I went along to the New Farm Neighbourhood Centre‘s Politics in the Pub at the Powerhouse on Tuesday night where there was an interesting discussion about media ownership. Speakers were Arch Bevis, Labor Member for Brisbane, Drew Hutton, Queensland Greens Convenor, Kathy MacLeish from ABC TV’s Stateline, and Dr Jason Wilson from Creative Industries at QUT. Jason, who had a guest post published here this week about the project he’s working on – youdecide2007 – reframed the question of ownership to encompass what we’ve been talking about this year with the Government Gazette vs. the blogosphere wars – the potential of new media to disrupt the MSM’s “ownership” of authoritative opinion. (See also this article by Margaret Simons for more background and analysis.) I videoed his talk, and also some of the question time where I raised a few of those issues and sought a response from Bevis and Hutton, who’d focussed on the Howard government’s amendments to media ownership legislation. There were some more questions later, but we recessed to go and look at the red moon, and I got caught up with wine and convivial conversation.
Not sure if this is the right place for this but owing to a combination of thing I have not been able to watch the Voter Verdict on Sky News,I was kinda amused that an American Republician Bushie type was imported to do the show,just curious if anyone watched and what it was like
Speaking of the GG v. blogs war, Dennis Sham-I-am has three (count ‘em) pro-war propaganda pieces in teh Oz today, including a Chrenkoff-style blog entry about all the good news from Iraq.
Tim “Inside The Tent” Dunlop’s response? “Interesting”
A lot of people were acclaiming the last MSM-blogs stoush as a victory for the bloggers, but it looks like Tim has been successfully muzzled. And the MSM marches on…
EG: Miranda Devine is now the Fairfax correspondent in Baghdad, would you believe.
More at my blog if anyone is interested.
Point the First:
Usual bare figures were presented, gary morgan’s, supporting conventional wisdom that we have a largely illiterate, commercial-tv-news opinion-formed populace.
I didn’t hear any comments or questions** about how uniform or otherwise that big-brigades phenomenon is across the demographs IE is above as true for 30, or are their opinions more googlified than channelten-emented?
…. (What are the patterns of dis/information in that demographic, that archipeligo of echo-chambers? I’m a trained Morgan pollster, and no survey I know of ever mentions blogs, and I would be surprised if the other polling vendors were any different.
Thus, there’s a good chance that influence of 2.0 etc will be being systematically underestimated: it’s a question of when, not if, it becomes significant. Does federalection.com.au-type offerings from the majors indicate that moment’s approach? ) …
Point the Second:
Mark: Did you recover form the hemlock, or whatever made you facesick, enough to make it to the socratic forum @ parliament house next night?
If so, what’s the skinny on it? Postworthy, surely?
Spot the Dog:
** Then again it was difficult, nay impossible, to get such a question in, what with those few who did get the mic treating it as an opportunity to give a policy speech. Present poster excluded of course.
No, I didn’t make it to the Socratic Forum, but I gather via Facebook that Sam Clifford is going to be posting about it:
http://ronaldraygun.livejournal.com/