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October 23, 2003

yawn television

The Chinese President Hu Jintao arrived in Australia yesterday. All we had were the brief television shots last night: Prime Minister John Howard and wife Janette greeting the arrivals President Hu being introduced to the waiting line of officials by the Governor-General Michael Jeffery and a waterfront lunch hosted by the Governor-General.

Today President Hu is engaged in a series of private business meetings in Sydney. The business leaders are expected to push for opportunities to take advantage of the growing Chinese economy. What would that be? Helping to build the Olympic infrastructure?

It's yawn television.

From these brief shots Hu Jintao appeared to be a competent but colorless technocrat; presumably anti-democratic given his record in Tibet. A suitable leader for a CCP concerned with stability in government, the market and society. The Chinese it would seem are more interested in making money than making revolutions.

So what is happening behind the pleasant television scenes? Are the Chinese on their way to replace the United States as the main power in Asia? Or is that perspective too simplified since the reality is that the United States and China together are dominating the region. Whatever, the Pacific is no longer an American lake. Those days have well gone.

We know that US politicians are now blaming China more and more for job losses in manufacturing and they are demanding the imperial presidency in Washington bring about a yuan currency devaluation (ie., eliminate exchange controls and float the yuan). APEC has taken China's side on the issue, saying that Asian countries probably aren't ready for severe currency revaluations.

We also know that more and more Australian manufacturing is moving to China. And that means job losses. But we--Quarry Australia---get to sell more gas and iron ore to fuel Chinese economic growth. Great. That means no knowledge-based manufacturing industry in the futurein Australia. China is one of the few growth centres of the world economy and it is becoming the epicentre of East Asian regional economic integration.

Remember all that crowing in Washington about the superiority of the free market vision of the US vis-a-vis Asia's paternalistic crony capitalism after the East Asian financial crisis of the late 1990s?(Link courtesy of Adam at PRC News).

It was all about state-led industrialisation and government directed development being a failure and that the future lay with the Western (ie., US) form of free market capitalism. That East Asian financial crisis was used by the US to assert its dominance over East Asia--keep them subordinate, by weakening Japan's regional construction efforts. Australia, of course, dutifully parroted the Washington line.

Well, that strategy has backfired. China has been empowered, trade and investment flows between China and the rest of Asia have boomed, and China is creating regional free trade areas with South and North East Asia. None of this wll go down well with the Imperial presidency in Washington. They---especially the neo-cons who arduously work for maximizing U.S. power---do not take kindly to their hegemony being challenged, especially by Asians.

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September 20, 2003

beyond silence

This article (link courtesy of Jean over at Creativity Machine) is interesting for its account of the difference between the old world of the mass media and the new world of the Internet.

Clay Shirky says that in relation to the mass media of the 20th century the:

"....historic role of the consumer has been nothing more than a giant maw at the end of the mass media's long conveyer belt, the all-absorbing Yin to mass media's all-producing Yang. Mass media's role has been to package consumers and sell their attention to the advertisers, in bulk. The consumers' appointed role in this system gives them and no way to communicate anything about themselves except their preference between Coke and Pepsi, Bounty and Brawny, Trix and Chex. They have no way to respond to the things they see on television or hear on the radio, and they have no access to any media on their own -- media is something that is done to them, and consuming is how they register their response."

This mass media made us consumers silent. But silence did not mean that the media's message passed unchallenged by us viewers. We did teach ourselves to read the product dished up to us critically. In doing so we became critics of the media. We challenged the media's claim their supply of information the population would enhance its critical consciousness and become a critical public opinin. We became aware that the technological news industry shapes our attention in a special direction and ‘mobilizes’ public opinion in favour of different polices.

What grew out of this was the search for void spaces, holes in the media systems, that would allow alternative story telling to emerge. But we the public as citizens did not become producers of culture because we did not have the media to enable us to do so. Hence there was little by way of public journalism.

Clay Shirkey is pretty upbeat in terms of the new media for alternative narrative to those the technologized news industry. He says that:

"In retrospect, mass media's position in the 20th century was an anomoly and not an inevitability. There have always been both one-way
and two-way media -- pamphlets vs. letters, stock tickers vs. telegraphs -- but in 20th century the TV so outstripped the town square that we came to assume that 'large audience' necessarily meant 'passive audience', even though size and passivity are unrelated."

Clay Shirky then contrasts this passivity of the consumer in a world of mass media with the possibilities opened by the Internet:

"With the Internet, we have the world's first large, active medium, but when it got here no one was ready for it, least of all the people who have learned to rely on the consumer's quiescent attention while the
Lucky Strike boxes tapdance across the screen.... In place of the giant maw are millions of mouths who can all talk back. There are no more consumers, because in a world where an email address constitutes a media channel, we are all producers now."

Clay hangs too much on the email as media. It is too romantic when this form of engaging in a conversation is being killed of by the spam mail that is now choking our email boxes.

Surely it is the weblog that makes the cultural difference as it is this media that enables us as amateurs to become producers of culture. Note that I say culture not news. Saying culture opens up a disturbing phenomenon in cyberspace: the systematic closing of the intellectual commons through the limited public access to online academic journals. The signs read Access Denied even at publicly-funded universities.

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August 28, 2003

would you trust a journalist?

I have come across this story about the decline of journalism by Michael D'Antonio. The link is courtesy of Rhetorica. Tis a sad narrative with a lot of nostalgia for the ethos of traditional journalism that has been swallowed up in the bright new world of communications.

The text starts by saying that journalists take bribes and that readers doesn't believe much of what they read in the press in general because its all biased and deceptive. This is a big fall from the watchdog role of the press in uncovering truth and cutting through partisan propaganda with its journalist ethos of fairness, honesty and independence.

What caused the fall from trust?

Several things according to the article. The tabloids came to the fore and the television networks began reporting secondhand what the tabloids were saying. Then the television networks began developing more "news" programs devoted to celebrities, lifestyles and other soft features whilst the newspapers, faced with stagnant or declining circulations, trimmed the number of pages devoted to hard news and expanded feature sections. Thus the drift toward infotainment.

All this is well known. But it does not account for the personality journalist with attitude---the Andrew Bolts or the Miranda Devines. Michael discusses this under 'buzz':

"Buzz is the publicity and chatter that hovers around a hot book, article, film or TV program. Buzz can raise newsstand sales, get your article optioned by a film company and turn a journalist into a hot commodity. One of the best ways to generate buzz is to write with edge, with an attitude."

Buzz displaces speaking truth to power in favour of journalists becoming celebrities. The desire is now to become noticed.

Buzz becomes transformed by radio and television. They turn it into shrill, in the form of news talk radio or loud television disputes that sought to entertain not with fluff but with fury. Well known examples in Australia are Alan Jones and John Laws. These hyper-aggressive, politically-driven white male shockjocks, such as Stan Zemanek at Radio 2UE, have gradually commandeered much of the AM band with programs that are a hybrid of entertainment and political advocacy. The nationally syndicated talkers have replaced local programming, and the network format has turned much of radio into a clubhouse for listeners who share the same views and has reduced radio's role as a source of straight journalism.

Michael then draws attention to what is beginning to happen in Australia. He says that the:

"... success of conservative radio hosts inspired cable networks to copy them..... They are not journalists but performers... The success of opinionated fast-talkers has led TV news departments to hire a parade of glib political figures as analysts and show hosts....Few of these people have ever spent a day gathering straight news. But all of them are skilled at spinning issues to present their point of view in a startling way."

Michael says that the Fox News cable network is an example of this paradigm. Fox openly mixes conservative opinion with news and taps the core audience devoted to conservative talk radio. In Sydney Australia that is 2GB and 2UE.

So there we have it. The decline of traditional, independent journalism speaking truth to power is due to both the rise of politically biased, high-profile analysts who distort the truth for rhetorical effect, and the blending of entertainment, news and opinion. As Tim Porter observes Micheal D'Antonio's text has the funereal air of an obituary for traditional journalism. If journalism -- the system by which we get our news -- is being subsumed by communications then what is going to replace it?

We have news outlets being owned by larger media corporations who use "journalism" or television programmes to promote their conglomerate parent's products, to engage in subtle lobbying or corporate rivalry and to intermingle journalism with advertising to boost profits. These pretty much encourage and promote market capitalism, with this self- interested commercialism posing as news discourage participation in public life and disconnected from a responsibility to provide citizens with good information.

Posted by Gary Sauer-Thompson at 07:51 PM | Comments (5) | TrackBack

August 21, 2003

here's a thought

I thought Adelaide, like Brisbane or Perth, was in pretty poor shape because it was a one newspaper town. Adelaide only had the Murdoch-owned Advertiser, which most people treat with contempt. It's a tabloid rag. We all hope that something different can develop to challenge it and introduce some different ideas and views about what is going one. I guess people listen to the radio in Adelaide.

On an historical note. Murdoch started in Adelaide with a tabloid called The News-- now long gone. Today the whole of Australia is small fry in a global News Corp that seems to get bigger and bigger.

So I looked in envy at the two newspaper towns of Melbourne ( The Age and Herald Sun) and Sydney (Sydney Morning Herald and Daily Telegraph). They meant media diversity. And the war between Fairfax and the Murdoch News Ltd meant competition and a diversity of views on public issues.

Then I thought. Newspapers are not big growth businesses in terms of the communications industry. That is television. What if Adelaide is actually Melbourne or Sydney's future? They too could be on their way to becoming one newspaper towns.

The Age is the weak link in the Fairfax chain, and from what I can gather from reading the media News Corp has launched an attack on Fairfax in Melbourne. It's the first front in the war so to speak. Fairfax is surrounded. Media analysts say that The Age is in danger of losing critical mass. When I reading The Age online I notice that it is beginning to increasingly look like a clone of the flagship Sydney Morning Herald. What comes through from The Bulletin on the media is just how News Corp dominates the Australian newspaper scene.

Hence the powerful political weight that News Corp has. So it increasingly looks as if the one newspaper standing in Melbourne and Sydney will be a Murdoch owned one. If a global News Corp would then have been a monopoly in these towns, then that means the end of the liberal print media as we have to know it. You can feel the ground shift under your feet.

That was my thought.

Posted by Gary Sauer-Thompson at 04:54 PM | Comments (1) | TrackBack

August 13, 2003

enter the market

In my earlier post on the ABC I mentioned Robert Manne's judgement that the ongoing reduction in the public funding of the ABC meant that the public broadcaster would be forced to find other income streams. I quoted Manne:

"...my political judgement [is] that there is no prospect that either the Coalition or Labor will substantially increase in the budgetary allocation to the ABC."

I suggested that this need to find extra income would be the way the competitive market will increasingly impact on, and shape the direction of, the ABC. Manne suggested between program advertising as a way to find that extra income:

" With a revised charter, requiring the ABC to maintain its independence from both government and business, and with a truly independent board, I do not see any reason why between-program advertising need compromise in any way any activity of the ABC."

Christopher Pyne has jumped on the bandwagon:

"...the ABC must find an additional revenue source, by introducing "between-program" advertising.The ABC cannot sustain its current reckless programming priorities unless it is prepared to find supplementary income.... Governments and government bodies are operating in a new paradigm. The days of funding largesse and blank chequebooks are long gone....Creating a new revenue stream would help the ABC face the reality that its appetite for government funds is greater than the Government's capacity to sate that appetite."

That is the Liberal Party response to the ABC cutting children's educational television programs in response to ongoing reduction in public funding. Cutting the Behind the News program has obviously touched a raw nerve: it has cut into its core programming responsibilities. Pyne talks about "The ABC's belly-aching", its "more esoteric programming", and the dumb downing" of the ABC is caused by the ABC management. And the headline refers to stopping Aunty's whingeing.

There is nothing here about the ABC being the watchdog of democracy or the media as the fourth estate. Its about the market. The purpose of the core responsiblities of the public broadcaster is neatly sidestepped by Christopher Pyne in his capacity as chairman of Federal Parliament's Communications Committee.

He evades a core issue: that big and important issues like the Howard Government's first pre-emptive war in Australian history should have been debated more thoroughly in Parliament; should have been covered more extensively and critically in the news media, and the options better presented to Australian citizens before our nation made such fateful choices. What we got was misleading Parliament and a weakening of the honesty check in the political system that gives Parliament a few teeth against a dominant executive.

The politics of this is pretty clear --discredit the ABC as a critical voice in the formation of public opinion. The politics is best expressed by Tapped:

"If a politician seeks to implement policies that he or she knows will have negative or unpopular consequences, it's important to discredit those institutions the public relies on for accurate, fair-minded assessments of how the policies will play out."

Of course, the claim that the ABC's AM program was accurate fairminded assessment of the Iraqi war is hotly contested. But it is the politics that is crucial as it is the main game.

Posted by Gary Sauer-Thompson at 09:13 AM | Comments (3) | TrackBack

August 11, 2003

Tim Blair watch

I mentioned here that the latest round in the ABC bias debate was pretty thin. I was working off a Crikey.comreport/notes on the speech that Tim Blair had given on the ABC at a recent Quadrant dinner.

Well Tim has published a version of the speech in The Australian. An appropriate place given for the article given the Murdoch line about the ABC's hissy fit:----ie., the ABC using "its budget cuts as a way of embarrassing the Howard Government, rather than as an opportunity to redefine its core tasks."

So what is Tim Blair saying? A couple of things. First we have the skirmishes, then the substance. I'll outline them and make a few comments. Consider this post to be a placeholder for the Tim.B. Liar blog to return from holiday.

The skirmishes have two fronts. Tim says that the standards of the independent quality broadcaster are slipping. The reason? The ABC went tabloid during the war with its over the top rhetoric about a humanitarian crisis in Iraq that never eventuated. And the ABC makes blunders in terms of factual errors as in its reports of the "looting" of the Baghdad museum.

It is a cheap shot. Take the humanitarian crisis. It did not happen. But the ABC was not alone in being concerned about such a crisis. The Pentagon was as well. It's postwar planning concentrated on dealing with a widespread humanitarian disaster, as well as massive oil fires and the use of weapons of mass destruction. They got it wrong too.

Secondly, there is the bias of Media Watch in pursuing media errors. It concentrates on right wing journalists, it lets left wing journalists off the hook and it does not pick up on the falling standards at the ABC.

Okay that is a problem with the balance of one programme. As I said it's a skirmish. The flaws of Media Watch stand for something bigger.

That leads us to the main line of attack. Tim says that:

"... the real limit at the ABC is its worldview, which places the Australian Democrats somewhere near the centre of the political spectrum, with both the ALP and the Coalition on the far Right and the Greens only slightly to the Left of mainstream...Persist with that view for long enough and you'll end up with the audience that you deserve."

At least this recognizes that the ABC is a participant in the culture wars, and not somehow standing above them being neutral and balanced.

So why should we citizens worry about the ABC's world view? Different media organizations have different world views and different politics. Tim says that:

"The danger for the ABC is that eventually, unless it does something about abundant biases and cultural narrowness, the debate over its future will creep beyond broadsheet opinion pages and into wider venues, as is happening with the BBC in Britain."

After this diagnosis of the ABC's affliction Tim offers a remedy:

"The response of the ABC....is simple and has been often stated. It must engage more with the mainstream and not reflexively vilify the large section of it that agrees with strong border protection, free market ideals, private education, the war on terror and our closeness to the US."

Funny that. I seemed to remember that all the fuss created by Senator Alston's claims about the anti-American bias against Linda Mottram on AM came about because that AM program did critically engage with conservative views in its coverage of the Iraqi war. Tim is recommending yet more engagement. More critical engagement by the ABC with the views of the conservative side of politics will draw more flak from the Howard Government.

Of course, critically engaging is not how Tim understands the ABC's role in the culture wars. He understands the ABC as "reflexively vilifying" the large section of the mainstream with conservative political views. That means engagement for him is giving expression to conservative and be neo-liberal views.

So, how do we achieve an ABC more to Tim's liking----an independent quality broadcaster? Tim implies that the free market will do the trick.

"The ABC's challenge is to somehow accomplish this [engagement with conservative part of the mainstream] without the guidance of market forces. It's like driving at night without any headlights. Since they're spending my money, I wish them luck".

How is unclear. What is clear is that you need headlights. Hence the deregulated, competitive market is the key. Though the article does accept the existence of an independent quality broadcaster, the missing word here is 'public'. So the implication is that the effect of market forces will ensure the privatisation of the ABC. Doing away with an independent quality public broadcaster is implied and is not made explicit. It is a minority/fringe position and not part of the conservative mainstream.

What is mainstream though, is the ongoing reduction in the public funding of the ABC and the public broadcaster being forced to find other income streams. As Robert Manne observes:

"...my political judgement [is] that there is no prospect that either the Coalition or Labor will substantially increase in the budgetary allocation to the ABC."

This is the way the competitive market will increasingly impact on the ABC. Whip the public broadcaster into shape through reducing public funding. Force the ABC to embrace the market. That will dampen down dissent.

Posted by Gary Sauer-Thompson at 11:38 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

August 08, 2003

it's oh so thin

Michael Keating puzzles me. I read his op. ed columns in The Australian and often wonder what I've read. What is the argument. Often I cannot work out what he is saying. His content seems to be as thin as a lot of Australian journalists.

This one is no different. Costello says:

'John Howard ... recognised he had to fight the "culture wars" and challenge Labor's interpretation of history if he was to establish his political ascendancy. Howard is winning that war. Indeed, his campaign against "political correctness" has turned into a rout of his opponents. One of the most successful parts of Howard's use and abuse of history was his statement that Labor, from 1996 onwards, was a policy-free zone, which had retreated on the core Hawke-Keating economic reform agenda. The media, by and large, bought this myth. It is still buying it.'

Costello then shows that the ALP is committed to a reform agenda to internationalise the Australia economy and creating an market order. It has even developed the new reform agenda devoted to research and development, education and training, and innovation.

Okay. So the media don't this. They are ensnarred in the myths spun by Howard's machine. And that's it.

So what is the problem?

It is this. Costello reduces the culture wars to economic reform and the market. There is very little here about civil society, the welfare state, culture, the media democracy or our cities. Nothing about sustainability--but that is to be expected from a neo-liberal who thinks that wealth creation is the end of government policy. There is nothing about the quality of public debate and discussionve rpublci policy, and no mention of citizens actively participate (beyond the simple act of voting) in the political life of the country.

In short, there is nothing about innovations in governance to improve the capacity to govern, even though governance is central to ongoing economic reform in a global world. Yet, as is pointed out by by Carmen Lawrence:

"The 'business of government' is very sick indeed....In Australia there appears to be a growing conviction that the fundamentals of the democratic contract have been corrupted."

She adds that:

"....most MPs are largely unable to influence the legislative or policy agenda except behind the closed doors of party rooms. Even then, there is often little room to manoeuvre because decisions have been made by the executives. Matters which deserve free and open consideration are often submerged because of anxiety about dissent. The media feeds this paranoia by portraying even the most minor disagreements as tests of leadership or signs of party disintegration. Indeed, the opportunities to speak openly are becoming more and more constrained."

Costello's reduction of the culture wars to economic reform and the market. that means that he sees reinventing government as making governments leaner and more efficient. What is ignored is the way the culture wars are also a conflict of future shaping--the way we shape the future. We can see that shaping the future is about if we ask, governance for what? For Costello the how of governance --the techniques to deliver productivity growth-----matter more than the what.

If you then ask what is the point of all this ongoing reform you hear stuff about creating jobs, raising the standard of living, wealth creation etc. Maybe ulitility is dropped in. But anything about an ethical life or vlaues is avoided, even shaping the future involves conflicts over values--wealth creation versus sustinability---whilst he valuies involved in libving happy lives is shunted off into the private life.

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August 04, 2003

ABC: the debate continues

The debate over the role of the ABC has nosedived with Crikey.com publishing the notes of Tim Blair's speech and an attack on Blair by an ABC insider.

From the material it is difficult to get much sense of Blair' speech. He seems to fire off shots all over the place. But he, along with the audience, want to break the public broadcaster up into parts. It was unclear whether Blair wanted to sell the ABC off, or just put into a box.

The ABC insider does not discuss the ideas---it's a personal attack on Blair for basically being a failed employee. So what? ABC insider finally concedes as much. The argument is that Blair is not a media expert. In fact he has little knowledge on any topic and away we go again in another personal attack.

Pretty poor show allround. The conservatives see the ABC as an integral part of the left-liberal intellectual hegemony of the recent past, and they are determined to use the culture wars to ensure the twilight of left-liberalism on issues such as republicanism, refugees and reconciliation.

Personal abuse indicates an incapacity to argue the case at a time when the ABC is forced to cut programs due to lack of public funding.

Posted by Gary Sauer-Thompson at 09:43 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

August 02, 2003

a note on Blair, Kelly & the BBC

In Australia the fallout in Britain over the Blair Government's justification for the Iraqi war is usually seen as a battle royal between the government and the BBC, with David Kelly cast in the role of the lonely whistle-blower, being seen as the fall guy. The murky waters of the Blair Government's management of the issue is overlooked:

Nicholson

The UK fallout is seen through the prism of what is happening in Australia between the Howard Government and the ABC. The conservative's charge that the objective values of journalistic integrity have been undermined by "reporters" (ie., commentators) furthering an ideological or a lefty political agenda. The problem is the lefty bias of the ABC. And Andrew Wilkie who spoke out.

Here is a different view from Airstrip One to make things more complex. Emmanual Goldstein says that:

"This is not really a battle between the BBC and the government, but a battle between some elements (how large we don't know) and the government.

The intelligence services were looking stupid because the dossiers that were supposedly based on their information was tosh, and they wanted the world to know who the real authors of these dossiers were. Tony Blair and Alastair Campbell were pretty high on the list."
It sure looks so judging from this report.

In Australia the intelligence agencies took the rap by saying that they slipped up in providing shonky information. They have been politicized along with the rest of the public service. The real concern in Australia is the unaccountable power of the ministerial advisors.

Emmanual's observations apply to Australia:

"The dossiers were a pile of tosh, and the fact that they were tosh was not because our intelligence services were hopeless but because our government lied to us, and our government lied to us not out of habit but out of a conscious desire to have an excuse to follow on the slipstream of a superpower."

Being good and loyal friends leads to dirty hands.

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July 30, 2003

yuk & apologies to Tim Blair

This guy cruised our local Adelaide Festival of Ideas a while back. The Sydney conservatives yelled and carried on. I wondered what all the fuss was about, and I had a bit of fun at Tim Blair's expense. I had never heard of George Monbiot. I gather that he is a columnist for The Guardian. So I read the article in The Age with interest-(its been downloaded from The Guardian)

It's trash. The main argument is this:

"...we must first grasp a reality that has seldom been discussed in print. The US is no longer just a nation. It is now a religion. Its soldiers have entered Iraq to liberate its people not only from their dictator, their oil and their sovereignty, but also from their darkness....So American soldiers are no longer merely terrestrial combatants; they have become missionaries. They are no longer simply killing enemies; they are casting out demons."

Well, the US is a Christian nation and its domestic political discourse under the Bush Administration is full of religious imagery. But the US is still a secular nation committed to liberal democracy. But we have more:

"... Like all those who send missionaries abroad, the high priests of America cannot conceive that the infidels might resist through their own free will; if they refuse to convert, it is the work of the devil, in his current guise as the former dictator of Iraq."

That reminds me of Anne Coulter. But as great as Anne is, she is still not America. Remember all those treasonous liberals she hates so passionately?

George makes short shift of secular democratic liberalism and free markets that shape the American way of life as he says that:

"..the Americans had now become the chosen people, with a divine duty to deliver the world to God's dominion... It is not just that the Americans are God's chosen people; America itself is now perceived as a divine project....The US no longer needs to call upon God; it is God, and those who go abroad to spread the light do so in the name of a celestial domain. The flag has become as sacred as the Bible; the name of the nation as holy as the name of God. The presidency is turning into a priesthood."

Ye gods. And there is lots more. We eventually get to the terminal point: the US is fascist ;ie., similiar to fascist Japan. And we end on:

"Those who seek to drag heaven down to earth are destined only to engineer a hell."

Eh? Did not the Iraqi regime under Saddam Hussein engineer a living hell for the Iraqi people.

And this is taken to be serious journalism. What has happened to The Age. I used to read it once. I read it less and less these days. Its a similiar experience to Norman Geras and The Guardian.

So Tim I can understand why you pointed the finger at George. It is looney tunes. Sure, even a form of new fundamentalism.

If we keep George in mind, then what Janet Albrechtsen says in her recent Sinners and fanatics article on the new fundamentalism makes sense:

"A new fundamentalism is stalking the Australian political landscape. Often couched in the language of religion, it is in fact deeply rooted in politics.

Its adherents, like all fundamentalists, keep their politics of hate simple. Rejecting nuance, ignoring the complex, they present us with the world according to them. If we disagree with them on issues such as Iraq, illegal immigration, a republic or indigenous affairs, our motives are impugned or, worse, we are evil, shameful, depraved. And because there are so many of us who disagree with them, they preach that Australia is an evil, shameful, depraved place."

After reading George Monbiot on why the US is a fascist state I just have to agree.

Posted by Gary Sauer-Thompson at 11:05 PM | Comments (7) | TrackBack

July 29, 2003

media wars

Webdiary has picked up this article by Jackie Ashley in Media Guardian that I had linked to here. Margo has juxtaposed the Guardian piece with this one from the Daily Telegraph.

The juxtaposition gives you the media wars: both a power conflict between government and public broadcaster and an attempt by the Murdoch Empire to kneecap the public broadcaster to make space for its expansion in the UK through owning television stations. Jackie Ashley decribes the media power play in the UK this way:

"This time, with the communications bill soon to become law - even as amended - Murdoch has a chance of getting into terrestrial British TV. If he was able to curb the BBC in its funding and its journalism, shoving it into a narrow little box, from which timid establishment- style reporting and dreary documentaries were all that trickled out, he would be in business."

Same in Australia. You can see this from the debates over the amendments to our media bill. The Bill aimed to extend the power of Murdoch and Packer, but was blocked by the Senate. It was a close call. The amendments are due to come back to the Senate for further consideration, and no doubt will be become part of the Howard Government's double dissolution trigger.

As Margo rightly points out, there is less media diversity in Australia, and it would get worse with the duopoly of Murdoch and Packer. She says:

"There are a large number of newspapers with different viewpoints and owners in the UK. There's only Fairfax in capital city Australia to balance Murdoch's dominance. Without an independent Fairfax, nothing like the Telegraph or Guardian pieces would ever be written in the mainstream press. As I keep repeating, the only real accountability is that different newspapers groups keep each other honest. With a partnership of Murdoch and Packer as owners, democracy is all over. Dismantling the ABC's role as independent, dynamic, courageous scrutineers of government would be too easy."

Hence the importance of the public broadcaster for democracy.. As Robert Sheer from the LA Times puts it, shooting the messenger---the public broadcaster-

"...is a denigration of the core ideal of representative democracy — rule by an enlightened public — as are vindictive attacks on journalistic watchdogs and whistle-blowers who keep our representatives honest."

Contrary to what Gerard Henderson claims, bias is not the issue here. Why doesn't the Howard Government acknowledge that the frightening claims made about Iraq amounted to little more than cherry-picked snippets from intelligence reports that generally regarded Iraq's threat to the world as modest and shrinking? Truth and bias is not the issue. Bias is the excuse, or the way to open a battle front through payback.

The strategic aim of payback is to cripple public broadcaster. Henderson is doing his bit iin the campaign.

Why is bias not the key issue? The answer is suggested by this article from the Wall Street Journal by Robert Bartley. He says that:

"I think we're coming to the end of the era of "objectivity" that has dominated journalism over this time. We need to define a new ethic that lends legitimacy to opinion, honestly disclosed and disciplined by some sense of propriety."

The old objectivity ethos has gone. It is not practised by Linda Mottram on the ABC's AM; nor by Andrew Bolt, Piers Ackerman or Fox News. we have entered the world of opinion journalism. As Bartley points out:

"... journalists can't have it both ways. Since they're increasingly dealing with subjective opinion, they should stop wearing "objectivity" on their sleeves."

And that applies to the ABC.

The neo-liberals have found the instrument to cripple the public broadcaster. It is either privatise the ABC or shove it into a narrow little box. This gives more room for Murdoch and Packer to acquire more media assets.

Ultimately, the power play can be seen as an attack on democracy. An enlightened public has got too noisy and uppity for the elites: they are questioning the elite's justification for war. So dissent and criticism need to be dampened down so the governing elites are not challenged or criticised in running the country their free market way.

Hence the media wars.

Posted by Gary Sauer-Thompson at 01:14 PM | Comments (6) | TrackBack

July 27, 2003

Polemics: conservative fallout

The comments that run through public opinion from the right wingers are in favour of privatising the ABC. This is the position that Tim Blair advocates. As one of the comments at Tim's site said:

"Everyone agrees the ABC should be privatised, but the problem is that most of its employees are so immune to criticism that they couldn't function in a free market. "

Everyone?
Presumably all those in the rightwinger camp was what was meant. By rightwingers here I mean those who think that the free market – as represents an ideal type. It is the highest form of capitalism. It is to be celebrated for its efficiency, for its technological dynamism, and even for its capacity to deliver full employment – all free from the dead hand of governmental regulation and control. Righties imagine that the United States is close to the ideal type. It is one of their favourite myths.

The rationale for this battle over the ABC in the culture wars is that, as the ABC as a public broadcaster is on the lefty side of politics, so it has to be taken out. There can be, and should be, no legitimate challenges to the political rule by conservatives from a public broadcaster funded out of general revenue.

Privatising the ABC will ensure this. For the righties the sooner it is done the better. A privatised ABC can then be as biased as it likes. Consumer choice is then used to provide the intellectual backbone for the free market case.

The thread running through the comments is that conservatives now rule. They enjoy their power, they will do everything to maintain that power and they get their kicks out of knee capping their opponents in the ABC. They enjoy hurting lefty ABC people in the culture wars. It's called partisan politics.

The public policy implication of this thread is that there no need for a public broadcaster to act as the watchdog for democracy, since democracy is the free market. Hence, there is no chance of public reason developing through actually comparing and contrasting the arguments of both sides and then coming to a judicious judgement. We just privatised opinions that cluster together in mutual protection societies.

The other implications are that ignorance and prejudice is bliss, and that the righties' prejudices about public broadcasting are in harmony with the considered opinions of middle Australia.

Well, here is a conservative dissenting from the above. Miranda Devine is defending the ABC. And she characterises Senator Alston's attacks on the ABC as nebulous nitpicking, lacking finesse and smacking of bully-boy overreach.

How Senator Alston must disappoint the road warriors of the right. He lacks the necessary courage and valour to be a war leader vanquishing his opponents.

May I suggest that all those readers of Tim Blair currently sweeping through public opinion go read Miranda. Go to read her guys---they're nearly all guys ---because Miranda talks sense for once. Instead of hunting for opinions and information that reinforce your prejudices you may even come across information that begins to question those prejudices. Why you may even start thinking about your myths.

Guys read Miranda because she is on your side. And did you know that ex Thaterites, such as Norman Tebbitt among others are coming out to support the BBC against Blair, even though they acknowledge that the BBC is a natural home of British Labourism?

Update
Heres another consideration about what to do with the ABC from John McVey:

"...the ABC should not be eliminated, just remove all the news, editorialising, pseudo-watchdoggery, 'educational' programs and entertainment nonsense, busting the organisation down to a strictly-facts-only-and-ALL-facts government-reporter dealing strictly with the goings-on of the various governments in our country. In this manner, the political and cultural bias rampant in the current ABC will be put to an end while retaining those elements of the ABC that are legitimate."

That's worthy of consideration.

Posted by Gary Sauer-Thompson at 12:06 PM | Comments (5) | TrackBack

July 25, 2003

Govt v Public Broadcaster

In the UK the Blair Government and the BBC continue to go hammer and tongs at one another over the way the Iraqi war was reported and commented upon. In Australia the Howard Government and the ABC are also in conflict. Both conflicts have the hallmarks of a war that involves the nature of public broadcasting.

Bargarz links to this article by Denis Boyles at National Review Online. It is worth a read for the detail and the links, but it is rather light on the big picture.

Bargarz's own take can be found here It is informed by Andrew Sullivan's claim that "the BBC decided to launch a propaganda campaign against the war against Saddam and to tarnish, if not bring down, the premiership of Tony Blair." More Sullivan here.

It's a while since I've read Sullivan. Re-reading him I can see that he defines the framework/perspective on current events for the Tim Blair's to work in. Other Australian accounts of ABC bias are Andrew Bolt and Piers Ackerman.

For the big picture on the Blair Government versus the BBC, try Jackie Ashley's article in the Media Guardian. The conflict is about power. The Blair Government wants to bring the BBC to heel. So does the Howard Government with the ABC. The public broadcaster's need to be kneecapped.

My sympathies lie with Jackie Ashley's account. Two points are made by her:

"The BBC's prime crime has not been sloppy reporting or an anti-war agenda. Its crime is to have pointed the finger at gaping holes in the government's case for going to war to disarm Iraq of weapons of mass destruction."

And:

"The BBC has done what good journalism ought to do: probing and questioning insistently - things that the government would rather not discuss. During the war it reported and commented about what was happening in the sand and cities of Iraq. It did not do what some US broadcasters - notably Fox - did, and act as a patriotic national cheerleader."

For a diferent tack see Jesse Walker's 'Beyond David and Goliath' over at Reasononline. She talks in terms of "a series of past conflicts that lend form to these dueling narratives."

From my perspective both the ABC and BBC have engaged in critical journalism in the form of commentary. These public broadcasters were acting as watchdogs for democracy and furthering the formation of public opinion. That watchdog role is why public broadcasting needs to de defended from those, such as Tim Blair, who want to privatise the ABC.

In Australia, it is Senator Alston who has launched the attack on the ABC.He has done so in terms of bias, by which he means that the ABC has failed to meet its charter of being balanced and impartial. What does balance and impartial mean here?

Some, including ABC Watch still understand it in terms of the old distinction between journalism as news and comment as editorials.(Nostalgia, July 13). However, the distinction between news and analysis on AM is generally agreed upon between the central antagonists in this debate.

Consider this exchange on the ABC's Media Report.Thus:

Catherine MCGrath: "News is the straight presentation of facts, without analysis, Current Affairs, typified by the ‘AM’ program, and indeed the ‘PM’ program, is there to analyse, to give listeners the broad view of information, to explain, to provide a context."

Senator Alston: "I don’t think I’d quarrel with anything of what you’ve said, Catherine, but what I would say is that none of that exempts the ABC from an obligation to be balanced and impartial in that coverage."

Alston is right. The ABC has that obligation as a public broadcaster. So what does balance and impartial mean? It is spelt out in this exchange on the ABC's Media Report. The topic under discussion is the possibility of Senator Alston laying a complaint about the ABC's bais in its commentary with the Australian Broadcasting Authority.

Mick O’Regan:... "So what we’re looking at here, and correct me if I’m wrong, obviously, is the degree to which in the opinion of the ABA, the Australian Broadcasting Corporation had met the conditions of its Charter, its obligations for the nature of comprehensive, balanced, unbiased reporting."

David Flint: "Yes, and I would assume that the core part of the code is this:

‘Every reasonable effort must be made to ensure that programs are balanced and impartial. The commitment to balance and impartiality requires that editorial staff present a wide range of perspectives, and not unduly favour one over the others, but it does not require them to be unquestioning, nor to give all sides of an issue the same amount of time.’

So there is a need to present a wide range of perspectives and not unduly favour one side of the other. Alston's charge is that the commentary worked from a particular perspective, one he calls anti-Americanism. Unlike many pro-many righter wingers he does not want pro-American bias. He wants balance and impartiality, which he assumes means having no perspective. The ABC should be above perspective.

How do you have no perspective? How do you stand outside being situated in a a particular way of looking at things without pretendign to be God? David Flint gives us a clue by mentioning what the Act says:

David Flint then goes on:

"And further on they say, and I think this is important to bear in mind:

‘Balance will be sought through the presentation as far as possible, of principal relevant viewpoints on matters of importance. This requirement may not always be reached within a single program or news bulletin, but will be achieved as soon as possible.’"

It is all about an interpretation of what is involved in the presentation of "principle relevant viewpoints" over a number of programs. The ABC is presenting the different relevant viewpoints but it is not doing so in a neutral way. It is making interpretations and judgments about the debate. Hence it situates itself as a participant in the public debate. The objection is that public broadcasters should not be a participant. That is what they mean by not having a perspective.

My own view is that the ABC"s perspective comes from its role as the watchdog of democracy.

Posted by Gary Sauer-Thompson at 12:59 AM | Comments (3) | TrackBack

July 24, 2003

trying to do a sneer

Until the PHP pathways code of public opinion are given a good reworking by an expert designer, postings will be limited. The front page will remain messy until then. I feel like this when confronted by rejigging snappily designed PHP include pathways.

This post is a bit of a roundup. It's also a bit self-reflexive. I'm trying to loosen up the dreary academic style I learnt in the taxpayer-funded university dominated by tenured radicals who think that Australia is a sewer of evil. I thought I'd do so by reading some of those conservative journalists who see journalism as a weapon in the culture wars.

I wanted to learn how to have fun on a weblog.

First up is Miranda Devine. She advises conservatives to ensure they have some attitude in dealing with the enemy. Don't write journalism just sneer. Tim Blair shows how it is done. Why sneer? It's all about revenge and sneering is the best way to get it.

Reading them reminds me of hagfish. You know, the ones whose face looks like their anus.

Just trying to do a sneer. Not that good eh?

But this is fun. It means that I don't have to do Tim Blair Watch (here and here) anymore.

So maybe I could learn a few tricks from this sneerer

You don't learn much sense I admit. This is a guy who thinks that building more dams is the solution to the water crisis. And he is not going giving to give up his lawn. But you can start writing lines like "Getting Melburnians to suck the juice of the pigface?"

Then I'd be able to do more than sneer. I would be able to swim upstream in urine just like the candiru catfish.

And this one could teach me the weapons of "ridicule, labelling and branding". You get the feeling he wants to eat your liver. And all I can come up with by way of a sneer is this.

Not good huh. To be honest I cannot do the sneer. I much prefer this style of journalism.

This is what happens when you try to copy a copy of a sneer. You start talking about frying the maggots.

But this one is my favourite by a long shot. Anne Coulter sets the pace. She has the looks, the fashion sense and the attitude. She sets the standard by which all the other bottomfeeders are measured.

Do you think I've managed to achieve a lighter tone? Even had a bit of fun?

Posted by Gary Sauer-Thompson at 09:16 PM | Comments (13) | TrackBack

July 19, 2003

nice to see some sense

In the Inquirer section of the Weekend Australian there is an article entitled The Vanishing by Bob Drogin (not online but obtainable at the New Republic Online (July 2003 but subscription only). It argues that Iraq probably did not have weapons of mass destruction at the time of the Iraqi war and that Hussein was bluffing because if he admitted that the UN containment had worked, it would have weakened his power in the region.

And check this as backup. (Link courtesy Tim Dunlop who has an extended discussion.

Nice of the Australian to run such material. But there is no acknowledgement that this undermines its own justifications for the war. That is too much too expect. But the circulation of such material it is the reason why Bush Blair and Howard talk about WMD programs these days. They cover the shift in position by pretending that they are saying the same thing prior to going war with Iraq. No honesty there either.

But The Australian has shifted further away from the Bush administation was absolutely right on everything.

An editorial on North Korea in the Weekend Australian (not online) acknowledges the rationality fo the Left vis-a-vis the Iraqi war. The editorial says that further to the left of the ALP:

'..we see the old habit returning: blame the Americans. Democrat's leader Andrew Bartlett says that Australia's participation in an interdiction force would only be "bowing to the US again". But wasn't the whole argument of the left against the war in Iraq that we should focus our resources on threats in the region?'

That is quite different to the standard 'appeasement and support Saddam' line that was run at the Left by the 'it's time for war now' crowd.

What The Australian does not say is that beating of drums of war with North Korea is not necessary either. Negoitations and diplomacy is a better way to go.

Whilst Australia and the US beat the drums of war on the domestic front (Howard, of course, talks a different language when he is visiting the Philippines, Japan and South Korea), it is China who is quietly doing the negotiating.

This acquiring a bit of sense does not apply to Christopher Pearson, Adelaide's homegrown neo-con, who favours pre-emptive intervention in foreign policy and the US acting as global cop keeping law and order. His column in The Australian (no link) is about one the ALP left for being critical of the US and the benefits accruing to Australia from being the deputy sheriff of the US. Pearson fails to address what pre-emptive intervention means for a North Korea that the ne-cons define as a rogue state posing a big threat to Australia's national security. Pearson evades the issue. He hides behind an attack on the ALP and boosting John Howard.

Posted by Gary Sauer-Thompson at 03:40 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

July 12, 2003

Tim Blair Watch

I see that Tim Blair says that "I’m fine with simply getting rid of a WMD-lusting dictator" in reference to Iraq. And in another post he says "Murdering lunatic deposed, people. This is a good thing."

Tim's foreign policy is pretty simple. Take out murdering lunatic, WMD-lusting dictators.

Well, Kim Jong-il in North Korea is one of these, as he has an extensive gulag system in place with its beatings, torture, hunger, slave labour and executions plus a reconstituted WMD program.

So lets go to war with North Korea. It is necessary.

How do we convince the Australian people to support another war? Easy.

Just talk about fearing a possible attack by North Korea, the need to boost regional security and developing the capability of missile interception that will give us the potential to engage in a broader missile defence.

Its a harsh and nasty world full of rogue states that threaten the Australian way of life. Lets take out the evil regime of North Korea in the name of freedom.

And while we are at it lets take out the Sydney Morning Herald.

And if China protests? No problems. Take them out as well. They are a threat to the USA as a Pacific power are they not? So Australia needs to step up and help defend the west coast to the USA. Thats what loyal allies are for. They stand firm when the going gets tough.

Posted by Gary Sauer-Thompson at 02:28 PM | Comments (9) | TrackBack

July 06, 2003

Conservative Commentary

I see that The Australian is now informing us about events in the US by downloading material from The Weekly Standard into the Weekend Inquiry.

There is no problem with introducing conservative commentary since the Australian variety is close to junk. And the Weekly Standard is one Washington's most influential political magazines for the politically obsessed inside and outside the Beltway.

If conservative commentary is going to be downloaded by the Murdoch corporation, and Australia becomes a cultural appendage of a conservative US culture that valorizes militarism, then how about some decent stuff?

Posted by Gary Sauer-Thompson at 01:25 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

July 03, 2003

Tim Blair watch

This is Tim on media diversity. Privatise the ABC. In his weekly column The Continuing Crisis in The Bulletin Tim says:

"Hot topic of the week: media diversity. Easy to see why, too; one Australian media organisation has media outlets in every state, plus additional networks that broadcast nationally. This Orwellian empire presents an almost complete lack of diversity. For the sake of Australian democracy, the ABC must be broken down and sold off."

Tim is not venting his spleen here. That is what his weblog is about. In this guise Tim is playing at being one of the avant garde. He is trying to provoke and shock us out of our complacency with public broadcasting.

Trouble is the arrows are directed at the Howard Government for not having the political courage to privatise the ABC. It does not stand enough for political principle. Too caught up in expediency.

Privatising the ABC would make for yet another double dissolution trigger would it not? It would help Howard to get the political edge over the ALP. Help to trap Labor.

Is that the politics of the media avant garde?

Posted by Gary Sauer-Thompson at 01:19 PM | Comments (1) | TrackBack

June 26, 2003

Senate does its job

So the Senate stood firm last night on Senator Harradine's amendment to Alston's Media Bill. In doing so they blocked the formation of two giant newspaper/television groups in Australia.

I missed the debate. I was at a seminar on urban renewal and development.

The Hansard record is here,( June 25, scroll down to p. 12175) Senator Bob Brown reads Paul Keating's witty and acerbic reply to Eric Beecher into Hansard after Crkey.com reported that the Sydney Morning Herald refuses to publish it. (p.12178).

The Senate rejected the Howard's Government's Media Bill because they judged that this legislation would have permitted a Rupert Murdoch and Kerry Packer snatch and grab that would give them overwhelmingly control of Australia's media. The Senate did so by voting in favour of Senator Harradine's amendment.

As Margo Kingston puts it that amendment:

"...was simple. No proprietor would be permitted to own a television station and a newspaper in a mainland capital city. Without that amendment, Rupert Murdoch could have bought a television network, adding to his dominance of our print media. Kerry Packer could have added Fairfax to his Nine Network. These men are the wealthiest, most powerful and most feared men in Australian life. Their power is so great that successive Prime Ministers have sought to curry favour with one or both of them in the hope that with their help they can retain government. It is very rare for either main party to reject their demands."

Why stand against Packer and Murdoch? Harradine states the case:

"...my position is not a secret. My entire approach to this issue has been guided by the importance of media diversity: preserving independent sources of news and information to meet community needs. The media is essential to the operation of democracy. Without a range of opinions through TV, radio, newspapers and other sources, it is hard to make an informed judgement about what is happening in government. An equitable system of media regulation would enhance the diversity of news services, ensuring that the market is more open so that new providers can provide other voices."

Harradine puts his finger on the issue:

"I can't accept that letting the big players make large cross-media purchases to form a combined newspaper and TV group is in the interests of the general public. It might be in the interests of media groups - but it's not in the interests of the broader community."

The tone of the debate was heated. Alston never addressed the issue raised by Harradine's amendment even though Alston has had it on his desk since March. He engaged in political polemic. All 4 Independent Senators stood firm. (p.1287)

So much for the Senate being a feather duster in relation to executive dominance or to the big media corporations standing behind the executive.

Posted by Gary Sauer-Thompson at 11:36 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

June 25, 2003

Senate Debate

I'm currently watching the Senate debate on media ownership. (Broadcasting Services Amendment [Media Ownership] Bill 2002). I also watched some of the earlier debate late last night over localism.

Currently, the Senate is going through the amendments to the Bill line by line.
It is hard to follow what is going on. We have amendments to the amendment, then withithdrawal of the amendment to the amendment, and then replaced it with another amendment to the amendment. And so on.

The ALP ---ie. Senator Sue McKay ---- is being negative. Their line is that it is flawed legislation. We will not support it. We will not support the amendments. But we reserve our right to change our strategy. They are not part of the debate. McKay reads her lines with humor.

The ALP position can be found here and here. The summary of Lindsay Tanner's speech states:

"In conclusion, this bill is bad for our democracy, it is bad for competition and it is bad for public debate. It will lead to the number of big media organisations in this country shrinking to three. I think that is almost certain. Ultimately, it may lead to a situation, if the government is able to privatise Telstra, where we have two totally dominant media organisations in this country. It is fundamental to the health of our democracy, to the strength of our public debate, to having informed public opinion and to ensuring that all citizens have the possibility of getting an airing to their views and to their interests that we have a diverse media ownership in this country. This government is restricting that. It is seeking to undermine it. It is simply seeking to fulfil pre-election promises that it made to a few of the major media proprietors. There is no evidence whatsoever that this legislation will have a significant positive impact in any regard other than on the share price of some of the major media companies. But it will lead to an outrageous concentration of power in our society in media ownership and a substantial reduction in diversity of media ownership and ultimately a substantial degradation of our democracy. I call on all senators from the minor parties to join Labor in defeating this bill when it hits the Senate."

The oppositional work on the floor is being done by Senators Shayne Murphy, Bob Brown, Meg Lees, Len Harris and John Cherry. No Senator Harradine.

Annable Crabb from The Age (no link) calls it the "maddening Dance of the Four Veils around the shaken and traumatised form of Communications Minister Richard Alston."

The tenor of the debate is one of trench warfare. Detail after detail is being fought over as if the whole world (public importance) depends on that detail. Senator Alston has little choice but to give ground---as little as possible though. This is hardly piling the pressure on the Senate to make them buckle under the strong will of a dominant executive. It is Alston on the back foot with his back to the wall fighting a hand to hand combat.

No media headlines there. What is a Canberra Press Gallery journalist going to do?

The debate has stopped. The Senate has moved onto matters of speeches on masters of public interest (MPI) then into the party political atmosphere of Question Time performances that are designed to make the headlines of the media.

Posted by Gary Sauer-Thompson at 12:52 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

June 23, 2003

media ownership and digital democracy

It is pretty clear that Senator Alston's proposed deregulatory reforms are in favour of the big media owners (Murdoch and Packer). The Bill is the Broadcast Services Amendment (Media Ownership) Bill 2002. The explanatory notes are here. The background briefing on media ownership in Australia can be found here. Second Reading speeches in the House of Representatives can be found here

It appears that this proposed deregulation is along similar lines to what is happening in the US, where the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) decided to relax limits on how media companies can merge and grow. That recent decision allowed individual companies to own television stations reaching nearly half the nation's viewers and combinations of newspapers and broadcast stations in the same city. It would appear that the Coalition is opposed to cross media ownership, has a lack of concern with alternatives regimes of regulation and is indifferent to long-term policy solutions. It is all about a quick fix.

And the opposition of Oz webloggers Ken Parish and Tim Dunlop and Senators John Cherry and Brian Harradine to Senator Alston's Media Ownership Bill is to block further deregulation to prevent the further concentration of media ownership in Australia.

What they rightly fear is this dystopian scenario. One company can own a town's local newspaper, TV and radio station. National TV networks can merge their news operations. There is no limit to the size of these media giants. In such a world we will only get one version of the news. Issues that matter can be more easily buried or distorted, and differing viewpoints will not be heard. Hence the defence and protection of localism, diversity and competition in the media.

Of course above scenario is a hypothethical----it is 'a what if'. Though it would never happen across the nation, it does highlight the importance of diversity of media for the healthy functioning of liberal democracy. A diversity of media allows a diversity of voices who can raise a diversity issues that matter to citizens in public. So diversity is a good thing for democracy. The lack of diversity means complacency as Scott Wickstein points out about Adelaide. Despite the new media diversity is lessening, and the cross media ownership rules are all that stand in the way of further media concentration.

The problem that I have with the Parish/Dunlop/Cherry/Harradine position is that it's basically a defence of the mid-1980s Hawke/Keating position. The status quo means that we end up with a de facto defence of hegemony of the old big corporate media regime of free-to-air television and newspapers. Better that than what would come next is the response. However, the defense is too negative. What needs to be asked is: 'What public interest is being served by the current laws?' Like their opponents no alternative regimes are considered and there is no long-term media policy.

We need to look broader because the deregulation of foreign ownership and cross media ownership restrictions is being made at a time of transition from the older media of TV and newspapers to the emerging broadband landscape. Julian Thomas observes that since the mid-1980s:

"...there has been the emergence of a whole new generation of cross-media interests outside the scope of the current rules. Considerable cross-ownership now exists both within new media and between new and old media....The stronger objection to the cross-media rules is that they do not extend to media forms that have emerged since 1987, such as subscription television, and they do not take account of the convergence of telecommunications, broadcasting and the Internet. This is true, and needs to be addressed through some changes to the existing system. So what should replace the cross-media rules, and when?"

There does seem to be a block to the emergence of new players that we could have had with the advent of digital TV and broadband. So why not shift to also thinking about democracy in terms of the newly forming digital landscape?

The Centre for Digital Democracy says that a democratic media policy is one that advocates for the following:

"...dozens of noncommercial, interactive digital cable and satellite channels for each community and the nation; there should be resources available to help harness the creative and civic vitality of nonprofits and others online; and education and community economic development should be in the foreground--not a mere afterthought--in building out digital networks."

This shift to a digital democracy strikes me as the positive way to go. It requires rethinking what we mean by diversity in the media and how to achieve it to ensure the public interest is meet. That requires new modes of new systems of regulatory governance to ensure both increased competition and greater diversity of media content and ownership.

Update

Here's a libertarian suggestion about what to do from Jack Robertson. Jack says:

"I fully support the removal of all media ownership controls in Australia, with the codicils that all defamation laws should also be scrapped and ABC funding significantly increased, the new levels being legislatively 'entrenched' in some way....I say open the floodgates. Let's all tough it out in the ideas marketplace. And may the global information meritocracy prevail."

Posted by Gary Sauer-Thompson at 01:17 PM | Comments (2) | TrackBack

cross-media ownership restrictions

This judgement by Eric Beecher from Text Media and The Reader is a good one. He says that:

"The curtain is coming down on Australia's era of cross-media ownership restrictions. Whether it happens this time around or within a few years, there is a sense of inevitability that the current laws limiting ownership of more than one media segment in a major market will disappear. Result: Australia's large media companies will get larger, and ownership of the country's media assets will fall into fewer hands."

This is probably what will happen, given that Senator Alston is basically fashioning broadcasting policy to fit in with the convenience of the media owners. Ken Parish helpfully spells out the way the concentration of ownership may worrk to the advantage of the owners. It is a process of:

"Packer buying Fairfax and Murdoch buying the Seven Network, thereby both controlling a newspaper and TV station (though not a radio station) in each capital city. Of course, Packer would only have newspapers in Sydney and Melbourne to start with, although there'd be nothing to prevent him from muscling into other markets as well (and Murdoch probably wouldn't try to stop him as long as they could carve it up between themselves). If that isn't a duopoly I don't know what you'd call it."

Thats the description of the concentration of media capital resulting from Senator Alston's deregulatory reforms. What then is the significance of the media duopoly for us?

Beecher says that that the 'opponents of these changes fear that greater media concentration will provide fewer media "voices" and therefore reduce the vibrancy of our democracy.' That has been the response of Ken Parish and Tim Dunlop. The appear to stand with Senator Brian Harradine in opposing any move by Kerry Packer and Rupert Murdoch to own television and newspaper assets in the same city.

Why keep the status quo?The standard answer is given by John Cherry of the Australian Democrats. This draws attention to the "importance of diversity of viewpoints in Australian media. Diversity, and fairness and accuracy in news reporting, is essential for our democracy to be effective and viable."

We can quibble with Cherry's account. Why news reporting rather than commentary?D on't we have enough news reporting? We need more interpretation of news reporting that spells out the significance of what is happening--as Ken Parish did-in his post -- and more policy work that spells out those alternatives or possibilities to the media duopoly that would enhance the functioning of liberal democracy.

What sort of diversity do we need? Is it reasonable to develop a diversity index as Cherry suggests? Is "editorial separation", (that is, the maintenance of separate newsrooms in the television station and the newspaper) a good idea? What about Cherry' suggestion of taking this further by requiring not just editorially separate newsrooms, but also that editorial control of one of the newsrooms be separated from the owner? Should we place a greater emphasis on digital technology than free-toair-televsion? Digital technology now makes it possible for Australia to have an a largere number of TV channels; an abundance of broadband websites; and the focused development of new public interest and educational services in communities across Australia? Should we be thinking in terms of digital democracy?

Eric Beecher then questions the democracy argument. He says that it:

"...is fine in theory, but the practical problem with that argument is that most of the media in Australia are not what you would describe as media with a political "voice". Commercial television, popular magazines and most commercial radio simply don't register on the Richter scale of political influence. How could they: they mainly run entertainment and music."

Beecher says that 'Media "influence" resides mainly in newspapers, on pages like this one. [Sydney Morning Herald]. That overlooks the crucial role played by John Laws and Alan Jones on talkback radio. Beecher's argument also overlooks the cultural diversity and the national identity argument and does not address the politics of culture (eg. the white picket fence

Beecher equates the media's political influence as the media being serious political propaganda tools. He then says:

"If you think that could happen, you misunderstand the reality of commercial TV, which is that it's a business based on ratings. In any case, as Australia's major media owners are all public companies, their overwhelming raison d'etre is financial success, not political influence."

Hardly. Political influence is less about propaganda and more about the shaping the political agenda so that the journalists, commentators and politicians working with the enframing of the issue. For example the consider the way law and order enframes the homeless as potential criminals.

Posted by Gary Sauer-Thompson at 11:09 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

June 21, 2003

Media Ownership: shooting from the hip

I read this by Ken Parish on the proposed changes in the bill on media ownership that has just come before the Senate.

Ken is in a bit of an irritable mood these days. He says:

"I wonder when the lefties are going to wake up and start focusing on this vital issue instead of carrying on with an interminable and largely pointless carping monologue about Iraq and WMD."

(The Iraq stuff is about accountability Ken, and the making sure the Senate does its job as a countervailing power to a dominant executive. Democracy Ken democracy.)

Well, I've been keeping a bit of an eye on this media business myself because it also has to do with democracy. Tim Blair, of course, only sees the media only in terms of the market not democracy. Tim Dunlop rightly picks him up on it. But he reads the negotiations around Alston's legislation as bad news with only The Sphinx standing firm. This article in the Sydney Morning Herald by Geoff Kitney seems to be what Ken and Tim are working off. Farifax is runnning hard on the issue.

However, I thought that Ken's post was over the top. Mind you, I have another bout of the flu, so I'm not seeing things straight and my mind goes blank every now and again. So Ken's post could be just the public mask worn by Ken --you know stirring things up etc. by being outrageous. But then again it is a text that has its own autonomy irrespective of the author. The author's intentions are irrelevent. Its the text that matters.

So what does the text say? The key issue in the media ownership debate is nailed by Ken:

'...this should not be seen as a left-right issue. Freedom of speech and diversity of viewpoint are core liberal-democratic values irrespective of one's views on social democracy versus "market forces"'.

Well said. It is somemthing that those reductionists who assume that Australia is just the free market, then write about society and politics in liberal democracy, are blind to. They have no conception of civil society or deliberative democracy.

It was this paragraph in Ken's text that struck me:

"Communications Minister Richard Alston is on the verge of clinching a deal with the 4 Independent Senators which would see the effective abolition of Australia's current foreign and cross-media ownership laws, albeit with some minor concessions to the Independents which sound on their face to be almost meaningless."

Almost meaningless? Let us turn to a journalist who keeps a close on the political happenings in Canberra, is respected by the politicians, works hard and is in daily contact with the independents. That's Michelle Grattan. Not the headline of her text---Alston's media dream hits Senate reality. That is a very different interpretation to Ken's.

Michelle says about the substance of the demands made by the quartet of Indepndent Senators:

"The Government has already agreed to insert stronger local news content rules for regional TV broadcasters, and to extend to all markets a prohibition on owning a TV licence, a radio licence and a newspaper in one market. Under discussion is a demand for a specific amendment to ensure no one newspaper proprietor can have more than one metropolitan paper in one capital city."

Now that means something in Adelaide. It means that Channel 7 10 and 9 must have local news content rather than running news out of Melbourne with one regional story for local colouring. Giving our federal democracy a hand I would have thought.

And the extension of the prohibition bit ensures regional diversity in places like Eyre Peninsula, the Riverland or Mt Gambier. Regionalism is important in a globalised world---as Ken well knows being in Darwin.

And the specific amendment to ensure no one newspaper proprietor can have more than one metropolitan paper in one capital city? Well Ken, that means that in one newspaper towns, such as Adelaide, there is a future protection for a second newspaper starting up. As you accurately observe:

"The cost of media technology and the ability of large media proprietors to achieve economies of scale by leveraging content across a wide range of media formats mean that this is an industry with huge entry barriers and therefore extremely susceptible to monopoly (or duopoly) control."

So why do all the hard yards only to have Murdockh come and gobble you up? That little amendment prevents Murdoch from taking over the startups once they are up and running. It actually fosters competition and protects cmedia diversity.

In the light of these diversity considerations that foster regional democracy Ken's judgement, that:

"Scrapping of the existing rules would almost certainly mean that all electronic and print media would rapidly become completely dominated by just 2 major players: Packer and Murdoch"

is too one sided an interpretation. Ken's text implies that the Senate is buckling under the demands of a dominant executive to "deregulate media ownership almost completely," rather than using its power to enhance media diversity.

And that is not all. Ken's a'lmost meaningless' remark is misleading in relation to the ABC. Ken rightly says:

"In this context, the ongoing campaign to abolish or "gut" the ABC by the Tories and their pundit and blogosphere apologists takes on a particularly sinister tone. This situation exposes the neo-liberal "invisible hand" of the market mantra for the pernicious nonsense it is."

So what are the quartet of Independent Senators doing? Lets turn to Michelle Grattan who says that some of what Senator Lees wants for the ABC must stick in the Alston craw.

'She insists the national broadcaster has to get more money. "If Alston won't deal on the ABC, there'll be no deal," Lees said. "If the minister is not prepared to acknowledge the need for extra ABC funding we won't be proceeding."

She wants not only the extension of ABC news radio's coverage from about 70 per cent to more than 90 per cent of the country - which Alston is thought likely to give - but also extra funding so the ABC can restart its transmission from Townsville, where its station is mothballed, and can restore and extend its digital multichannelling, in particular resurrecting ABC Kids and Fly TV.'

Sounds like trying to defend the public broadcaster to me. That doesn't strike me as "almost meaningless."

Posted by Gary Sauer-Thompson at 02:25 PM | Comments (13) | TrackBack

June 19, 2003

More myths in the culture wars

Here is another example of the distortions being deployed by right wing journalists in public debate. It is Greg Sheridan this time. The distortion is fast becoming a standard line. It is being recycled with a straight face. However, you would think that they would lift their game to avoid being seen as mediocre, shallow or a joke. Or maybe the crude distortion is a tactic of spitting in the eye of the educated public.

Sheridan makes a general point about the (presumably Australian) left as an ideological movement:

"...the construction of certain defining myths that determine the orthodox interpretation of key events is a critical task....In this way the Left, which normally loses the election, can win the symbols. This process has the incidental result of making our history perpetually disgruntled, as actions overwhelmingly approved at the time are later interpreted as dishonourable."

Well, yes. Culture is important. It is about making sense of something through interpreting various historical events from our particular situated perspectives. History is contested.

Sheridan then illustrates his symbol claim with the war on Iraq:

"In the aftermath of the Iraq war, we can see this process unfolding. Our troops performed magnificently in a just cause, liberating 25 million people from a murderous dictator, ending his program of weapons of mass destruction and enhancing our prestige.

But that's not going to be the commentariat's orthodoxy. Two myths are being constructed. One is that Saddam Hussein never had weapons of mass destruction. The other is that our participation in the war damaged our standing in Asia."

Take a moment to read that again. Therein lies the distortion. The left is saying that Saddam Hussein never had weapons of mass destruction. Goodness me. This is beyond shallow and mediocre. What we have is a figment of Sheridan's feverish imagination.

The left (who is this monolith?) never denied that the Iraqi regime possessed weapons of mass destruction. That is a straw dog created by Sheridan. The various voices on the left pretty much supported the UN and accepted the judgements of Hans Blix. Blix maintained that the Iraqi regime had maintained an active chemical and biological weapons program up to 1998 (when the UN inspectors left Iraq); and that it probably continued it thereafter. We can add that the WMD's are probably in Syria.

Having created his straw dog Sheridan then proceeds to destroy it with much gusto. So it is Greg who is creating the myths rather than engaging in public debate.

Now notice the reason Greg gives for invading Iraq. It was a just cause as it was about liberating 25 million people from a murderous dictator. But the neo-cons threw out the just war theory, and the Howard Government only used the liberation argument after the war began. It gave them a moral omph and it played better in the persuasion of public opinion stakes. But it was a post war justification for going to war. See John Howard's Speech to the National Club.

Sheridan's strategy marks a failure to engage with what is being said: that the evidence publicly presented about the existence of Iraq's weapons of mass destruction did not justify going to war. Iraq was not the imminent threat that it was made out to be. The prime reason for going to war were geo-political considerations, which were not laid out before the public. As Hugh White says:

"my unease.... arises from the fact that all the talk of WMDs was anyway much less central to the coalition's reasons for invading Iraq than they made out at the time. It was evident a year ago that Iraq's WMDs were at most a secondary reason for regime change in Iraq. So was the destruction of Saddam's admittedly dreadful dictatorship. America's primary reason was much more ambitious: to turn Iraq into an American strategic asset, and a starting point for the democratisation of the Arab and Islamic worlds."

And Australia and Britain tagged along as good allies doing what they needed to do to remain the good friends of America.

So why cannot a journalist like Sheridan put these reasons on the table? Why does he engage in cover up and deceit instead of openly discussing the geopolitical considerations? Why does he not address the accountibility issue of the executive misusing the intelligence information on Iraq's weapons of mass destruction? This is hardly whingeing as Catallaxy Files suggests. It is, as the editorial in Australian Financial Review(subscription required, 19 6 2003, p.62) suggests, allowing Parliament to play its proper role of making the executive properly accountable to the Parliament. That is a suitable role for the Senate---acting as a counterweight to a powerful executuive government.

By not addressing these issues Greg is not participating in a rhetorically informed debate as is Huge White, who provides good reasons for why Howard used the arguments he did. He thought they were the best ones to persuade public opinion and probably thought they had some truth content. But persuasion was the name of the game, and Howard has a track record of pulling the wool of people's eyes when it suits him. (eg., the Tampa affair).

Sheridan, in contrast to White, is engaged in mass deception whilst pretending to be informed and knowledgeable. The commitment to the professional standards of journalism--objectivity and truth-- has been tossed overboard by this warrior in the culture wars. This journalist sees himself as engaged in a battle in the culture wars that has to be won.

Sheridan's text is also a poor use of rhetoric, which is form of effective writing that aims to persuade readers to adopt a point of view. Sheridan's understanding of rhetoric is that it is a form of deception. Deception at this level is not an effective way to persuade public opinion. Hence it is probably spitting in the eye of the educated public reader. If not, then it is simply spinning for the Coalition.

Posted by Gary Sauer-Thompson at 01:29 PM | Comments (1) | TrackBack

June 18, 2003

the poverty of journalism

This piece by Charles Krauthammer, from The Washington Post, is pretty bad piece of work. It is a section of a text that has been downloaded into The Australian from the column's full text in The Washington Post.

Krauthammer starts by acknowledging the problem and then rejects the criticism:

"The inability to find the weapons (in Iraq) is indeed troubling, but only because it means that the weapons remain unaccounted for and might be in the wrong hands. The idea that our inability to thus far find the weapons proves that the threat was phony and hyped is simply false."

He then spells out that it was widely accepted that Iraq had chemical and biological weapons (no nuclear) then concludes:

"The weapons-hyping charge is . . . a way for opponents of the war – deeply embarrassed by the mass graves, torture chambers and grotesque palaces discovered after the war – to change the subject and relieve themselves
of the shame of having opposed the liberation of 25 million people."

This is revisionism. It fails to address the issue of threat posed to the national security of the US, the UK and Australia by Iraq's WMD. We went to war because containment did not work, and we could not wait for the UN inspectors to do their work due to the threat being serious and imminent. It was the imminency of the threat to national security that was the key. But this is what is being glossed over.

The critics are not saying that the threat was phony. The threat was "hyped" to the extent that it was not supported by the evidence about the capacity of Iraqi delivery systems to deliver WMD or about the substantive links to Al Quaida.

Saying that the Iraqi regime had WMD's (that was agreed by all) does not establish the seriousness or the imminency of the threat to the national security of the above three nation-states. The issue is that it appears clear that it that Saddam Hussein's regime did not represent a 'clear and serious threat' to the national security of the US, the UK or Australia. To say otherwise without the evidence to back it up is to engage in deception.

William Shawcross is outraged by this line of criticism. He too neatly dodges the imminent threat issue. But at least he has the honesty to address the geopolitical situation in the Middle East by connecting the war with Iraq to the defence of Israel. But no mention of empire.

Krauthammer's text is threadbare. It is using journalism as a sledgehammer. By publishing it The Australian undercuts its own creditabilty. Polemics replaces journalism. The Australian is doing what it did during the war: refusing to engage with the arguments of its opponents.

Posted by Gary Sauer-Thompson at 12:55 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

June 12, 2003

says it all

I could not agree more. This rightly fingers the press.

Sections of the media have allowed themselves to become conduits for government spin. The journalists are either on the drip feed or they are content to recycle media releases. Either way they become publicity agents for particular politicians. The feeding is all carefully planned and organized.

And as the article says:

"Their market-driven editors are complicit, ready to hype what is often little more than tendentious hearsay in order to present front-page scoops."

Its shows how far some journalists have gone dumped their responsibilities to democracy.

Posted by Gary Sauer-Thompson at 11:59 AM | Comments (3) | TrackBack

June 09, 2003

shuffling away from the Reithian past

The traditional ethos of the ABC has been a paternalistic Reithian one. It was paternalistic, culturally conservative and suspicious of popular culture. The ABC, as a public broadcaster, was envisioned by the liberal state as an instrument to govern the unruly working class and achieve the social cohesion of the nation.

The paternal ethos was undermined from within by the current affairs ethos that criticised conservative politicians, a conservative political culture and its public policies of This Day Tonight. Commentary in an ironic mode, not objectivity, was the top priority of This Day Tonight and it was clearly linked to public education in a liberal democracy. This Day Tonight informed, educated and entertained citizens (the Reithian ethos) and it framed its media activities within the context of the public interest of liberal democracy. The ABC's AM program of today has its roots in the political journalism of the old ABC This Day Tonight (1967-78) program. The story selection of AM, like that of the ABC's 7.30 Report and Lateline, is closely connected to the daily news agenda and it involves both a fleshing out and an influencing of the news the next day.
This critical public service broadcasting ethos is quite different from that of commercial current affairs program, which selects stories on their intrinsic audience appeal and then constructs a story around them. These stories are infotainment dressed up in the form of public interest journalism (eg., the props of reporter, the two sides to every story, challenging interviews etc.) within the format of a current affairs program.

What we have buried within the accusations of bias of AM (ie., taking a point of view) is that public figures (primarily politicians) use the ABC's formal commitment to objectivity to hamstring commentary designed to make the politicians publicly accountable. The history of current affairs journalism from This Day Tonight to AM today has been one of ABC management needing to placate their political masters, who more often than not engage in direct political attack (eg., that of Senator Alston is just the latest episode). And a whole public relations industry (spin) has now been constructed to help governments negate the public influence of critical public affairs journalism. But the ABC has become more and more defensive and embattled with respect to its criticism of public figures and policies, rather than taking the full-frontal attack on by defending its capacity for critical commentary.

Given the audience success of infotainment and political analysis being limited to a 30 second grab on national news, substantive political debate is now seen as minority taste. But it is also the case that a genuinely critical form of current affairs is not in the interests of the ABC nor the corporate commercials; and so we have a retreat from away from the combative ethos of This Day Tonight and its democratic function. That democratic function is no longer seen as primary consideration in an increasingly deregulated media market. The discussion of ideas by the fourth estate in relation to democracy is now dismissed as the chattering of the left liberal elites.

The general point of view is now one of consumers, product, choice and user pays ----not the informed political discussions of the conservative politics that currently shape our lives. This reflects the push for a new level of commercial penetration, with a minimum of restriction on the free play of market forces based on the assumption that commercial competition is the surest guide to quality. The free market case is currently packaged as widening the consumer's choice, promoting diversity and initiative, and taking power from stuffy government bureaucrats and transferring it to the consumer.

Do we have a post-Reithian public broadcasting in Australia? Is public broadcasting worth defending? If so how can it be defended? It is being made by government ministers in Britain in terms of public broadcasting being a public good that cannot be supplied by market institutions alone.

Update

Some interesting remarks on media bias can be found Oxblog. David Adesnik, in addressing the impact on the audience of media bias, says:

"Until recently, scholars presumed that the average citizens was simply so prejudiced and closed-minded that he or she reached his opinions in the absence of information. With the aid of the online paradigm, however, one can understand how the average citizens forms opinions without devoting a tremendous amount of memory to political information storage."

We can add to this. Citizens start from their prejudices, form opinions from listening to the national conversation in the media then form their judgements about the players and the issues. The media, therefore, have a crucial role in keeping the public conversation going in a federal democracy.

Posted by Gary Sauer-Thompson at 01:06 PM | Comments (12) | TrackBack

June 07, 2003

a joke

This editorial in The Australian should be read as a joke. If it is not a joke then its revisionism with a macabre touch give the way The Australian supported the neo-con view that America's military force should use its power early and often to advance its own interests and values.

The editorial starts off well enough.

"WHERE are Iraq's weapons of mass destruction? It is a fair question – and one that this newspaper, in common with many people, both supporters and opponents of the war – would like answered. The Australian supported military action against Iraqi president Saddam Hussein because we believed he was a dangerous dictator, "addicted" as former UN chief arms inspector Richard Butler puts it, "to weapons of mass destruction......But given the vehemence with which the governments of the US and Britain assured us all of the horrors in Saddam's armoury, they must either produce evidence the weapons existed or explain why they cannot."

What has happened to the Howard Government? Did it not too assure The Australian? Or does The Australian mean to imply that the Howard Government was just a camp follower?

Is there not some revisionism here? The Australian acted as the media extension of the military machine through the war. They had no doubts then. Those who doubted were fools and idiots; anti-American appeasers who sided with an oppressive Iraqi regime.

They were acting to shape public opinion. Is there anything wrong with that? Consider the classic strategy propaganda for shaping public opinion so that it is favourable to war. The Government tells the public that they are under attack and then denounces the pacificist for lack of patriotism and exposing the country to danger.

Did not The Australian play its part in this campaign by stating that the threat posed by Saddam Hussein was linked to a the imminent attack by international terrorists using (unspecificed) weapons of mass destruction.

It is a classic strategy because you can just write communits for terrorist. The Australian acted to help frighten the electorate, and then it supported the national security state's line that there was no need to worry because a small but strong government would protect them.

Very little questioning on behalf of democracy there in the name of liberal values. Now consider this paragraph from the The Australian's editorial:

"But democracies are based on trust, and the governments of Britain, the US and Australia must demonstrate they had good reason to believe the intelligence reports circulated before the war. It is not a question of explaining why weapons of mass destruction have yet to be found, but of showing us that the three governments had compelling reasons to reasonably fear they existed before the shooting started."

None of the quality press beat the war drum more than The Australian did. It was loud.It was part of the war party. None denigrated the opponents of war with Iraq more than The Australian. They were mean in their distortions. None failed in their job of questioning the Howard Government's spin more than The Australian. They dumped their responsibility to democracy overboard. None refused to engage with the arguments of the critics of the Bush Administration more than The Australian. Their charges of appeaser welded like a sledgehammer acted to undermine the trust of the public sphere.

And now The Australian talks about trust and democracy and it implies that it is acting a watchdog defending democracy. Should not The Australian be looking at its own actions, considering the way it undermined democracy through cultivating an atmosphere of hostility, fear and suspicion.

Update

Here is an article that addresses how difficult it is for media organizations to admit they are wrong and to correct their mistakes. Most of the Australian media organizations deny they have a problem or that they are accountable to the public.

And Alexander Cockburn writes:

"Intelligence services invariably succumb in the face of political bullying. But it didn't matter that the CIA and DIA were cowed by the wild men in Rumsfeld's Department of Defense, who said Iraq was still bristling with WMDs. Any enterprising news editor could have found (and some did) plenty of solid evidence to support the claim that Saddam had destroyed his WMDs, that he had no alliance with Al Qaeda."

But they didn't at The Australian. Instead they, to paraphrase Cockburn, "delightedly hyped shoddy journalism that played a far greater role in the [Canberra] propaganda blitz than the bullying of the CIA and DIA." And they will not be called to account, nor will they apologize to public opinion. The Australian remains one of the hounds of war.

Posted by Gary Sauer-Thompson at 11:25 AM | Comments (11) | TrackBack

a misguided boy

This guy has lost it. Mandela's life was devoted to making South Africa a more, free just and equal place. Rivkin has devoted his life to Rivkin. He celebrates the ethos of the market not that of the public good.

Evoking Mandela indicates that Rivkin has little understanding of life outside the horizons of the market.

Posted by Gary Sauer-Thompson at 11:11 AM | Comments (7) | TrackBack

June 05, 2003

Cracking the whip

One of the more interesting threads running through the comments of the previous post is the one about censorship. This thread says that the left want to censor the right wing media to curb their political bias. You know muzzle them with a bit of good old-fashioned state censorship.

The spectre of totalitarianism and the end of freedom is the script. Oh I know. its melodramatic. But you do hear the echos of the Cold War resounding around the Internet. And you hear the sounds of the cogs of the spin machine grinding as the media spinners crank up the creaky machinery for another run of an old script.

Censorship? It's a pretty tired old image that is being re-run. It hasn't got much in the way of legs. to be able to shape perceptions. The reality is that the journalists in the highly competitive environment of the corporate media censor themselves. They know that dissent does not boost their careers. They know the rewards for going along to get along and they know that is the game that they have to play.

They know the hazards of failing to toe the line especially during a war. If they---I have in mind the liberal journalists---dissent, then they will be necklaced with lack of patriotism, anti-Americanism and unAustralian.

It is the fear that keeps them from asking the tough questions. So they self-censor. They know that a lot of the key information was filtered out during the war by the government. But they stay silent.

And they are staying silent as the Howard Government lines up the ABC AM program for bias. There is no defence of a questioning media that sees its job to ask the tough questions. There is no defence of the media as the Fourth Estate questioning the official pronouncements of Canberra that are shaped by media spinners.

They cannot can they? Most of their copy is recycling media releases and drip feeds in the name of a functional professionalism saturated with corporate sensibilities.

The image that comes to mind is an old one. It is from George Orwell. Some journalists are like the circus dogs that jump when the trainer cracks the whip. Others, the well trained ones, do what is required---turn the necessary somersaults---when there is no whip. These journalists do not wander far.

The left are into state censorship of the media? Nah. No chance. No need. Murdoch and Packer have done the job already. And they have done it so well. Their journalists know how they have to shape political perceptions whilst writing in an irony free zone.

And you know what? The media lap dogs have yet to realize that they've been had. The Howard Government went along with Washington and London. All three wanted the war. So they glossed up the intelligence reports and ensured that the contrary stuff went sideways. Just like Tampa.

Has the Australian media drawn the implication. That saying Saddam Hussein posed an imminent threat to Australia's national security is another example of misrepresentation and deception ---just like Tampa. And the lap dogs? Well by saying that Saddam Hussein did pose such a threat they are saying that night is day and day is night.

And they have been self-censoring themselves for so long that they just shrug when someone points out their somersaults. They whip themselves.

If you think I'm over the top, why Paul Krugman is saying it about the Americans.

Posted by Gary Sauer-Thompson at 08:32 PM | Comments (8) | TrackBack

Cracks in the mirror

The debate on the bias of the ABC's AM program continues to splutter along. Yesterday Gerald Stone, an SBS board member, a former executive producer of 60 Minutes and former editor of The Bulletin, weighed in. He understands how the media enframes an issue and the bias of the media, and he knows the specific techniques that the media deploys to persuade its audience.

So it is worth while having a closer look at the case he is arguing. Stone says:

"I noted at least 20 instances where, as an ABC news executive, I would have called AM staff members to task for making smug and gratuitous comments blatant enough to bring the program's impartiality into question.That's apart from the issue of what tone of voice they may have used in delivering some of the suspect lines. Inflection or facial expression can be crucial in determining the degree of bias within the electronic media."

Well, we all know that happens. It happens on all the media. Its called rhetoric and it is aimed to appeal to the emotions of the audience to make a case. Lets grant that some of Linda Mottram's rhetoric was badly done in that the quality of her rhetoric was missing on some occcasions. The rhetoric was not as polished as that we see on 60 Minutes.

We move on because the quality of the rhetoric is not what all the fuss is about. Its media bias or the politics of media texts.

Stone does address the core issue. Stone calls it media bias by which he means "reporters using subtle journalistic techniques to push their viewpoints, regardless of the facts." He then usefully lists these techniques:

'What are some of these techniques? Ironically, though biased reporting is notoriously hard to prove, many of its warning signs are easy for the listener or viewer to spot. Here are just a few.  Beware of any report that begins with a value judgement before the fact: "The Government suffered a major setback today when the Prime Minister announced ..."  Beware of inference-packed words like "admitted", "conceded", "claimed" when "said" is sufficient.  Beware of the use of "but" to link a seemingly positive development with a less favourable one that invariably seems to put it in doubt. For example, an announcement of a drop in unemployment followed by the spoiler: "But unions warn of unrest, etc."

Most of all, beware of coverage that continually takes a given fact and immediately overshadows it by raising grave doubts about where it might possibly lead in the future. That was the most frequent "offence" to feature in Alston's litany of complaints."Now that the US has conquered the Iraqi regime, who and where next?" Mottram gloomily asked her listeners.'

This is interesting and informed commentary. What it indicates is the model of journalism that Stone thinks should be done in political commentary programs such as AM. AM is not the news. It is commentary on the news. Note Stone's rejection of using words such as "admitted", "conceded", "claimed" in favour of "said". Linda Mottram is being highly reflexive here as she is drawing the audience's attention to the arguments of those whose position she disagrees with. This is an acknowledgement of the arguments of opponents that is rarely, if ever, made by the Miranda Devines, the shock jocks on talk back radio or the Tim Blairs They mock, scorn and ridicule their opponents rather than engage with their arguments.

Stone is saying that Mottram should report that Downer said X about weapons of mass destruction ie., she is reporting a fact. She should not draw attention to Downer making an argument, responding to arguments made by others, or the plausibility of the argument. Stone then reduces Mottram's work within a rhetorical model of journalism to perpetual sneers and dripping sarcasm.

Yet arguments are being made all the time in the public sphere in which the ABC is located, and the ABC deploys the techniques of rhetoric just like all the other media and political players. The public conversation in the public policy, media and parliamentary is rhetorically based. You have to have these skills to be able to be heard---as Stone well knows.

Stone is saying that AM should not engage in rhetoric and its presenters should not make judgements about the persuasiveness of the arguments of others. It should work with a model of recording the facts. Why? Because he is working with a naive model of realism in which words mirror facts. Stone assumes that the world is as it appears to be, and that it is possible to make bias-free value-free descriptions of the world that are accurate and realistic. If the world is objectively describable, then the journalist's ethical and professional responsibility is to become as transparent as possible so as to allow the reality of the situation to predominate.

What is most suprising is that Stone does not acknowledge the cracks in the mirror given his extensive of how media orgnizations work. The naive realist model was discarded by media organizations long ago, as Stone well knows. He would never have survived as executive producer of 60 Minutes if he had operated that program within the confines of the mirror model.

Nor does Stone argue why AM should adopt the naive mirror model of journalism when he clearly knows that it no longer fits the actual on-the-ground media practices. So why impose it on AM and not 60 Minutes?

Answering that question leads us to the politics of the media, which is what the current debate is really about.

Posted by Gary Sauer-Thompson at 10:32 AM | Comments (19) | TrackBack

June 02, 2003

cultural & media politics

Judging by all the kerfuffle of late, the ABC as a public broadcaster is a big political concern for the Howard Government. It has been subject to a number of attacks over the years ranging from it being run by left wing staff, to political bias, to suggestions about the need to get rid of (privatising) the public broadcaster.

You get the distinct impression that the notion of government ownership of media (public broadcasting) went out with the passing of Pravda and the fall of the Soviet Union. A national broadcaster is no longer needed says Ross Cameron, a Liberal MP for Parramatta in Sydney's west.

Robert Manne gives a postcard history of the recent conservative attacks on the ABC as a public broadcaster here. An interpretation of this history would suggest that it is part of a broad-based political attack on public ownership, government control and public broadcasting. The new market discourse can be construed as liberating journalists from the shackles of government funding, government control and the trade unions. The aim of fighting the cultural war is to undermine the idea of the public in the realm of public policy.

Tim Blair disappoints on this. Its just a question of plagarism he quips. More is involved than this. And Tim knows it.

In his latest intervention Senator Alston, the Minister for Communications, defends this political campaign here by saying that "the right of any individual to publicly criticise a taxpayer-funded institution is surely a fundamental tenet of a democracy."

That is not the issue at all. Of course Senator Alston has a right to criticize. Just like any citizen in liberal democracy. The current core issue is the left-of-centre bias of the current affairs programs, such as AM. The Minister misleads here. He says:

"But under the ABC Act and its own statutory editorial charter, the ABC is required to report accurately and impartially. This surely requires any analysis to be based on the evidence, and should not be a licence to inject personal opinions unsupported by evidence."

"Inject personal opinions unsupported by evidence" is not the issue here. It is the left-liberal cultural bias through which particular political events are intepreted that is the core of the Howard Government's complaint. Michelle Grattan has a good contextual criticism of the Senator Alston's own example of bias.

Now Senator Alston knows that the core issue is one of political bias all too well. He actually quotes the following account of the mechanisms of the deployment of bias in the ABC from a former senior ABC insider. This says:

"....the constant and ongoing use of value-laden language and loaded questions to shape perceptions. Bias also appears in those stories that are chosen for broadcast and those that are not; the people who are chosen for interview and those who are not; the facts that are highlighted and those that are downplayed or ignored, and the analysis that crosses over into commentary."

It has nothing to do with injecting personal opinions unsupported by evidence at all. Its a red herring. Its cultural politics not personal opinions that is at issue here.

And so far the Minister is only saying that the Howard Government does not like the ABC's cultural politics. So what? That has been known for a long time. Its been a fact of political life in Australia for decades. The question at issue is: what is wrong with the ABC having this left-liberal bias in current affairs?

It cannot be the stories that are chosen for broadcast and those that are not; nor the people who are chosen for interview and those who are not; or even the the facts that are highlighted and those that are downplayed or ignored. Thats how the modern media works. It selects what it considers makes for a good story. Politicians have no control over that even when it works against them.

Nope. It has to do with 'the analysis that crosses over into commentary'. The Howard Government can accept analysis but it does not like the commentary. Judging by the Alston dossier it sees the commentary in the choice of words and the tone of the voice of the journalist.

Why the dislike of commentary on AM when the commercial media has oodles of commentary? Why cannot the ABC give commentary when the commercials can?

To his credit Senator Alston addresses this:

"News and current affairs has rightly always been a high priority for the ABC. But as a great national cultural institution, it should aspire to be the quality alternative to the commercials – an electronic journal of record, not a fierce tabloid-style competitor – and unafraid of scrutiny by the public, politicians and parliament."

Record is the key word. It denies commentary. So the ABC should not engage in commentary. Alston has a particular model of journalism the quality record model which is then counterposed to the tabloid style. It is a model that denies interpretation, political bias (anti-Americanism) and a questioning of the spin of the Howard government and the US military machine. This he says is the model the ABC should be following and be made accountable for.

What does it mean? Here's a stab. The ABC should state that events xyz happened and not interpret them. It should not engage with the intepretation of xyz in the texts (media releases, interviews etc) of the Howard government or the US military in order to help Australian citizens understand the significance of xyz.

Let's repeat that. The ABC should not engage with the Howard Government's commentary on xyz. It should simply record what the commentary is. No comment on the comment.

Why not? Because, the Minister says, "under the ABC Act and its own statutory editorial charter, the ABC is required to report accurately and impartially." Reporting accurately and impartially means no interpetration of the facts; no commentary on events; and no comment on the commentary (interpretation) of the Howard Government of the US military. What is out of bounds is a critique of public reason of the Howard Government outlining its reasons for going to war with Iraq. AM, in short, is an in-depth analysis of the news (reporting the facts) and not a commentary on the news.

Its a strange model of journalism isn't it. The ABC cannot comment on a federal election election campaign that was centred around a fiction about asylum seeker's children being thrown overboard. And the ABC cannot comment on the reason why the Howard Government took Australia to war--- that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction. It cannot comment even though none of these weapons have been found up to now, and one of its senior Minsters, Defence Minister Robert Hill, concedes that the intelligence about Saddam Hussein's weapons capability may have been flawed.

If the ABC current affairs presenters cannot comment, then what should the ABC do about the commentary provided by the Howard Government? Answer. The AM report should take the coalition's commentary at face value. That is what Senator Alston means by the ABC reporting accurately and impartially. The ABC's AM program should trust the Government and not be sceptical that its comments and interpretation re the reasons for going to war are not based on evidence. Those supicions that the Howard Government engaged in disinformation campaign to designed to encourage support for a war through the national security state playing up the fear angle to keep the population supporting the Coalition should be forgotten.

Nowhere does the Minister link this model of journalism to democracy, even though he talks about the right to criticize the media in a democracy. There is a marked silence in the Minister's text about the connection between public broadcasting, deliberative democracy and educating citizens about current events. Odd isn't it. I wonder what sort of liberal democracy the Minister has in mind?

The oddness is understandable. Mentioning terms such as deliberative democracy and educating citizens would give weight to the 'public' in public broadcasting. And we cannot have that can we? It would lead to the ABC scrutinizing the Howard Government's claims about Iraq's WMDs, the links to al-Qaeda, and the fact these claims by politicians were probably contrary to the advice from the Government's own intelligence community.That would undermine the legitimacy of the Howard Government's attempts to achieve political unity.

Posted by Gary Sauer-Thompson at 11:57 AM | Comments (12) | TrackBack

May 30, 2003

ABC as democracy's watchdog.

Max Uechtritz, the director of news and current affairs at the ABC, puts his money on the table in his response to the criticism of bias and prejudice made by Senator Alston, the Minister of Communications, Information Technology and the Arts. Uechtritz puts his money on the table by linking the critical watchdog role of the media to democracy. But that's not enough these days.

First the ABC case. Uechtritz says:

"In wartime, distortion - for good reasons and bad - is a given. And that's why the most essential tenet of journalism, healthy scepticism, needs to be applied with full vigour. The media have to explore all points of view, have to try to get to the truth or some way towards it."

Hence we have the classic appeal to truth. Why do we need the truth? Uechtritz says:

"It is the duty of independent journalists in a robust democracy to question everything. The senator seems to think the media's duty in time of war is to fall meekly into line with the government of the day."

Truth is linked to democracy. But why question what happens in democracy? Uechtritz says that during a war:

".. it is not always in the interests of the military and those who govern them to deliver the whole truth....It is the media's role to question what the military and their political masters say, to look at both sides, to seek the truth. At times that will inevitably make people from both sides a little uncomfortable.
It's called democracy."

So in a democracy (what sort does Uechtritzh have in mind?) journalists have to adopt a questioning mode to uncover the truth that has been covered up or hidden by Canberra spin. Uechtritz implies that journalists uncover the government's spin and, when it is uncovered, there lies the truth revealed for the audience to see. That is the watchdog role and it is what the ABC did during the war. Its a key argument and it needs to be made. It is developed to good effect here over at Crikey.com

There rests the ABC's case. It is a classic defence of journalism; one which the commerical stations have largely discarded in favour of cheque book journalism and infotainment. It is a rational for public broadcasting that counters the ratings, revenue salary focus of the commercial media. Such a defence does raise lots of questions about truth. Nor does it go far enough in addressing the lefty politics of the ABC.

First a quibble about the appeal to truth. Is there are a truth to the matter as is implied by Uechtritz? What, for instance, is the truth about the reasons for going to war with Iraq? Do we not have layers and layer sof interpretation all the way down here , rather than some bedrock indisputable fact? Secondly, is not the truth of the matter about the reasons for Australia going to war more akin to some form of public agreement or consensus that that bedrock indisputable fact. For example, a consensus is forming within the formation of public opinion that the WMD reason was not a real reason?

If so, should we not focus on the deliberative process? If we do, then Uechtritz's
defence of the ABC implies a large and heterogeneous public sphere. It implies fairness or reasonable between different points of view in the current ABC media. But this is not right. It ignores the detail about the audience of current affairs programs and says nothing about group polarization in liberal democracy.The communications market the public is deeply divided one with different groups preferring their own communications package.

This consumer fragmentation means that the different groups hear more and more louder versions of their pre-existing commitments and prejudices. Its what Geoff Honnor noted about the ABC, but the same can be said for the Herald Sun and the Daily Telegraph. So we get a flowing of controversial and substantive programmingin which the audience hears the same viewpoint stated over and over again. The trend is for public deliberation to become more and more an enclave deliberation. This is a problem because, for liberal democracy to work, we need shared understandings of some minimal sort between the enclaves. What are these?

More substantively, Uechtritz fails to state that the ABC has a political agenda. Clearly it has---a left liberal one as ABC Watch well knows. The ABC's market segement is a left liberal audience; it reflects this enclave groups values and is the springboard for this groups deliberations. Yet Uechtritz pretends otherwise with his appeal to truth. He implies that the ABC speaks the truth. It has no political bias. That is what is implied. What is also implied is that the commerical stations have a political agenda but not the ABC.

Its political spin and it deserves to be deconstructed by conservatives. And it is politically indefensible in the face of Alston's criticisms. What needs to be done is to link the left-liberal politics to the ABC's role as a national broadcaster. What is the role of the ABC, apart from a critical questioning of political spin in the name of truth? What is it that makes it different from commerical media?

The answer has to be along the lines of the value of truth being linked to the requirements placed on the ABC through its Charter under the Broadcasting Act. This Charter places an emphasis on the ABC contributing to a sense of national identity, informing and entertaining, and reflecting the cultural diversity of the Australian community. Consequently, the ABC needs to show how its left liberal politics fosters a sense of national identity and reflects the cultural diversity of the Australian community.

Uechtritz failed to give such a defence. And that is the flaw in the way the ABC currently conducts itself in the public sphere. The defence needs to be made, otherwise the difference of the ABC as a public broadcaster in relation the commerical media will be continue to seen in subjective terms. The difference is all in the eye of the beholder.

Posted by Gary Sauer-Thompson at 01:20 PM | Comments (3) | TrackBack

May 29, 2003

sigh

Oh well, it was to be expected. The ABC and the Coalition are two differently painted square cultural pegs in a round hole. Their relationship has pretty much been a history of ongoing cultural warfare. This charge of the ABC being blatantly biased and anti-American in its Iraq war coverage does raise the stakes and temperature in the cultural wars.

Richard Alston's specific charges of bias on the ABC's AM programme on Radio National can be found here.The Bunyip approves and reckons that Alston could have gone in even harder in calling the ABC to account.

It is pretty clear that the Coalition Government does not see the role of the ABC as a national broadcaster in terms of being a watchdog for democracy. Factual reporting is what is required. No comment. We the listening public make up our minds based on the facts presented to us.

Its a bit like the way that Gareth Parker presents the issue. Here's Alston's dossier. Read it and make up your minds.

This deep-seated empiricism (only the facts ma, only the facts) ignores the way that journalism is commentary, prejudice and myth. Journalism operates within a global media flow of interpretations and it responds to those interpretations. Hence we have conflicting interpretations trying to make sense of particular events. What Gareth is implying is that that journalism should be about reporting facts and it should not engage with interpretation.

The issue raised by Alston's political intervention is not just faulty journalism--getting the facts wrong---by the AM crowd because of their political bias. There is a genuine issue here. What the Coalition cannot countenance is the ABC use of a critical public reason to expose the media spin around government policy. On the other hand the ABC does see itself acting a watchdog for democracy. Remember how the Hawke-Keating Government went off the planet about the ABC's use of Robert Springborg as a commentator in 1991 during the first Gulf War? They too reacted angrily to the ABC acting as a watchdog for democracy. Many politicians do not like the media acting in a watchdog role. They want lapdogs on a drip feed.

Hence it is an issue about the role of the public journalism of the national broadcaster in a liberal democracy. Should the ABC play a critical role? Should it present commentary from perspectives excluded by the corporate media---eg., the Murdock Press in Australia? Should it present critical commentary that questions competing interpretations of political events?

Update

There is a discussion on the politics of the Alston criticism of the ABC by by Tim Dunlop over at Road to Surfdom. I forgot to link to it yesterday.

And Geoff Honnor has a post here It says that righties have to learn to deconstruct ABC Radio National interpretations just like Lefties have to deconstruct those in The Australian. They need some education to help them do so.

Yep. Its what citizens do. Think for themselves. That political freedom means questioning the habitual thinking of right and left and the centre.

And Scott over at The Eye of the Beholder has a good post that accepts both bias in journalism as a fact of life and the diversity of the media.

Prejudice as bias is a part of everyday life and the media. The different forms of media in rbiing against one another can challenge these taken-for-granted prejudices, and so we get a form of debate or dialogue or conversation going through an exercise in political freedom. That exchange of ideas in the public sphere by citizens is a core tenet of liberal democracy.

Posted by Gary Sauer-Thompson at 02:06 PM | Comments (19)

May 15, 2003

Australian press

I find myself in full agreement with Gerard Henderson on this. The Australian press is very insular. It was clearly evident in the Iraq war. They---as a collective body---- had little understanding of the Middle East.

Canberra is the centre of their media universe. Do they----the Canberra Press Gallery----- actually read the international papers?

Posted by Gary Sauer-Thompson at 09:42 AM | Comments (5)

April 24, 2003

poor old ABC

There is an article in the latest issue of The Bulletin by Graham Davis, called, 'Its yore ABC. It argues that the ABC did a bad job on covering the Iraq war.

This was not because of the bias of the left liberal culture in news and current affairs. All news and commentary is biased and prejudiced--some left some right. Rather Davis focuses on the poor news reporting due to the lack of correspondents in Iraq, and it says that the ABC was outgunned by Nine, which has become the national broadcaster. The ABC is no longer the news leader. Davis argues that the current affairs programs--the 7.30 Report and Lateline-- did an excellent job.

I did not see Lateline as I was on the Internet. I saw the 7.30 Report and I thought that it did a poor job as it failed to give us the Arab perspective on the war; not in the sense of dishing up the pro-Hussein line, but give an account, and an evaluation of what was being said by Arab current affairs commentators living in the region. All we ever heard was commentary from the Anglo-American perspective which mostly focused on the military strategy and not the politics of the region.

I appreciate that giving space for Arab commentary on the war would not go down well in Canberra, which dutfully followed the Washington neo-conservative line. But it is the role of the ABC as a public broadcaster to educate. And public opinion needed some education about the Middle East. The ABC failed and failed badly to counter the shallowness, glibness and cartoon analysis of what passes for public debate on foreign policy and national security issues in Australia.

An example? To say that working through the UN was an act of appeasement with all its historical evoking of Hitler and Neville Chamberlain.

Posted by Gary Sauer-Thompson at 11:53 AM | Comments (2) | TrackBack

April 10, 2003

Andrew Bolt: One of a kind

I thought that scenes of wild celebrations would bring out the worst in the pro-war journalists. No suprise then when this little bit surfaced:

"And written in the blood of this war is a moral lesson some will find as grotesque as it is true: the West has won because it is free. In fact, that's the secret of the West's supremacy for so much of the 2500 years since the rise of the Greeks -- even the most ruthless dictatorship is little match for free men fighting a just war....this war is even so a triumph of our civilisation."

It's from Andrew Bolt.

The West is superior to Islam. What does the West include? Germany? Italy? Or is it just the Anglo-Americans? Or does the West mean a liberal civilization? He means "a free, inquiring and self-critical democracy" and that would exclude France and Germany because they didn't go to war with "a closed, dissent-murdering tyranny."

And Andrew pushes the superiority theme:

...."It's far more likely that Saddam's humiliation will make many Arabs confront a truth that has too long been suppressed -- that their abject weakness is born of their own flawed societies.They are ruled by bomb-waving dictators, ayatollahs, generals and playboy kings, yet remain impotent. Their terrorists may kill Westerners, but their armies cannot defeat them. Just ask Israel. Four times Arab armies have joined to try to wipe out this democratic nation of just six million people, and each time they have been slaughtered.

Now Iraq, once the scourge of Iran and Kuwait, has collapsed in mere days before another Western army, half the size of its own. Hiding from the truth is no longer possible. Many Arabs will grudgingly realise after this that only Western ways now can make them strong -- not nuclear bombs, but freedom; not conscripted soldiers, but elected politicians."

This is the ugly side of liberalism. Triumphant, cold war reflexes, hostile to what is different; unwilling to accept that Arab civilization has liberal tendencies; relishing the slaughter bench of history. It is supremacy that is being pushed here.

Even Anne Coulter does not go so far. She only uses the war celebrations to twist the knife into the traitorous liberals:

"Liberals are no longer a threat to the nation. The new media have defeated them with free speech – the very freedom these fifth columnists hide behind whenever their speech gets them in hot water with the American people."

It is even worse than Charles Krauthammer who content to talk in terms of "the surgical removal of a one-party police state while trying to leave the civilians and the infrastructure as untouched as possible."

But it is difficult for a leftie to engage in critique as we are entrapped in self-contradiction and incoherence?

Posted by Gary Sauer-Thompson at 08:04 PM | Comments (2)

March 29, 2003

Hearts and Minds

Two quotes of significance from different texts in the Iraq discourse of the US military machine.

The first is from the US Military, a Lieutenant General William Wallace, a Commander of V Corps. During a visit to the 101st Airborne Division headquarters in central Iraq he acknowledged that the combination of overextended supply lines and a combative adversary using unconventional tactics have stalled the U.S. drive toward Baghdad. This has increased the likelihood of a longer war than many strategists had anticipated. He then said:

"The enemy we're fighting is different from the one we'd war-gamed against."

I bet those war games never factored in Iraqi patriotism. They probably assumed that a bit of shock and awe would lead the Iraqi' to rebel against a dictator, would hunt down and kill the central figures in the Iraqi regime, throw open the gates of Baghdad and welcome the Anglo American army of liberation. Instead the Iraqi's are fighting for the country they love. In concentrating on playing mind games with the Iraqi's the American psych.ops forget about the Iraqi heart.

The second quote is from Greg Sheridan, a conservative Australian commentor specialising in foreign affairs. He says:

"...the military briefings of the Central Command, which the whole world watches on Fox, CNN or the BBC...are atrocious, as bad as anything I've seen...the Centcom military briefings have been a disgrace. Just one example. Either they were incredibly sloppy in telling us that Umm Qasr had been taken when it hadn't, or they were telling lies. For the first few days of the war, the primary objective of these military briefings was to convince Hussein's forces that they should quit. But running deception operations against Iraqis through military briefings to your own people runs the grave risk of undermining your own support because people eventually realise they are not being told the truth."

The hearts and minds of Anglo-American citizens were completely ignored if not treated with utter contempt.

The consquence is indicated by the photo on the front page of The Australian (no link). In the foreground stands a yound Iraqi girl dressed in red/purple dress with white rectangular lines on the upper body. She is waiting for food in Al Zubata, south of Basra. She is surrounded, enclosed, by the brown/olive Coalition (pressumably British) troops who form a backdrop of bodies. A military hand rests on her right shoulder restraining her. Guns flank her on both sides.

This image has been put there centre stage by a pro-war Australian editors to say Liberation. But it says Occupation.

Sloppy editing? Nope. Its blindness to the significance of the massive destruction being wrought by shock and awe wrapped up in historical amnesia.

A new narrative about the war (not just military battles) is in formation, and it is a counter to the totalizing peace, propersity and freedom narrative of the Militarised Enlightenment. The counter narrative works from interpreting the images and words of the censored western media otherwise. The newly-forming counter narrative, which is based on the hearts and minds of citizens, is a tragic one representing human suffering and moved by historical shudders.

You don't have to read Derrida to understand the significance of difference in the war on Iraq. Deconstruction is the name for reading texts and images otherwise.

Posted by Gary Sauer-Thompson at 11:27 AM | Comments (6)

March 28, 2003

Peggy Noonan in Australia

Peggy Noonan, from the Wall Street Journal, recently appeared in The Australian as part of the conservative campaign to soften up public opinion. It is the first time that her column has appeared in Australia as far as I know.

It was pretty thin material as usual. The message was we (the US) have to hang tough when the bodies of the soldiers start piling up. True, it was written, more gracefully than that. Here is a sample:

"After Vietnam, the US military establishment began to press for new preconditions of war. They would insist that political backing for any military action be real, clear and sustainable; that military planning include exit strategies in case of insupportable disaster; and that the US go into any conflict with full and ferocious force. Thus the heavy bombing, the highly technologised fighting force, the highly trained specialists that we see on the news every night.... The idea was that if you go in with overwhelming force, victory will beat the body bags home. All of which is understandable as strategy, but it has also tended to support the assumption that Americans can't take battlefield losses, that they've grown soft and unused to suffering, that ultimately they don't want to pay a price."

But things are not turning out the shock and awe way---despite the best attempts by the embedded media. Now embedding the reporters of the US networks enabled the Pentagon to control what we see and what they report on. And to see something different we need to turn to the foreign press; and what they show us ---mangled, blackened torn civilian bodies is viewed with disapproval by both the US media and the Anglo-American war politicians. And images that are offered to the western media by Al Jazeerah, for instance, are turned down by the Western media. They are too harsh and alarming and the they might give the public the wrong idea of what the war is about.

But the negative does trickle into the US consciousness along with the growing awareness the war is going to be tough and hard. So Peggy says 'hang tough'. We can take the body bags coming home. The American people will suffer through this, accept the body bags because they believe the war is needed and the US position is right. They will accept the high price that needs to be paid to oust Hussein and pacify Iraq. We Americans have moral courage and clarity.

Thats Peggy Noonan in Australia folks. An embedded journalist doing a good publicity job for the Bush administration. Much needed in Australia to give the local gals (Janet and Miranda a lift.) In the US Peggy is much loved by Tom over at TBogg and James over at The Rittenhouse Review. They have a deep appreciation of Peggy's moral uplift. Unsure what moral uplift is? Check out Peggy's latest effort Eyes on the Main Prize. It informs us that we should keep our eyes on the prize. Why? Becuse Peggy senses that the US:

"...is about to startle and reorder the world. We are going to win this thing, and in the winning of it we are going to reinspire civilized people across the globe. We're going to give the world a lift. Victory will remind the world that faith and effort trump ennui and despair. It will demonstrate to the civilized world that the good do not have to see themselves as at the inevitable mercy of barbarians."

Thats moral uplift. Want some more?:

"A victory in Iraq is about to enhance America's stature in the world. America deserves it. Because of all the powerful countries in the world, it is the most trustworthy, reliable and constructive. Soon this war will be over. It was hard getting there, hard doing it and there will no doubt be hard going. But it will be over, and we won't come back from hell with empty hands. We will have won a great deal. In the next week and weeks it will be good to keep that in mind, and keep our eyes on the prize."

You can see why Peggy is needed in Australia. The local conservatives are too negative. They just attack the left. They have no moral uplift.

Posted by Gary Sauer-Thompson at 04:18 PM | Comments (4)

March 26, 2003

Media briefs & public debate

The public philosopher over at philosophy.com has been writing long posts on the need for the humanities to address public issues of concern to citizens

These daily media briefings provided by ANU are one example of the humanities showing their public relevance. Are they useful? Yes, because of the lack of information and knowledge about the Middle East in Australia.

Some instances.

First, Amin Saikal, the professor of Arab and Islamic studies at ANU, says that the briefings provide an opportunity to redress the paucity of opinion from an Arab or Islamic perspective in Australia. Most notable is the footage showing large numbers of civilian casualties broadcast on in the Arab world has been given little or no airing in the West. Only SBS is making an attempt, followed by the ABC.

Amin says that different perceptions are being formed by the contrasting coverage of the war in the Middle East and the West. The images on the Al-Jazeera network:

"...are the images that the Arab masses get and they shape their perception of what is really happening, and their perception of the American, British and Australian drive to Baghdad".

What we don't see much of are the gruesome pictures of civilian and military casualties that made front pages in Europe. So its CNN v Al Jazeera

And if you are not in Canberra? Tough luck. No media briefing There is nothing online. In Adelaide, for instance, there is a panel discussion in a week or so which costs money to attend. So we are left with a paucity of opinion from an Arab or Islamic perspective in Australia.

Secondly, we have need to counter the orchestrated, triumphalist Anglo-American one from the embedded journalists who concentrate on technology at the expense of the human element. It is orchestrated because, as Tony Walker argued in the Australian Financial Review, the US networks are the media used as weapon (subscription required). The media has become a conduit for military information. The largely pro-US view of CNN gives us lots of scenes of tanks charging through desert sand storms and spectacular, night-vision footage of bombardments of Baghdad.

Its Hollywood joining hands with the Militarized Enlightenment to give us the guilty pleasures of The Shock and Awe Show The public relations is being run by the Pentagon's instrumental reason as if it were a political campaign. This creates an illusion of being inside the war machine with a direct access to the empirical truth. In reality this picture is constucted around on photo-ops that enable viewers to identify with the troops and the mission. What disappears is the questioning of the war.

Thirdly, we have the Howard Government's control of the information. As Margo Kingston says:

"Unlike our allies, Australian reporters get nowhere near our troops, and the people are told virtually nothing of what they're doing. Like the Defence force war on boat people, there is a total media blackout, except that, unlike that war, the government is silent too, not spinning the facts to suit the politics."

She argues that John Howard only wants us to see that which his apparatus can control, shots where Australians look strong and nowhere near the victims of war. Hence we have fake warshots of the troops.

Three instances. All point to the need for citizens to access knowledge to question and make their judgements about the implications of this war (blowback) in our region; or the implications of the pre-emptive strike doctrine for the western alliance and world security. All three instances indicate the lack of knowledge: we have a knowedge vacum. We need lots more of this analysis.

The significance of the ANU media briefings is that the academics are providing knowledge that we citizens lack; this enables us to question of where Australia is going and its implications for us. These media briefings indicate that the Humanities can play useful role in this questioning of public policy: they can provide information about the significance of the images of civilian casualties; the reactions of distrust and sense of abandonment by the Iraqi people; the reactions by Iran to the war; and the changes in the world order arising from the new fault lines in interantional relations and so on.

But the universities are not coming to the party in any substantive way by putting the media briefings online. The corporate managers, infatuated by the money making possibilities of the biotech sciences have generally seen the humanities as useless, and so have downsized staff and starved them of resources. So we citizens turn elsewhere. The humanities are marginalized even further.

Posted by Gary Sauer-Thompson at 02:31 PM | Comments (2)

March 25, 2003

Media's view of the war

The melancholy cultural critic over at a heap of junk for code has a go at the media reporting of the war in the post, 'On the road to Adelaide'. It appears that he has retreated to the BBC in disgust with the US networks.

Well, this post Anglo-American Lies Exposed is a critique of the language used by the embedded BBC journalists to represent the Anglo-American war on the ground.

How do we interpret this text? What is bought to bear on the public thinking in the media networks by Fisk is a historical perspective that rightly challenges the ahistorical, technocratic language of the US military. Consider this statement from a US marine, a Sgt Sprague, from White Sulphur Springs in West Virginia:

"The problem with these people is that you can't believe anything they say... If it weren't for the liberal press, we might have taken Baghdad last time...I've been all the way through this desert from Basra to here and I ain't seen one shopping mall or fast food restaurant," he said. "These people got nothing. Even in a little town like ours of twenty five hundred people you got a McDonald's at one end and a Hardee's at the other."

A great start. This raises a broader issue.

What is missing in all this war commentary is a deep historical sense---the media's stops at 1991. Yet Australia was fighting with the British in Iraq in the 1941-1918 war; the British & Australians marched on Baghdad in 1915-1916 to knock of the Ottoman Empire; and both the UK and US have a long history of regime change in the region that marked the edge of the Classical Roman world. It is a region saturated in layers and layers of history; a history in which Arab people have suffered.

It is this history which explains why Arabs read contemporary events differently to the US media. Our history in Australia stops at Gallipoli which has become a sacred site we honour the dead, celebrate the forging of the Australain nation in blood and affirm our national identity. We forget that Australia also has a history of fighting other people's wars in the region. There is historical blank between 1981 and 1991 when Iraq invaded Kuwait. The Arab peopel do not have that kind of blank.

So I think that Fisk is quite right to challenge the gungho technocratic thinking of the Militarised Enlightenment and remind us of the politics involved in Great Powers bringing liberal civilization to the Arab people. We need a little less hubris and triumphalism about being liberators here. In the long run it is the Iraqi people who will have to establish a democratic Iraq and run the state as citizens for their own well-being. The best that the western powers can do is lend a hand.

But history indicates that the track record of western powers lending a hand to the Arab people in their fight for democracy is not a good one.

Posted by Gary Sauer-Thompson at 02:02 PM | Comments (1)

March 23, 2003

comment on comment.

I'm slowly getting around to reading the weekend newspapers. I refused to watch television last night. I wanted a break.

I read Paul Kelly's 'Fight of their Lives' in the Weekend Australian (no links) this morning. Kelly's text is good on the domestic side of the conflict of the war with a militarily weak Iraq, and poor on the international side. Kelly says about Howard's speech justifiying war that:

"Howard did not argue that Iraq posed a real or immediate threat to Australia or the world. He did not argue any serious link between Iraq and al-Qa'ida....He made no effort to relate the decision to Australia's regional position and interest. He made no reference to the split in the Western allaince but, significantly, neither he endorse Bush's doctrine of pre-emption that Iraq symbolizes. His speech was devoid of strategic evaluation."

Kelly puts his finger on Howard's reason for Australia marching with the US to Baghdad: it is for the US-Australia alliance. So what have we signed up to? Kelly is thin, waffly and evasive at this point. He says:

"The question for Australia is whether the Iraq war heralds a new order or whether it is an aberration. The US under Bush is a more demanding alliance partner but Iraq is a test of whether his demands work for Australia's national interest. The truth is that Australia needs a US that works with the world community, not against it; a US that is liked, not hated."

This leads to an evaluation of where is Bush going in the Middle East; it requires an assessment of the neo-con strategy in this region. But Kelly is silent. He evades any assessment of the neo-Bush policy of helping Israel against the Arab states overturning the current regimes in Iran, Syria and Saudia Arabia through the preferred instrument of force; extending US power in the region and the globe and checking the rise of any competitor state (eg. China). This is a lot more than the US just being global cop protecting the status quo. As Peter Hartcher in the Australian Financial Review says this is The first of many wars.

Brian Toohey in the Australian Financial Review(subscription required) asks the right question: whats in it for Australia? What do we Australians's get for paying the premiums on our insurance policy for future securitywhen payout time comes. What's our payout, if Islamic fundamentalists ever come to power in Indonesia? That is the unspoken Australian neo-con nightmare---it is where the long road to Baghdad leads for Australia. Forget the free trade stuff: its a side issue. Target Indonesia is the real game in town.

Will Australia ask the US to confront a hostile Indonesian state and not accommodate them? As we all know there are no guarantees that the US will come to Australia's rescue. If the US-Australia alliance is not a contract, so does the US as a close friend and ally have an obligation to attack Indonesia to protect Australia? Doubts flow freely on this one.

Similar reasoning about the national interest can be found in Britain, where Tony Blair also claims a 'special relationship' with the US. David Carr at Samzdata.org sums this up pretty well:

"But there are others on the British right who are vigourously opposed to Britain taking any part in the attack on Iraq not because they harbour anti-American sentiments (indeed, they heartily reject such nonsense) but because they believe that it is not in British national interests to do so. They are far from confident that any US administration would go to bat for Britain in the way that Britain has gone to bat for America..."

Such considerations of national interest take us a long aay from the Australian neo-con claim (eg., C. Pearson, in his 'Rebels as gullible as before' in the Weekend Australian, no link) that, for the left, the inviolability of Iraq's sovereignty is of more consequence than the Iraqi regime's brutal and repression practices.

Remember what we are seeing in the mediascape's representation of travelling on road to Baghdad---lots of wreckage and collatoral damage. Remember how the Arab media and Islamic groups see the US---as a big, uncivilized bully trampling all over improverished and weak Arabs. Canberra should be in the grip of strategic anxiety.

Posted by Gary Sauer-Thompson at 02:08 PM | Comments (3) | TrackBack

March 16, 2003

Mark Steyn:--empty headed fantasy

After walking the dogs in the Adelaide Parklands this morning I had breakfast in the early a morning autumn sunshine. A day's painting lay ahead of me after washing the dogs, so I lingered over coffee and glanced through the Weekend Australian and came across an article by Mark Steyn called 'Europe abdicates' in the Inquirer section. Steyn is rarely syndicated to Australian newspapers, and as I had only read bits and pieces of his work, I read the article with interest. He is a big name. Maybe he stood for quality journalism.

You know, after reading it I had no idea what the article was about. I could see the Old Europe bashing ---to be expected in the Murdoch Press that pushes the Washington line. According to Steyn, Europe (ie., one run along French and German lines) was about morality, moral character and pacifism. France pacifist? Germany perhaps given its recent history. France has always stood for the independent use of military power to protect to its national interests. Like the US.

Yet pacifist Europe was what Steyn was trying to argue: Europe as a superpower with no means of defense. But demography--declining population was against it because the continental model of the welfare state presupposed a constantly growing population. It is on the way to becoming a basket case. Europe is a joke. Its a sclerotic statism compared to the vitality of the Anglo Saxon capitalism of the US. UK and Australia.

So what was Steyn arguing? I dunno. You tell me. All I could get was that an arthritic, snobbish Old Europe is finished and three cheers for the defenders of the heathy free market, as this stood for the future of the West. His reference to the this National Review indicates that the three nation states of Auustrali, the US and the UK are the most plausible alternative to the traditional Western alliance as they represent a Western liberal Western civilization characterized by a high degree of individualism and dynamism, assimilation and high trust.

Its trading in fantasy.

Oh, well, now to wash the dogs and do the painting.

Posted by Gary Sauer-Thompson at 10:32 AM | Comments (2)

March 08, 2003

Tim Blair retreats

You have to read the post a couple of times before the significance of the fragment sinks in. Tim Blair has conceded defeat and he has beat a retreat under the cover of a smoke screen.

The post was a comment on the recent Phillip Adams column in which he rejected the anti-America charge and argued that he was anti-Bush. Tim Blair conceded the argument on March 8 2003 at 9.25 am---'Its all about Bush' he says. As indeed it is.

Thats a huge defeat for the 'lets pulverise Iraq now' crowd. Anti-Americanism was one of their chief tactics to delegitimise their opponents.

The smokescreen? Calling his opponents 'shallow as Lake Eyre'. A witty quip to be sure. But it has no bite since surface is everything in postmodernity and Tim has always operated on the surface.

I feel sorry for Tim's fans. They will be distressed when their news gets out that their hero has retreated from the battle. Tears all round. Will their hero retreat on other fronts?

Now the neo-cons will have to argue their case to justify their going along with Bush's unilateralism, displacement of the UN as a governing institution, might is right, absolute freedom and American hegemony. Arguing their case rather than attacking the person will be something new.

John Quiggin has noticed Blair's retreat as well.

Posted by Gary Sauer-Thompson at 08:31 PM | Comments (9) | TrackBack

March 06, 2003

Tim Blair Watch

For all those readers who love to know what Tim Blair has been up to with his hit and run journalism.

The Tim Blair Watch can be found at a heap of junk for code today.

After scrolling through his work I have realized that Tim Blair has no pity or compassion for the vulnerable and the fragile. He has only scorn. He also lacks a conceptual graps of living life live on the razor's edge of luck.

Posted by Gary Sauer-Thompson at 05:36 PM | Comments (0)

March 03, 2003

Media & the War

How will the media conduct themselves in the forthcoming war with Iraq?

For some back ground to news and war, see Tim Porter

Will the media conduct themselves in being objective & telling the truth? Or will they act along the lines of this account of CNN's preparations by Robert Fisk. That is food for thought.

Let us hope that the media corporations show more initiative than they did last time around to be ‘to be witnesses to the truth’. It does not look to be so.

Posted by Gary Sauer-Thompson at 04:10 PM | Comments (3)

February 20, 2003

Miranda runs out of puff

I read Miranda Devine's latest piece this morning. It was so disappointing.

The protestors were a bunch of simpletons, whose beliefs 'require such a corrosive cocktail of ignorance and postmodern cynicism they soon rot whatever brain cells might have existed in the first place.' Our mindset is such that we 'forget Saddam understands only force and thrives on the weakness of his enemies. ' We are motivated by gut feelings, are ill informed and desire peace at any price.

The logical conclusion of such views leads to people becoming propanganda tools for the Iraqi regime.

All in all pretty feeble apart from this description of the irrational mob or the rabble---the beast stirring from its slumber; the lunatics clamouring below---the idiots is Tim Blair's term. The implication was that the conservative political elite were knowledgeable, operated in terms of reason and had a proper understanding of politics.

The lack of content was mixed up with a spicey spray about left-liberal views on refugees, the republic, reconciliation to give it the appearance of backbone--to give the appearance that Miranda is saying something. If we ignore the spice, then what is Miranda saying? Her text is little more than a dismissal of the protest marches as a sign of collective insanity.

The text is hardly the pleasant chiming of the bells--a worldly and civilizing rhetoric. Reading her text is akin to reading an amplifier, someone who falsifies experience because they boom it up so much that they distort it. It is watching a journalist self-destruct and dissolve into fragments, none of which have any authority.

Posted by Gary Sauer-Thompson at 08:07 AM | Comments (6)

February 18, 2003

Anti-democratic sentiments

I noticed this entry on the Weekly James about the protestors marching against the war on Iraq at a moment when James THOUGHT BRIEFLY OF HEADING DOWNTOWN. James said:

'I even ran into a neighbor from up the street, his wife and three children in tow - a nice guy with whom I've shared an after-work beer over the fence.

"You going to The Walk?" he asked hopefully.

"Hell no! I'm going to Cole's!" I replied, laughing, having misread his question and assuming we would have a laugh about the great unwashed heading downtown.

"Oh, that's right! You're American!" he said, a roll of pennies clattering behind his eyes.

As if that explained the whole thing, and that my accent automatically meant that I was like some grinning, bloody-fanged Jewish caricature in an Arab newspaper gleefully eating Muslim children.'

No James, wrong call. Its calling those Australian citizens exercising their political rights ' the great unwashed' that is the issue. That language refers back to the dirty, uneducated proles of the nineteenth century. They were seen as the dangerous classes but they won their political rights through political struggle. The language indicates a resignation to that political reality of democracy, but it dismisses them as uneducated and ruled by emotion and instinct.

And the iconoclastic Tim Blair, who gets his rocks off deflating left triumphalism, quotes the above passage on his Monday post here without comment. So neo-con Tim thinks the protestors as the great unwashed. Tim, we are waiting for you to push things a bit. Why not call them the enemy within? Why not accuse those who marched against a war with Iraq of committing treason.

O, c-mon Tim. Don't disappoint us. Push that envelop beyond 'peace-lovin' idealists', 'Peace Mooks', 'chicken shits' etc. Transgress the boundaries by moving beyond comments like its the '' Iraqi people the crazy Left doesn't care about.' Move beyond being entertained by the absurdities of lefty life----the capering of the love pixies-----to scorning democracy. Let us see the neo-con snarl behind the entertainer.

We want to be entertained.

Posted by Gary Sauer-Thompson at 10:57 AM | Comments (19) | TrackBack

February 14, 2003

Beyond the Australian media

For those who want a world roundup of the journalist comment to the main events of the week check this. It takes us beyond the American centred view that we get in Australia. It highlights the narrow media universe in Australia.

For a good criticism of the Saddam=Hitler and the critics of the war=appeasers, see this. The pro-war commentary is close to war propaganda as it endlessly recycles the cliched script without any attempt to engage with the criticism of the Bush adminstration's pre-emptive approach and the intellectual framework and strategic thinking behind this approach. It works within the rigid limits of the narrow nationalist agenda of the neo-conservative Bush administration and the liberal internationalists who seek to go beyond the nation-state with their global governance and conception of international law as a kind of superior law above the state.

You want a bit of dirt on the US in relation to the UN? See here. (Link courtesy of wood s lot). It is increasingly clear that the US basically rejects any global constraint on its actions. Its hegemonic power rests on a pax americana structuered around persuasive military threats accompanied by tough arm-twisting amongst the allies. It has the military power and technology to go to war alone war can be won without lasting political repercussions in the US itself. Britain and Australia are basically there for political dressing--- to indicate to the American public that there is soem world-wide support for Bush administrations actions. John Howard played his part well when in Washington.

Sorry:wrong target rejects the Bush administration's view of Old Europe as a bunch of appeasers. It indicates the commonality of reasons for the opposition to the Bush adminstration's war with Iraq between the European and Australian people. These reason lie:

"... in a deep rooted mistrust of US President George W. Bush: of his methods; of the rough way he handles his allies when they do not bend; of the misunderstanding, or the lack of interest in what those allies have to say; and of this cold war motto, ‘Either you are with us, or you are against us!’

They are not cowards or traitors this European majority; nor are they unable to understand what’s at stake.... They just don’t believe in the new US doctrine of pre-emptive war or its black and white quasi-fundamentalist vision of the outside world."

What is deepening the rift between the US and European and Australian people is the rough way the Bush administration handles its allies: a touch of bullying; coercing instead of convincing; and antagonising their friends instead of building a consensus around their strategy. The consequence of these tactics is that the Blair and Howard Governments are now at odds with a majority of their own citizens.

And for something different? Try a weblog by an American in Baghdad MidEastLog. (Link courtesy of Eve Tushnet.) I couldn't track done Al Jazeera English website. Its coming nzoom.com. In the meantime we have to make do with Aljazeera.netin Arabic and translate; or this and IslamOnLine.net

We are now beginning to step beyond the horizons of the Australian media.

Posted by Gary Sauer-Thompson at 09:47 PM | Comments (0)

February 13, 2003

Tim Blair & others

Sorry. Nothing much to say about Tim's Bulletin column this week(subscription required). No real crevices for me to get my finger nails into.

The signs of a continuing crisis in Australia that are noted by Tim are: nudity for peace in Bryon Bay NSW; Carmen Lawrence MP not being able to board an American ship berthed in Perth; Victorian Premier Steve Bracks slurring his speech at a sports event; and John Valder, a Liberal wet, being confused when he was seven years old.

These are the signs of the absurdities of Australian life. Little humorous details that show the meaninglessness at the heart of life. Light relief from the blanket media coverage of the Iraqi war.

Miranda Devine's column War-wary will not weary them does not disappoint. Its in Anne Coulter territory. Miranda has been in the US and, upon returning to Australia, she was quickly:

"...struck by the infantile level of debate here over Iraq. Just for starters, there has been the nude peace protest in Byron Bay, the sneering tone of the anti-Bush letters to the editor, the gross anti-Americanism exhibited by federal Labor and fellow travellers, the "gotcha" reaction to Bush's unremarkable "coalition of the willing" remarks and the wacko campaign to persuade people to send their anti-terrorism packs back to the Government as a war protest."

That about it. Lots of the usual neo-con stuff about anti-Americanism ('the anti-US bilge that permeates so much of what passes for Australian debate'; lefty sneers ('sophisticated people everywhere who sneer about Howard's and Bush's binary morality"'); a quick dismissal of France and Germany ('who cares what France and Germany think' and the left sneering because they no longer know what is right.

Tim Dunlop blogs on this piece by asking:'Why does Miranda Devine hate Australia so much?' I can affirm a key point he makes, that Miranda's own text contributes to the infantile level of debate. Miranda does not address the Australian commitment to the United Nations; the concern about the impact of the war on the region Australia is in; the lack of evidence that Australia's national interest is threatened by Iraq; a preference for a policy of vigilent containment etc. She does what she accuses other of doing: exhibiting 'a profound lack of seriousness and understanding of the issues which face Australia and the world'.

Janet Albrechtsen is more circumspect. She addresses the vitriol of Howard's ALP opponents and says that Howard is a conviction politician:

"Whether you agree with Howard or not, at least he believes in his own position. Voters respect that. And that drives his detractors to distraction. It drove them crazy in 1996 when voters preferred the dull, boring Howard to the clock-collecting Mahler-loving P. J. Keating. And it's driven them to Olympian heights of vitriol ever since. But people want leaders with convictions. On that score, Howard's history says he's way out in front of the conviction-challenged Crean."

What Janet does not say is that many Australian citizens who oppose the Bush administrations war are also conviction politicians. But they are abused by the neo-cons because they are peace-niks and appeasers. Once again there is a failure to engage with the issues such as these raised by Graham Edwards MP about not forgetting the lessons of Vietnam, the accusations of treason levelled against those who question a unilaterial strike against Iraq the long-term ramifications of the war in his speech on 5th February (House Hansard p. 225.)

Or the issues raised in this speech by Graham Edwards (Matter of Importance, House Hansard 6th Feb, p. 366) about the Commonwealth Government, that so quick to send someone else's kids to war, but is so very slow to fairly compensate serving men and women of the ADF and their families in the event of death or injury.

Its time to move away from the Canberra political hothouse to the common life of the nation and the concerns of ordinary Australians who will bear the brunt of this war. As Graham Edwards points out, it is always other people's sons whom the politicians send off to an overseas war to defend the security of the nation.

Posted by Gary Sauer-Thompson at 02:32 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

February 10, 2003

Why cannot this happen in Australia?

This should also happen in Australia. It is Tony Blair being quizzed about his views on the war on BBC Television, and seeking to engage with, rather than manipulate public opinion.

John Howard should appear on National Television where he can quizzed by an experienced and highly skilled journalist and a panel of citizens about his position on the war with Iraq and his political handling of that issue.
It will not happen in Australia will it? A genuine Socratic discussion over the war between our political representatives, the media and citizens. We don't have such a healthy political public sphere in our liberal democracy.

For the American reaction see Calpundit; and Interesting Times

Keiran Healy has an extended post.

Posted by Gary Sauer-Thompson at 09:19 PM | Comments (8) | TrackBack