The only downside for Rudd in fighting this unlosable election is if he loses.
Yep, would have made Dennis’ job much easier if Rudd had run to lose… Then all that commentary about the “preferred PM theorem”, “we understand the polls because we own them”, blah, bleh, might not have been just waiting for its karmic rebound. Me, I’m just disappointed he didn’t find a way to work sausage rolls into this particular column.
It’s about time that we had an open thread to discuss the way the media have covered and commented on this campaign so far. Lots to talk about!
Comical Ali:
Dennis is not that far behind Comical Ali. Apart from Matt Price, George Megalogenis and a few others the Oz has earned its reputation as the Government Gazette. So many of Rupert’s people don’t even bother to conceal their partisan love of John Howard.
The lipstick and “cheap” perfume coating on LNP turds describes for me the approach of the Murdoch bordello of newspapers in this long running campaign.
(It’s going to be sweet to see them grovel if Labor gets a landslide.)
The siren song of Dennis et al reminds me of what the waspish Gilbert said to Arthur Sullivan:
Spot on Peter!
OF COURSE it is all about Murdoch, in the end, not the pathetic hired underlings who compete to solicit his favour with ever-more-ridiculous bile and nonsense.
OTOH, News Ltd columnists like Shanahan, Albrechtsen, Milne et al have their loony equivalents at Fairfax (see Gerard Henderson and Miranda Devine for starters).
Newspaper publishers regularly defend their support for such “elites” by claiming that their extremist views are entertaining and generate healthy debate (and coincidentally help sell lots of papers). But it’s funny how leftwing equivalents never get offered a column, innit?
In the end it all comes back to the billionaire publishers and their own Big Business agendas. During the Howard years, these agendas have been ably abetted by the relentless withering of media ownership laws, but in truth it was already bad enough under Keating.
What’s needed, probably, is community-owned competitors. But until somebody like George Soros comes along to help fund such a project, blogs like this are probably the best response we have.
NB: I would also urge readers to support independent magazines like The Monthly.
I guess the harping eminating from the GG is the only thing that lets Kevin claim some sort of underdog status. Some days you would think the polls are reversed with the tripe the Murdoch papers spew.
gandhi,
I beg to differ, I think Phillip Adams is a ‘left-wing equivalent’. At least he CLAIMS to be left. Some of his columns in the GG beggar belief. A couple of years ago he did a rant about how, very soon, the Howard Govt would be locking up ‘dissidents’ such as his good self. These guys who never lived under Hitler or Stalin or Pol Pot sometimes harbour strange fantasies of future repression. His columns are shockers, often, IMHO. They give journalism a bad name – let alone what innocent readers may conclude about ‘left opinion’.
OTOH I like his “late Night Live” interviews – relaxed, humane, not afraid of delving into detail.
cheerio
Also worth noting: following the latest Newspoll, I think the GG is now moving into a new phase of strategery, in synch with the Howard government. The fear-mongering is cranking up a notch.
Yesterday it was Greg Sheridan all but conceding defeat while warning ominously about a one-party state under Rudd. Today Sham-I-am echoes the “End Is Nigh” meme. Note that both bitterly attribute Rudd’s inevitable sweeping victory to the vast left-wing media conspiracy.
The Wise Men Of The Right have always said that Australians will stop supporting a Rudd victory when they begin to contemplate the real consequences of such a foolish choice. I think the GG is trying to paint a picture of this barren post-Howard landscape for voters who obviously lack the requisite imagination.
Coincidentally, Costello is today warning of a global “tsunami” hitting the financial markets (and these are people who criticized Keating for his alarmist “banana republic” phrase?).
But I think the real fear-mongering is yet to come. I fully expect an incident of some kind to be portrayed as a terrorist attack on Australians sometime in the next four weeks (just as happened in Spain). And when it happens, the Murdoch media will be right there fanning the flames.
I’ve just been reading the ‘uncut’ version of Paul Barry’s ‘The Rise and Rise Of Kerry Packer’. It’s instructive to look at the section on how the extent of influence of Sir Frank Packer, through is organ of influence the Daily Telegraph, in keeping the Libs in power for 23 years.
I would argue that the mainstream media now is probably even more partisan, particularly now that the Libs have finally co-opted the once proudly independent ABC to their fold and the Fairfax metros have become lifestyle papers, pandering to the frenzied consumption of Sydney and Melbourne yuppies.
Murdoch’s The Australian is shameless and I really cannot understand (beyond the need to make a buck) how many of the working journalists there can justify to themselves working a a publication that so brazenly twists the news to favour a particular political party.
Ambigulous, but at least Adams’ columns are just that -’columns’. What’s unforgiveable in the Oz is the twisting of straight news to favour the Libs.
Ambigulous,
I’ve always thought of Adams as more of a humorist and social commentator than a political scribe. Even if he is a leftist, that is one out of how many in the News Ltd stable?
You could probably also point to Fairfax writers like Alan Ramsay or Mike Carlton, but then I think you have to distinguish legitimate, reasoned criticism of an existing government from nonsensical partisan cheerleading. And surely that is the point: composition or decomposition, as Peter Kemp put it earlier.
I have a friend who works at the GG, who admits to being troubled by this on a regular basis.
But where else can he go? It’s not as if there’s a lot of work for journalists at the moment (particularly good high-level work), and look at the alternatives – they’re even worse.
As much as the blatantly ignorant bias of the Oz shits me, I have to grudgingly admit that it’s investigative journalism and international coverage still beats any other Australian newspaper (don’t forget that it was the Oz that first brought out the Haneef affair, for example).
Unfortunately, it looks as is the Oz is (as an employer, as well as a newspaper), the best of a bad lot. Which just goes to show the crap state of MMS in Australia at the moment.
I’ve finally given up reading newspapers entirely.
gandhi
I wasn’t arguing that Adams “balances out the numbers”. I was trying to convey my view that he is as silly, in most of his columns (poorly argued, badly written) as some of the right-wing columnists you decry. I read some of his columns as hysterical rants (almost reaching the Pure Platinum Deveny Heights Of Excellence).
Adams in full flight, Albrechtsen in full flight: a plague on both their houses.
“……the Fairfax metros have become lifestyle papers, pandering to the frenzied consumption of Sydney and Melbourne yuppies”
Amen to that statement Mr Denmore.
Salacious lifestyle pornography.
Shanahan, like Kelly and the ludicrous Sheridan, just have no credibility left. This column was pretty unremarkable – the only noteworthy line was his clumsy swipe at the “so-called free media” for daring to run “positive” stories about ALP polling and Rudd’s leadership. Nothing more needs to be said on that front, I think, given the Oz’s extraordinarily biased coverage.
Interesting in terms of the MSM business is that the Oz appears to be a partially “free” agent within the Murdoch machine; Murdoch appears to be tacitly supporting Rudd over Howard at present, and is generally pushing climate change as an issue (amazingly, given Murdoch’s utter lack of ethics in most arenas), but the Oz has been allowed, or has insisted, on pushing the other way. Perhaps Chris Mitchell has something on Rupert?
Yes Ambigulous, Adams is a strange one. His columns are routinely terrible, but he can come into his own on latenight live sometimes (when he’s not interrupting the guest).
Ambigulous: “Adams in full flight, Albrechtsen in full flight: a plague on both their houses.”
I fully agree. Although in my view the Adamses, Albrechtsens and Akermans are so over the top that they have no influence on anybody and serve only to provide harmless entertainment for strong supporters or opponents. My concern is really the lack of balanced commentary rather than the inclusion of the rantings of idealogues.
But the Shanahan opinion pieces are in a class of their own because the bias is more insidious and the columns are frequently given the prominence of real news items – sometimes the lead item on the front page.
This in turn is part of the wider problem of the GG’s front page being a daily exercise in spin, with the headlines, presentation and content carefully calculated to provide the strongest possible pro-Government message.
The Worst of Perth: “Yes Ambigulous, Adams is a strange one. His columns are routinely terrible, but he can come into his own on latenight live”
I also enjoy much of Adam’s work. But it seems to me that his current contract with the Oz requires him to provide a ridiculous counterweight to the newspaper’s real bias in order to give an impression of balance. Which is OK. I’m sure his part in the charade enables him to extract huge sums of filthy lucre from the GG and how can that be a bad thing.
Thanks Jenny & Worst
I’m glad I’m not the only Adams-sceptic. You’re right about the GG front page, Jenny. Very carefully designed.
Other papers used to do more of that “leading-column-on-front-page” caper, f’rinstance “The Age” with Michelle Grattan. Seems less common now.
I’m with Jenny – I too could live with a Wall Street Journal model that has pretty straight news reporting accompanied by batsh*t-crazy editorial pages, but Orwellian techniques on the their front page is another thing altogether.
This is slowly morphing into a condemn thread. Can we have another proper condemn thread, pretty please?
While “contemplating the barren post-Howard landscape”, I’ve decided to stock up on canned goods and petrol. Maybe some U.S.-style football pads, too, for when I’m out scavenging with my fellow mohawked desperadoes.
Wantok said:
Do you have any links at all to back that up? I think that is a completely false assertion.
I think Rupert is measuring his personal comments very carefully (for fear of becoming a visible part of the campaign) and keeping a bob (or ten thousand billion bobs) each way. As for climate change, I think the global aggregation of scientific evidence and opinion means that the issue has now escaped his super-editorial spin (in personal comments, he still describes global warming as a fallacy). Same goes for Iraq, where the daily carnage and political farce makes pro-war spin look ridiculous.
Yae, verily, even the might Mr Murdoch – one of the greatest War Criminals on this earth, incidentally – cannot forever keep pretending that the Iraq campaign he championed from the get-go is going well, or that our precious globe remains unperturbed by his Big Business mates’ reckless activities. For all his power, Murdoch remains a slave to public opinion, even as he helps shape it on every continent.
Meanwhile, Murdoch today is celebrating the birth of his new Fox Business Network, including the resources of Dow Jones and the Wall Street Journal, thanks to supine government support:
And you thought his control of news was bad – imagine when you cannot even trust the latest data from the Stock Exchange!
Talk about your role models.
Funny you should say that Greg. Someone out there is already exploring the tonsorial implications of this election.
I think Piers is a pretty good roll model.
Dennis should not kid himself that he is engaged in proper journalism and real reporting.
It always struck me that while there is a cheersquad for the Liberal Party (Albrechtseins, Bolt, Akerman) but there is no equivalent for the labor Party.
Of course there are many left commentators, but they tend to berate the ALP for not being progressive enough. So Labor cops it on both sides.
A breathtaking example of how Liberal journalists operate is the latest from Andrew Bolt where he twists a simple response from a journalist’s question into ‘politicising the death’
This is discussed at Not a Hedgehog.
gandhi,
you might easily have missed it, but a few months ago Rupert the American announced [drum roll, fanfare] that News Limited would be taking steps to become ‘carbon neutral’. I assume this referred to printing, distribution, production, office space, etc.
Of course, even if a corporation is ‘carbon neutral’, it can still be a blight on the planet as its emissions of BULLSHIT continue to rise at an alarming rate.
come to think of it, can I be “bullshit neutral”, if I take in as much bullshit as I spout, on a daily average basis?
And were I to follow Jobby @ 10.21am, and cease reading newspapers at all, would I then be obliged to shut (TF) up, to maintain my bullshit neutral status?
Heaven forfend!
I think you’ve hit on something there Ambigulous. Maybe that’s the reason we get such poor service from the Canberra gallery – they’re so used to eating shit from the pollies they can’t taste their own waste any more!
I think that’s because the newspaper columnists tend to argue over the cultural politics divide than the economic one. The Libs have made the deeply socially conservative ground their own. But Labor, fearing the wedge, has been reluctant to adopt the progressive side.
My major disappointment -apart from the fact I live in WA so my only daily newspaper choice is between the Australian and the West Australian- has been the ABC. The 7pm news has been fairly balanced, but it seems the later it gets in the evening, the further the ABC bends backwards to spin for the Coalition. A prime example was the use of footage of someone presenting Rudd with a bottle of champagne at a shopping centre. The 7pm News included the line: the bottle was refused as premature. This line had disappeared by the time the footage got onto Lateline, and it looked like Rudd had accepted the bottle, and was showing “hubris” by celebrating already.
The ABC has over-corrected, since being so badly bruised by 11 years of Culture Wars.
And having its board stacked with wingnuts such as Keith Windschuttle and
Anne CoulterJanet Albrechtson.I think that some sort of bullshit emissions trading scheme might be in order here.
What bugs the hell out of me is the A..bloody B..bloody..C and it’s lightweight moral equivalence between the two major party’s campaigns. The standard ‘balanced’ line is that both sides are equally guilty of using smears. I must have missed the bit where the ALP told us how Australians will be doomed to eternal suffering if we re-elect the Howard team. Why can’t journalists call a spade a spade and describe the Liberal ads, and the BCA ads for that matter, as the unashamed scaremongering tripe that they are?
Similarly, why can’t ABC journalists mention Paul Keating, factually, as ‘the former Prime Minister’ without adding ‘who gave us the recession we had to have’? Do they always mention John Howard as ‘the Prime Minister who let a Govt agency pay $300m in bribes to Saddam Hussain’ or ‘who gave us the GST he promised he would never never introduce’?
There is no ‘balance’ in the supposedly independent publically-funded ABC. There is only a perverted version of ‘balance’. That’s why Tip can go on like a goose and get reported seriously. If someone had the balls to call bullshit, he might temper his rhetoric a tad. But no, we have to have ‘balance’ rather than scrutiny.
To be honest, the Coalition is in such deep shit, it won’t matter how much of a boost they get in the MSM. And I doubt it will take long for Rudd to make his own appointments to the ABC Board. Maybe Joe McDonald can get a gig, now he’s out of the ALP?
I agree with Alan that the ABC has “over-corrected”. So paranoid have newsrooms there become after years of witch-hunts by the Alstons of the world that they now routinely spin for the government, even in their “straight” news coverage.
You hear it in the credulous way they report even the most outrageous piece of Coalition spin. The journalistic skills of providing context and distance are forsaken for a literal-minded application of the ‘impartiality’ principle.
Apart from Kerry O’Brien, ABC journos invariably go in harder in their questioning of Labor figures than their government counterparts. And they dutifully chase after blatant government red herrings, while letting real stories rot.
The old man always referred to the Oz as the Troglodyte Times, even back in its better days.
At least Shanahan, Sheridan & Akerman will have jobs waiting for them at Quadrant when the revolution comes.
BTW, I put this comment on the previous thread about the weird Age editorial on Summer Heights High, but it’s also apposite for this column:
Methinks we’re overdue for a TV satire based on what goes on in an op/ed editor’s office.
It’s been well over 10 years since the demise of Frontline, yeah?
BTW – great post title, Kim!
This is the election that blogs have come to the fore.
The more the mainstream press decry political blogs the more they demonstrate their fear. And so they should.
Why have professional and corrupt political commentators on what should be the right of every citizen? Corrupt, you might ask? The National Press Club is your answer.
Even the most stupid blogger is a thousand times more profound than the likes of Dennis Shanahan and co.