In the Weekend Oz Brad Norington has produced another mixed feature discussing the endless blogs vs MSM argument. It’s the usual stuff that you read elsewhere and everywhere (bloggers are stupid and ugly and no one likes them) and a few names get dropped and quoted, not the least of which is blogging Web 2.0 luddite Andrew Keen who wrote a book about amateurish bloggers and the devastation they will bring to the world as we know it. Presumably he excuses himself from his nutty generalisations.
Thankfully there is one high point in the piece in that Peter Brent appears to have made up with Chris Mitchell and Dennis Shanahan, which is nice considering that both were wrong and still are. But back to Norington and Keen.
The mainstream media, he argues, offers a quality product that is vetted by knowledgeable editors and corroborated by sources. “The responsibility of a journalist is to inform us, not converse with us,” Keen writes. “If you simply want to converse with a journalist, invite them to your local bar for a few drinks.”
This is what lies at the heart of the Australian’s misunderstanding not only about blogging and bloggers but the web in general judging by these two pieces. And of course you can’t run a newspaper that is online and blogging and not inform as well as converse, which is exactly what the Australian is currently having difficulty with. The game has changed, that two way conversation is fundamental to new and online media.
Finally there is this, in all of the blog vs MSM column inches written one thing always comes up - bloggers don’t break stories. The entire argument against bloggers and the cult of the amateur hinges on those four words. Of course the problem is that in Australia real bloggers (those who grew up in this media) would never get the chance. Bloggers can’t break stories without some kind of access, and they can’t really be judged by that standard until they have it.
Oz Politics and Road to Surfdom add to the conversation.
Money quote from Donnelly:
Oh dear, that wouldn’t pass muster for the canon.
It’s a bizarre schizophrenic world over at the GG sometimes - Rupert decrees the web to be the future of journalism, and then they launch round two of teh intertubes will destroy the world firefight.
I was chatting with a journalism student about blogging a few months ago, and she said the reason she was interested was because all they ever heard in journo school was about how the internet and especially bloggers were going to destroy journalism as a profession, and they’d never all get jobs.
Australian political bloggers are venturing down the same path but with key differences. Websites with names such as Mumble (www.mumble.com.au), Oz Politics, Possums Pollytics, Poll Bludger, Psephos, the Piping Shrike, New Matilda, Righthinker and Blogspot run commentary that mainstream-media critics say often confuses fact with opinion,
“Blogspot” is an Australian political blog (short for web log or record)?
I suspect it’s actually personal, Mark. Both Peter (Mumble) and I have had monumental shitfights with the GG. Jeremy Sear’s massive interblog shit-fight over Greg Sheridan can’t have gone without notice, along with quite a few other things that have slipped my mind at present.
It’s probably also worth pointing out that journalism has long suffered with a problem of graduate oversupply, with only the most beautiful and talented and sonorously voiced getting a gig. Everyone else finishes up writing advertising copy, or working in HR. The whole business is simply reflective of anti-competitive behaviour. Bloggers represent competition, and - like any corporation - the various media bodies don’t like it. They’ll slag us off until doomsday, or their stock price starts to drop, whichever is sooner.
Blogs offer varied insight and opinion that major proprietors would never allow.
Most of the political stories that pass as “breaking news” are in reality just more grist to the mill of manufactured consent. The Children Overboard scandal was once a news story at its beginning.
Thousands of New York Times articles on Iraq pale into insignificance after reading the Riverbend Blog.
http://riverbendblog.blogspot.com/
Part of the problem seems to be that up until now they have been able to feed the propaganda of great economic management by Howard into a positive newspoll loop. Since the collapse of the coalition primary vote they just look silly because the numbers do not support their theories.
Some things just produce unintended consequences.
New Matilda would be surprised to learn it’s a blog as well.
I’m a bit over the GG’s line that none of us know what we are talking about. They are quite clearly trying to plant the meme that they have more authority than the bloggers. It’s total bollocks. Sure, some of them have more inside information, but that access to information means that they are more susceptible to manipulation and that they have a vested interest in maintaining the status quo. The GG likes to talk down to it’s readership, but I think they’ll find that many of their readers understand this key point.
Tigtog, you’re kidding right? Blogging may destroy opinion in newspapers, or at the very least devalue or dilute their power and effectiveness in that area but that’s about it, the kids should know that considering the way journalism is going there will always be a place for ambulance chasers fresh out of J school.
But there is never a substitute for the investigative journalism powers of a big Org like the Oz….if they choose to actually throw some resources at that rather than waste their time attacking bloggers of course.
That’s what journalism schools should be worrying about not bloggers….a lack of resources made available by the moguls to investigate their Govt and corporate pals - it’s trite I know but speaking truth to power still works for me. Instead we get silly pieces like the one today when there are bigger fish to fry.
What the MSM misses about blogging is that they expect a blog or blogger to be a one stop shop for quality opinion when the power of blogging is the personal aggregation of information across the content of a number of bloggers over time. It that critical mass of information collected in bite sized chunks in a feed reader that not only helps help you form an opinion but influences you.
Now back to the cous cous, lamb cutlets and a second glass of home made vino.
I don’t think The Australian is so much missing the point of political blogs, it is just thinking of itself too much. All three articles note the same point, that blogs are being read in the type of political circles that The Australian hopes too influence and it is clearly losing it. Shanahan may have had credibility while Howard was ascendant, but the paper is looking out of touch now. Look at the recent U-turns it has had to do on Haneef and Howard’s own electoral prospects. Too bad, things change!
Exactly,TPS. It is very hard for the GG with a conservative mindset to get out of the past and realise the ground has shifted. Another major shift they seem to have difficulty overcoming is the old pull a Rabbit out of a hat to win an election theory which might or might not work this time. Cheering each attempt becomes self defeating when the magician fools nobody except himself though.
I started blogging when a friend who works in a marketing and PR company told me he thought that blogs were a new information sharing paradigm that would turn mainstream media on its head.
Looking at the recent argy bargy between the GG & bloggers, and mention of “blogosphere opinions” by Tony Jones in his intro to the recent Great Global Warming Swindle, it seems this is happening.
Previously, the public had to swallow (or throw up) the tripe that the media feeds us occasionally. Now
anyone can write on a blog that the emperor has no clothes.
The GG itself acknowledged their problem in the famous editorial attacking Mumble and others when they admitted they can and will only attack the Federal Government from the right. What they don’t see is with this ludicrous position as the Government becomes more isolated the GG becomes even more irrelevant as a political force in this election.
I agree but I don’t think the bloggers should be getting ahead of themselves here. This is less about the power of bloggers but more about confusion in establishment circles. And this is not just confined to the media. Looking at the way the legal profession has been all over the place on the use of the antiterrorism laws.
By the way, steve, there have been an awful lot of expectations that Howard would pull a rabbit out his hat in the blogging circles as well (admittedly from a position of concern).
In this mornings SMH they published a letter from an ex-government PR staffer which shines a bright light into the dark corners of media management by our current government. I am willing to bet that only MSM follow-up to this storey, if any, will be to discredit the writer. Its called looking after the customer!
Bloggers are no threat to real reporters, in fact we feed of real news stories and even feed back news into the chain.
Bloggers ARE a threat, however, to the media elite who INTERPRET the news, and VET it, and MAKE IT UP for their own political and fiscal purposes. It’s the editors and columnist who are screaming about the end of the world as they know it.
BTW, is it just me? 13 responses here, and 8 at RTS, and nobody has mentioned Tim Dunlop? It’s nearly a month since the Murdoch media censored his blog, you know. One assumes he has had time for a chat with teh bureacracy. So it seems pretty clear that he has been muzzled, and accepted it. Which just goes to prove that all MSM-run blogs are total crap.
The other issue is you never know if they are just trolling for eyeballs. That article got a bunch of links from prominent blogs. I suspect it is a bit of both.
Also particularly ironic that the psephologist blogs they criticise are by far and away higher quality and more detailed in their analysis than MSM writing on polling. The psephologists stand out as a particular Auian form of the blogopshere that I am not seeing in the other countries political blogging.
I think they are the Auian gems and the MSM has nothing even close that can rival them.
How’s this for a consistent reliable view of the world? No wonder they dislike scrutiny.
I am skeptical, cam. It might work in the USA where top blogs have daily readerships in the hundreds of thousands; but in Australia the most visited plog is probably this one, and it’s getting a bit under 3000 average visits per day (a few hundred more than Troppo).
Personally I think that the success of the US megablogs has been driven partly by their willingness to fish out stories by themselves; but partly also because they’ve been more successful at building communities as well. DailyKos is the pivotal example: the Scoop codebase outgrew Kuro5hin to power DK and a number of other megasites of a similar nature (such as RedState).
Australia, having come later to the scene, began with 3rd generation platforms like Wordpress, Movable Type, Blogspot and Blogger; platforms to which community is not the focus of design or function. 2nd generation platforms like Scoop or Slash still have the edge in community building and story-aggregating technology.
Journalism programs are going to face quite a shake up around this very soon, possibly around the Federal Election this year. In the ‘media wars’ debates of about 10 years ago, the defence of journalism educators against the challenge of media/cultural studies was that they needed to maintain credibility with the mainstream media, defined primarily as the newspaper editors. It could now well be the case that this argument rests upon both shifting and eroding sands.
As Steven Den Beste says:
As far as opinion pieces go, the blogs already leave the major dailies for dead. Their interactivity and real-time challenges bring accountability far beyond a begrudging correction paragraph buried on page 33. And that only happens when the dailies can’t be bothered circling the wagons. There also seems to be a dearth of talent in some of the daily opinion columns where the usual suspects endlessly recycle the same piece over and over. They desperately need a wider variety of voices.
OTOH the ability to break stories is changing quickly. There’s a whole generation of neo-Zapruders out there with increasingly capable mobile phone cameras. These reporters might be panning from their mate’s bare backside to the latest Hindenburg, but they’ll still be first on the scene. We just have to be vigilant against the odd Adrian Hajj.
test
Hrrrrmmmm… every time I see the acronym MSM I think of how the freepers (ab)use it.
To be avoided, methinks.
Jacques, It might work in the USA where top blogs have daily readerships in the hundreds of thousands;
Picking fights is good marketing. Look at the current dailykos and Bill O’Reilly fight. I don’t watch O’Reilly (or cable/network news for that matter) but because of the ‘news’ factor of it I have seen O’Reilly’s youtubes on a bunch of sites across the US political spectrum. Have even watched them to see what the deal is.
the Scoop codebase outgrew Kuro5hin to power DK and a number of other megasites of a similar nature (such as RedState).
I agree. The lone scoop attempt in the Auian blogs didnt catch on as a large community and has adopted the blog style. Interestingly the next gen dailykos platform is being written in ruby.
Well I can’t speak for the superdome, but let us never forget the quality information about WMDs heaped upon us by Judith Miller of the illustrious New York Times.
See, what Brad and Andrew haven’t come to grips with is there’s this thing called the internet, whereby readers can check the “facts” dispensed from on high by the overpaid loud-hailers on the daily blathersheets.
I think that LP could probably succeed with a move to a DailyKos / scoop model. It has lots of readers and lefties love to talk to each other!
The thing about the “next gen Daily Kos” - which they seem to call DK4.0 - is that after saying in February it’ll be developed using Ruby on Rails the whole thing goes quiet.
But getting an alternative source of facts is not the problem, it is the interpretation of the ones we already have. We didn’t need the coalition forces to invade Iraq to know that a sanction–gripped country struggling with basic infrastructure was incapable of developing weapons of mass destruction. We didn’t need an inquiry to tell us that refugees who risked their lives to travel hundreds of miles across the seas to give their kids a better life would them throw them overboard as a ruse to get the Navy to pick them up. Nor do we need to wait for the final findings of the intervention into the indigenous communities to tell us that the claims of a child abuse epidemic were a beat-up. Anyone can read the original report and see the lack of evidence for themselves.
I think Gandhi summed it up nicely. Its the unquestioned control of how the news is presented, and what constitutes “worthy” news that’s the problem with the MSN.
The concentration of ownership becomes rather less problematic if anyone can jump online and point out a lie or inaccuracy in your 15 layers of rigorous fact checking.
Having said that I’m more likely to be skeptical of a “big” claim made online than in a major news service.
The Piping Shrike
There are bad people in the world, I worked in detention and can honestly say, although extremely rare (about 3 in 3,000+ detainees) at least one I met would have set his kids on fire in a heartbeat if it would have got him what he wanted.
He used his kids to smash windows, go on hunger strikes and so on.
I was at the pickup for his group and after we took everyone off the boat there was a few bags left. No-one owned up to them so they were left behind. After a few of the detainees were released the story came out that this man and his 2 sons (one about 13 the other 18) had thrown 2 Afghans overboard at sea.
He will never be charged.
Another man I considered evil (more so than the abusers) allowed his small daughter to be molested.
A female officer spotted a man sitting with about 3 others, bouncing a little girl (about 5) on his lap. She also spotted the blokes dick out between her legs. He was “humping” her thighs without vaginal penetration, the other 2 fellows there were aware of what was happening as well. The officer yelled at him and they took off.
An attempt was made to lay charges (this was before another allegation made it to the papers) But the father, who was friends with the blokes in question refused to allow it.
It was a source of great anger and frustration to officers.
I have given this story and many others to a couple of media organisations, backed up by reports and other witnesses if needed. I have boxes of documents, but because the stories don’t “spin” either way detainees/govt = good/bad and has a bit of complexity its not news.
95% of the people who went through detention were no better or worse than you or I, a small number were what Id call saints, and would have released in an instant, and the smallest group were assholes and evil.
I use the detention centres as an example of media “falling down” because the level of activism from the ABC was positively surreal. NONE of the media tried to show any of the complexity and actively sought out only stories that fitted their “spin”.
Things like the Curtain centre being extremely badly run, I was so offended during my rotation there I put in numerous complaints. The place being staffed ands run basically by Queensland prisons staff.
Sorry for the rant but media “accuracy” is not a term I like to use.
This is more about self-interested journalists protecting their patch than any real debate on the worth or otherwise of the blogosphere.
Whereas lazy journalists could once slip their hastily put-together piece of deadline-beating drivel past an editor and hope a reader wouldn’t write to complain about the crap the paper keeps serving up in the name of informed news or opinion, there are now a thousand pedantic critics—with access to many of the same resources the journalists once had to themselves—who will respond immediately. And critically.
This is what makes them uncomfortable.
There are bad people in the world, I worked in detention and can honestly say, although extremely rare (about 3 in 3,000+ detainees) at least one I met would have set his kids on fire in a heartbeat if it would have got him what he wanted.
He used his kids to smash windows, go on hunger strikes and so on.
One in 1,000 abusers would be equal to, if not even lower than, the general population.
So, your point?
There ya go.
Helen
I should have been clearer. The point was that he became a “cause” for a number of people based entirely on what was written about him.
Fortunately this support dried up very quickly when his supporters actually met him. He then retreated and let his kids do the talking.
That 1 in 1000 isnt just a bit bad, thats people who would kill, standover and rob/rape at the drop of a hat.
That was the point of saying “no worse than me or you”. Everyone makes some stuff ups and does a few things which, with hindsight, are wrong or hurt others. That’s the other 95% I was referring to.
The reason for bringing it up? The canonisation of ALL refugees is fairly silly, but it has been a tactic for their supporters from day 1. Its simplistic and rather silly, like bringing up high achievers of whatever group, or the low achievers, its just not realistic or sensible. At least 1 boat was deliberately sunk in view of the RAN, others were crippled and made unseaworthy. Its semantics to then say “but they didnt throw the kids in the water”.
The point,to bring it back to the media argument, was that much of the actions taken by detainees were instigated by a core group of thugs with a definite eye to favourable coverage from the ABC. I had detainees on many occasions explain what they were going to do and it wasnt “personal” but aimed at getting press coverage. It got to the stage where the first action in a riot was to cut the public phones, because sure as apples a detainee would be on the phone to the ABC.
Scrutiny on detention was and still is needed, however I can say without reservation that biased or agenda based reporting by the ABC was a catalyst for may of the incidents at Port Hedland.
The ABC sent up media crews to cover a protest by about 15 people on a bus. Not even the local news considered it worth covering.
The ABC was an advocate, not a news organ. It was no less a hatchet job than A current affair covering “dole bludgers” or any other group they choose to villanize.
A reporter or news organisation has a duty to report facts, on many occasions the media prints whatever juicy anecdote fits their agenda and the facts be damned.
Annoyed you weren’t just left alone to carry out the will of the government as you saw fit?
Sorry mate, but your lot, your employers and the people who contracted them were and are not to be trusted sight unseen. There’s a lot of nasty stuff that thrives when nobody is looking and whether you liked it or not, the ABC kept the light on.
For instance you seem to be quite genuinely upset that the detainees would actually be trying things on to get attention so they could get out of there. You’ve totally forgotten that most of them shouldn’t have been there and were only there in order to get the Federal Liberal government elected.
You may have had the best of intentions, but you were captured by the system. You should have been wondering why the hell kids were locked up with these desperate and unpleasant adults at all.
Blogs are a blight on centralized propaganda. Mark my words, nothing good will come of it.
zebbidies spring
Gee heaps of shades of grey and complexity in your argument isnt there?
Let me tell you a story, its a true one, and it might, just might give you an idea of some of what went on between those eeevil staff and detainees.
I was placed in charge of activities for a few months at PH centre. The budget was crap and it was impossible to get approval for much in the way of outside activities, due in no small part to a couple of escape attempts.
I proposed a fishing trip each morning for 2 officers and 6 detainees out to a strech of beach called the spoil bank. I wrote in for approval and heard nothing back for 2 weeks. I had been prepared for this so re-submitted it to the 3 heads of the centre with the addition of “if i dont hear within 2 weeks I will take it as approved”.
2 weeks later i took the first group out for the couple of hours and continued to do so for the next 3 weeks regardless of if I was paid or not.
The centre manager only found out because DIMIA came and passed on compliments for the programme as it was a big boost for the long term detainees.
I was summonsed and sort of disciplined but the programme continued on and off for the next 3 years.
I might point out this couldn’t have gone on without the active collusion of both non-management staff, shift supervisors and detainees in order to get around Sydney based management.
I can give you any number of stories (once stopped a mosque burning to the ground) of other officers as well. Not quite the evil baby eaters you want us to be, but then again you probably got most of your info from activists and the ABC.
I might also point out it was rare to have a detainee cause any problems unless they received a knock-back on their visa application.
But I’m wasting my breath I’m sure you know much more than someone who was there for 4 years, testified against the assistant manager of PHIRPC when he saw him bash a detainee eh??? Be a bit to confusing for you to remember the same regime was in place during the Hawke/Keating years as well?
I think we’ve moved on from the original intent of this post, so can we get back on track, this is about the Oz and blogging not the ABC and detention facilities etc….move along ok
To get back to the original issue, the point that seems to be coming from the original Oz article was that bloggers are not being alternative sources of news like in the US. But I’m not sure that is such a bad thing. Too often this ‘alternative’ news just becomes either conspiracy theories, or, as the article suggests, major parties using the sites as a dumping ground for their own political reasons. I think the problem with those who want to be an alternative is not the lack of alternative facts, but the interpretation of the ones we have. Too often those who pose themselves as an alternative accept the premises of those they are trying to oppose without questioning them. The NT intervention is a case in point.
Fair enough Phil. I shall swallow my rejoinders to Mole.
And just point out that, once I started reading blogs, the quality of analysis and writing that I came across and the quality of the commenters opened my eyes as to just how shallow, blinkered and agenda-driven the opinionators in the press where (obviously not all blogs or all commenters).
If I want a new story (ie happening NOW) the media organisations are champion. For understanding, I will almost always turn to blogs (except for economics where there are no bloggers that com close to Ross Gittins). And very often I will turn to American or British blogs, where the standard of writing that is churned out is astonishing.
This is the sort of competition in the “marketplace of ideas” that the Oz is always blathering about. ‘Cept now that they’re being out-competed, they resort to the first response of all doomed businessmen: don’t improve what you do - try and drag your competition down to your level.
Makes you wonder how much exposure to actual capitalism these corporate warriors have ever actually had.
How about Quiggin?
There are some other economists who are good bloggers in Australia - Nick Gruen at Troppo, Joshua Gans, Andrew Leigh, etc., but they don’t tend to write commentary on current economic issues and trends to the same degree that JQ does.
Peter Martin who’s an MSM crossover - columnist for the Canberra Times - does the Gittins style thing at his blog regularly and well.
http://petermartin.blogspot.com/
Hmmn…
So it IS just me, then.
Pity.
Mark
I read Quiggin most days, but he tends to the economic theory end and is rather too wonkish for my understandings. Gittins is better at describing what it means. He also keeps an humanistic eye on what it means to the production units at the pointy end of economic theories.
As to the others, I mean no disrepect to their statuses as economists, but for my purposes, with my (limited) understanding of economics, Gittins fits the bill the best.
But now I’ve followed the link, Peter Martin may tempt me away from The Beard…especially as surfing the SMH website makes me feel like I’m stuck in the doctors waiting room, forced to read endless tripe about overseas celebrities or (worse!) some some arch gossip about the tiresome gaggle of property developers and their banking system enablers which is, apparently, what Sydney Society is composed of.
Gandhi, the conclusion you’ve come to is fairly obvious - that Tim has found out that the freedom of MSM blogging has its own limits. I don’t criticise him for continuing to earn a crust from it, though I would have been happier if he’d felt able to say something about what transpired. It’s really up to everyone to take that into account when reading his blog, and I said on the thread about this a while back I think it’s unhelpful to personalise commentary on the situation.
zebbidies, I suspect you’d like Peter Martin, having read your explanation.
Comments crossed!
That’s only going to work with Melbourne journos. In Sydney, we’re all the more outdoorsy, active types, not interested in talking politics over a beer.
Every time John Thorpe opens his trap he says something stupider than the time before.
Mark,
Hmmn. Dare I suggest that perhaps you are personalizing it?
It might look like I am pursuing a personal grudge against Tim, but actually I have consistently acknowledged that he is a good writer and does a great job blogging against Howard. Tim is not the real problem, whatever his personal failings might be. It is Murdoch that is the real problem, and THI$$$$ is how he works.
What frustrates me is that a man with Tim’s obvious intelligence takes the bait, and that so many observers say, “Well, who can blame him?” Obviously he’s gotta feed his starving children, and pay for his Mum’s operation, right?
It’s that damned Gordon Gecko “business is business” mentality, which has done so much damage to our society. I’m sure Dick Cheney’s friends don’t blame him for invading Iraq either - after all, business is business, right?
To a student of hirstory this is fascinating fun…kinda like listening into the Middle ages.
‘These new printing presses are publishing rubbish…plus they might put us out of a job!’
But then to my deep and lasting shame and embarrassment most anarchists don’t get the web either.
Agreed Amanda. John Thorpe seems to still be living with an ideal of pubs from a few decades back. He probably feels that these sorts of changes are a retrogressive for the pubs.