The Australian has been indulging itself in a spot of end of year defensive triumphalism, filling almost an entire page of its paper edition with quotes from Bernard Keane and Laura Tingle apparently proving that “Dennis Shanahan was right!” or something. In Tingle’s case, it must be because of her temerity in criticising the paper.
What all this boils down to is the claim that the rest of the press gallery is somehow blinded by ideology – proved by the fact that no one else saw the downfall of Kevin Rudd coming. To that end, there’s something of a taste of next year’s paywall tactics – an article by Chris Kenny demonstrating that the gallery are all lefties, which is only in the print edition, and which hardly justifies outlaying a buck or two because its basic premise is that the PM should have more Liberal party talking points put to her at press conferences.
The alternative explanation for the “we and only we are right because we are so brilliant” hypothesis is that they were the crew that various alleged US informants were also spruiking to about Rudd’s impending doom.
Jeremy Sear notices the links between this tendentious piece and another – a lament by Michael Thompson that the ALP has deserted “working class values”, a line the said author was peddling as long ago as 1999, in a book called Labor Without Class. Thompson is perhaps best known for a bizarre website mixing climate change denialism with cheerleading for urban development, all united by an odd workerist rhetoric.
Sear ties together this with a quote from the paper’s editorial:
There is a deeper malaise, as Chris Kenny writes in our pages today, born of the tendency for journalists to come increasingly from a tertiary-educated elite with a “disdain for the vulgarity, ignorance and prejudices of working families and their suburbs”.
Ok, then.
Meanwhile, Christopher Joye has a neat post drawing some more threads together:
Yes, The Australian seems intent on imitating a non-comedic version of The Chaser, with its ‘war on everything’. This weekend it returns to its war on the Press Gallery. A few quick observations.
First, The Australian appears to spend more time defending its own actions in pushing specific agendas and ideological narratives than any other serious media forum on earth (and I don’t include the Global Times in the serious media camp!). This is revealing. It betrays a sense of insecurity. The Australian is clearly not comfortable in its own skin if it has to dedicate so many column inches to rationalising its own decisions. One might ask why…
Second, The Australian’s crusade today is littered with logical inconsistencies. The editorial runs a familiar line, criticising both the Government and the Press Gallery for being out of touch with popular mainstream views on climate change and asylum-seekers. Yet in literally the same breath, The Australian assaults the Government (and the Press Gallery) for its ‘vacuous’ reaction to extraordinarily strong public views on the equity of our banking system. Sorry, but I am confused. You punish the government for listening to the vast majority of consumers on the question of fairness in a taxpayer-backed banking system, but concurrently punish them for ignoring a far less clear majority (minority?) on global warming and asylum-seekers. These are terribly weak intellectual foundations on which to base criticisms of others, and on which to justify your own behaviour.
Update: More from Joye on the Oz’s Doomsday Code.
Elsewhere: Loon Pond.
Update: John Quiggin.
The Oz is becoming quite strident in its self-righteousness, absurdly so recently
On the weekend they engaged a former Liberal party insider to write an article on how the Press Gallery got it wrong during 2010. And lo and behold he finds that, apart from the OZ itself, the gallery demonstrated its ineptness and/or bias because they didn’t go in hard enough on Labor. Wow, what a surprise that a partisan observer draws that conclusion.
Right next to that we have a typical clip job from an expanded Cut & Paste that, as usual, finds fault with the OZ’s commercial competitors.
Something is happening at the Australian, its like a bully being challenged so it lashes out
Dear The Australian,
Self-praise is no recommendation.
Yours sincerely,
People who used to be your customers.
So, hands up who’s going to PAY to read the OZ on-line? Gawd! What a waste of money. Methinks they’ll be preaching to the converted, if they’re not already doing that. What a pack of wankers.
When Coles and Woolworths start advertising their weekly specials and when Smorgy’s advertises its all-you-can-eat menu in the pages of the Australian, you know that Murdoch’s populism has begun to bite.
Right now, the Australian features advertisements from the likes of Hardy Brothers and Tiffany and Company, well-known haunts of trakky-dacked bogans.
Not.
I have been referring for some time to “Tony Abbott’s tea party”. So it was pleasing to see Christopher Pearson explaining why, with Tony Abbott as opposition leader, Australia didn’t need a tea party.
The Australian’s commentary sometimes gets it right!
John D @ 5, I’d be very surprised if Pearson understands why that’s so funny.
Update: More from Joye on the Oz’s Doomsday Code.
I noticed all that twoddle in the Weekend OZ and the pin-pricking critique of how Fairfax handled the Wikileaks leaks. I assumed that Rupert must be coming home for Christmas and this was all for his benefit; it certainly wasn’t for ours.
Tony Abbott as Spartacus? Surely he’d have to shave off all that hair before he could get oiled up like Kirk Douglas. Besides, at the end of the movie, which is surely where sinidinos gets his extensive knowledge of this obscure slave general, Abbott, I mean Spartacus gets crucified. I look forward to the day. After all, Malcolm is as weakthy as Crassus and probably just as politically ruthless.
But on-topic. If the OZ is going fold when Rupert shuffles off the mortal coil – a thought that had never occurred to me – it might be well to remember Rupert comes from long-lived genes. The rag might be around for a while yet.
This is the Australian’s typical lose/lose and it sometimes extends to lose/lose/lose.
For example. The Australian demands the government take a course of action or it immediately rights some perceived wrong that has got up someone’s goat, usually from the opposition.
The government does what is demanded and takes action = lose. It is weak and has capitulated and doesn’t deserve to be in power.
The government ignores the demand = lose. It is missing in action, a do nothing government that doesn’t deserve to be in power.
The government responds with perspicuity in an alternate view = lose. They are all spin and no action, and can you trust a government that stuffs up everything.
You saw this in action with the insulation scheme and the BER.
That’s when it actually has ads.
Further to my earlier post. I still find the OZ worth reading, and that’s why it is disappointing that our national daily has gone awry. It blurs the line between opinion and news and is now taking up column space defending itself and attacking its rivals. But even given that it still has its good points and I don’t think it’s going to disappear anytime soon.
The critics are, of course, completely correct.
( And I just love the way they always give away, in advance, what they are about to do, to then go on and deny it. It kindly clarifies the lie before they even make it.)
The Oz is a self righteous right wing diatribe dressed up with some pseudo liberal intellectualism. It is Rupert Murdoch’s mouthpiece and nothing else. Frankly I don’t think it is a patch on the Fin and probably goes to the heart of News’ loathing for Fairfax.
Hope it crashes and burns…
Lol, Mercurious @2.
Along with several thousand of his followers, Paul Burns. Can’t be soon enough for me. Where’s the Crucifier General when you need him/her. I’ll supply the vinegar sponges on a spear.
The only question is how many people will stand up and yell:
“I’m Tony Abbott!”?
Robert B,
They’ll probably stand up and say “I’m John Howard.” instead.
So, the Press gallery never missed how bad Latham and Rudd were until it was all over bar the shouting? What, they just forgot to tell the oublic about it? And they didn’t miss the challenge for the 2IC spot of the Greens post-election because they were too busy nailing the Greens on too many of their flawed policies so they couldn’t fit it in the stories?
The Australian isn’t perfect but it there is nothing wrong with telling people when it is getting it right. The Fairfax papers haven’t exactly been exposing the clay feet of the ALP have they?
But that lack of ads through the pages of the Australian must be terribly, terribly worrying for the folks who labour so hard to “get their stories right”.
It’s no triumph to be “right” if you are dead.
The Australian is nothing more than a vanity press whose only raison d’etre is that it pleases an old man’s dreams of grandeur. The Australian is one faltering pulse away from extinction.
Of course, if the Australian did fold, all its opinion formers could always take themselves off to Quadrant…
Fox News in print. There are no facts just differences of opinion.
Maybe closer than you think, Paul. Back in the late 70s, Mungo McCallum noticed a promo The Oz was doing to potential advertisers. It was under the heading of, “More Pulling Power”, which Mungo thought was singularly appropriate.
And on Murdoch’s longevity I share your anxiety. In fact, I’m starting to worry whether your cartoon namesake, Monte Burns, might be based on Rupert. Be afraid!
Katz #19, I forget now whether it was Dave Ricardo or Derrida Derider who some years back described Quadrant as “a student newspaper produced by the inmates of a nursing home”. The phrase sticks as surely to the OO.
In today’s OO, Godwin gets a real workout with David Burchell and Giles Coren (a hybrid of Auty and Anna?) lodging competing claims that Hugo Chavez and Mark Zuckerberg respectively is the new Hitler. On the same page (in more senses than one) Oliver Marc Hartwich of the Centre for Independent Studies reminds us of the absurdities which one is capable of uttering when one’s reading of the Torah ceases at Genesis 1:28 (and therefore doesn’t proceed to consider the divine advocacy of vegetarianism in the next two verses of the text).
Don @ 21,
And now the Murdochs have their foot in the door @ Channel 10.
Seasons Greetings btw.
Razor, don’t be silly, darl. Of course there is. It’s a newspaper, not a five-year-old child or a company selling frozen food. It’s supposed to be a conduit, not an end, or product, or end product, in itself. And ‘getting it right’ ought to be a matter of course. If one trumpets that one has got something right, it’s a tacit admission that getting things wrong is a common occurrence — so common, indeed, that getting them right is a matter for celebration.
Rather than Spartacus perhaps a more acurate ancient equivalent for Abbott would be one of those eunuch chief ministers that served in the emperors courts.
Abbott is more Sejanus than Spartacus.
I’m Spartacus!
No! I’m Brian and so’s my wife!
ArthurS to TAbbott..”Tony do you like gladiator movies??”
(apologies to Flying High fans!)
@25 – newspapers are there to make money. If they don’t then they can’t exist.
But Razor, the Opposition Organ does not make money.
A quick scan of its pages demonstrate that it carries virtually no advertisements. Moreover, the circulation of the Opposition Organ is small. Wiki informs that Chris Mitchell can persuade only 135,000 people Australia-wide to shell out their hard-earned for its few and flimsy pages.
The Opposition Organ is thus a drain on the resources of News Corp. Yet Rupert Murdoch is prepared to continue to bankroll this uneconomic masthead.
Rupert Murdoch must have his reasons for being the Opposition Organ’s sugar daddy. But as a principal in a public company, Rupert Murdoch isn’t spending only his own money. He is also burning the funds of his fellow shareholders.
Again, those shareholders may have their own reasons for acting as the proxy sugar daddies for this faltering masthead.
But I’m fairly confident that these shareholders, who are mostly Americans, really couldn’t care all that much about the parochial concerns of a tiny and faltering publication on the other side of the world.
Could it be that these shareholders haven’t really looked very carefully at how Murdoch spends their funds?
The second half of this is true (unless, as Katz points out, they have other sources — but that’s ‘making money’ too, in its way).
But the first half is a complete crock; do you honestly believe that making money is the main thing newspapers are for? Outside of the Rupertverse, I mean. And if you do so believe, how can you possibly be so credulous about the contents of said newspapers? If the primary (as distinct from secondary or tertiary) aim of any newspaper is to make money then it deserves to go straight down the toilet, which is where its contents will almost certainly belong.
Elsewhere: Loon Pond.
The Murdochs and Packers obviously have no idea about what media is all about.
Unlike the media tycoons posting here.
I would not be too sure The Australian doesn’t make money. It carries very large supplements in the print editions, which are still lucrative sources of advertising revenue.
In Australia, making money is the main thing newspapers are for. We do not have a system like Sweden or France where the government is prepared to subsidise newspapers from taxpayers’ funds. Whether governments should subsidise journalism as they subsidise the arts is perhaps a debate to be had, but we don’t have it at present.
I also suspect most on this list would oppose such subsidies to The Australian, SMH or The Age, given how much grumbling there is already on this site about the ABC and its alleged misuses of taxpayers’ funds.
How are The Age and The SMH going, then? Bringing home the bacon? Killing the pig?
The Australian is important as it is the newspaper of record as well as an indicator of which way our votes and policies should be going.
For getting information out there it’s pretty damn cheap.
And it’s extraordinarily successful where it counts. I for one believe it was instrumental in the downfall of Rudd.
Whether or not this is a good thing is a matter for opinion. And who makes the opinion.
Is it now your contention that no Australian broadsheet makes a profit?
This appears to contradict your earlier assertion.
I don’t know about the SMH, but The Age is in serious trouble, and The Australian only exists, as it always has, because Rupert Murdoch wants it to.
For the future of The Australian, just think of what happened to “Sunday” and The Bulletin when KFP Packer died.
I agree HC.
The dead tree version is doomed to die.
The ipad may allow for preservation of the masthead. But the business model will be almost unrecognisable. And the fixed capital costs associated with printing and distribution will disappear.
The trouble is that the “professionals” who make a living writing words that induce buyers to purchase a newspaper are in no way superior in talent to many amateurs who now write on the intertubes.
The dead tree version of a newspaper still provides a bully pulpit. When that goes, the Ackermans, Divines and Albrechtsens will be waifs in a jungle.
What person with any sense at all would subscribe to an ipad version of the OO to read Albrechtsen?
The best response to an immature, attention seeking individual is to ignore it wherever possible. Same goes for immature, attention seeking newspapers.
They only do this kind of thing as an antedote to impending irrelevance.
Razor, you continue to miss the point. I wouldn’t deny for a minute either that Murdoch and Packer are rich, or that newspapers are in financial trouble. But it is faulty logic to say that if a newspaper is making money then it must be a good newspaper, and it is a nonsense to say that making money is the main thing that newspapers are for. Some of us just. do. not. see every human activity as a profit-making enterprise.
Perhaps Razor has an out here. It could be argued that although the OO itself loses money hand over fist, in the broader scheme of things Murdoch (and News Ltd) might see this as a ‘profitable’ investment for the leg-up it gives their organisation’s interests.
Like the unlimited free Coke refills at Hungry Jack’s, say.
A pertinent observation from Jay Rosen:
‘I’m sorry but I am unable to discern any point in, “The media’s job is to make money for its parent corporation, period!” I think it’s a kind of comment board therapy, by which patients self-soothe and persuade themselves that they are being more realistic than these pointy heads and clueless dreamers.
… I don’t think that explains anything. It’s just a way of saying my realism dick is bigger than yours.’
I’m guessing that this applies equally to Australian newspapers. But I could be wrong.
(h/t Ann Althouse)
@43 – I agree not everything is aboutmaking money. eg my wife runs a gymnastics club as a personal business and makes a loss that I fund. And there are a variety of reason for that. It might break even this year. However, most businesses are in the long run about making money, otherwise they won’t exist.
Anybody seen Margot Kingston and Webdiary lately?
Ohhh, so that’s why News Ltd columnists include Janet of Jannali, Piers of Punchbowl and Miranda of…Miranda, oui?
Why are you so concerned about profitability Razor? The matter of whether The Australian is profitable or not is a distraction.
The point is that it purports to be a non-partisan watchdog organ.
When power was concentrated in the state, non-partisan watchdog organs justified their ability to speak truth to power by being independent of the state, i.e. by being private businesses.
Today power concentrates as much in private businesses like News Ltd as in states.
The reason The Australian is so tediously strident in its claim to be a non-partisan watchdog is that it is not at all independent from concentrated power. It is quite obvious to even the occasional media observer that its connections to the political elite are extensive and consolidated.
Such connections are what non-partisan watchdog organisations traditionally sought to expose and counteract.
Like Pravda in its time, The Australian is a partisan lapdog organ to the political elite. And as in the case of Pravda, the only people who believe its propaganda are the political elite and their toadies.
@50. If “The Australian is a partisan lapdog organ to the political elite.” then what does that make the Age and the SMH? Board minutes?
Who cares? The matter of The Australian being a partisan lapdog organ has nothing to do with Fairfax.
Update: John Quiggin.
Oh, so Rupert’s Australian is a Thread of Doom? That explains everything.
JikaJika said:
The political elite and toadies of the USSR didn’t believe Pravda. They knew it was nonsense (and almost certainly knew that anyone they really had to be worried about did too), and in that respect, the analogy fits. The political elite and toadies here don’t believe The Australian either.
Of course, it is important to know what the official talking point of the day is so that you know how to avoid getting into strife. Luckily, in Australia, the consequences for believing old news aren’t as personally devastating, even if it is just as unrelated to observable reality.
The danger is that The Oz incarnates a political style that as a form of government would be disastrous: hysterical self-righteousness and indifference to real world evidence think Bush II. This is not the sort of govt Australia needs.
Credit where it’s due, but. The Australian did foretell the Rudd debacle. At the time I thought it was fomenting it. In hindsight and with ALP insiders coming clean, we learnt the truth.
I remember sitting on a boat,very pissed, in May 2010 at the Abrohlos Islands, asking crew mates how in Gods name did I seem to have such a different view of Rudd as aperson and as a PM compared to the majority of the electorate. Happy to be vindicated now.
@58
“very pissed”
The Rosetta stone to most of Razor’s comments. The entire Rudd disaster narrative remains unsubstantiated. The entire Gillard will save us from disaster narrative remains contested.
Bottoms up!
Placing Rudd’s sacking in perspective.
http://www.thenews.com.pk/TodaysPrintDetail.aspx?ID=21809&Cat=2
Originally posted on Saturday Salon by mistake.
The Piping Shrike is spot on re Rudd:
Actually Adrian, while the arguments for Rudd’s sacking were entirely self-serving, and hypocritical since the things he did to harm his standing were prompted by the people who came to dump him, Bernard Keane isn’t far from accurate in his piece at Crikey.
Rudd was largely the instrument of his own downfall. Doubtless he realised the fragility of his support base within the party, if not in the wider electorate, but certainly, from the time he acceded to demands to use the ETS issue as an opportunity for political game playing against the then Turnbull-led coalition, he set in motion the forces which would strike him down. Had he simply stated in August that he meant to implement Garnaut and that if the opposition didn’t like it he would go to a snap election on it late in 2009, there can be little doubt that they would have caved, or if they had not, then been smashed. Think of it — he’d have run on his record of dealing with the GFC and trying to deliver on what had been a bipartisan position on a carbon price and which the opposition had still not rejected. Abbott had been all over the place. Turnbull was still wearing Godwin Grech. No Boats! No RSPT. No Pink Batts!
It was Rudd’s apparent loss of nerve (or cynicism, take your pick), manifest in the drawn out process of making even browner a scheme that was already muddy brown that gave the opposition on the right to any scheme at all credence. This faux bipartisanship and delay in the run up to Copenhagen damaged him a lot. His “tough on asylum seekers” stand also threw the initiative to the opposition to run with More Boats! as a slogan, further self-wedging. When Copenhagen failed, Rudd had nothing — neither a suppoprt base in the party nor convictions about anything. When even the weak ETs was drop punted into the never never, then even the symbolism was gone. By the time he came up with RSPT, it looked like a desperate measure to claw back cred and it was all too easy, with the press smelling blood, for the world’s richest miners to knock him off.
Rudd was not the nasty piece of work made out in the press and indeed he was probably the most cerebral PM we have had since Whitlam. Yet he showed that IQ, if that’s what he had, was not enough. You need EQ as well, and emotional resilience. These things he lacked, and these told decisively against him when facing the machinations of the ALP’s in house dementors, Arbib, Bitar, Feeney, Howes etc …
Like a failed surfer, he missed the best wave while daydreaming about the shore. Or as a 2009 Brutus might have put it to him: