Not that I’ve been churning out the posts here, but one of the side effects on my life since becoming an LP blogger a few weeks ago is that I now feel obliged to read the Australian media more consistently than I had been in the habit of doing. And that’s been a depressing read.
It’s not as if I’d been completely out of touch with it, but without being very aware of doing this, I’d found myself narrowing my reading (and viewing) more and more in the past few years. Maybe I should say I’ve been widening one part of my reading and narrowing the other. I continue to read a great deal online – political news and analyses from the best places on the Web (such as Open Democracy, Tom’s Dispatch, Alternet) and many links from political blogs. I read The Guardian online most days. As for Australian media, I usually watch (or at least have the tv on in the background) the main ABC news broadcast each night. I listen to ABC radio when I’m in the car, but that’s not very often these days.
In the past couple of years, however, I’ve virtually stopped reading Australian newspapers, except in a superficial or erratic way. I do regularly look at the Sydney Morning Herald website but find that it’s becoming more and more tabloid. My SO gets the weekend papers and I can barely bring myself to glance at them these days, except for the weekend magazines for some light relief. I also read the Crikey non-subscriber newsletter – there are only so many hours in the day, so it’s as much as I can do as a working mother to skim read the headlines.
Now that I’m an LPer, I feel obliged, however, to take a closer look at The Australian, the Telegraph and the paper edition of the SMH most days. And it’s a depressing task.
What do I find depressing? (Need I say?) Answer: both the media and the message, the message and the news (which are inextricably entwined, especially in the Murdoch media). The Australian in particular takes an active role in Australian politics, hectoring and bullying various politicians (usually Labor) and acting as a government mouthpiece in a way which verges on propaganda. The Sydney Morning Herald, on the other hand, is regularly as disappointing as the Labor Party in its wishy-washy approach to the main stories of the day. And as I said, its website seeks more and more to be a tabloid crowd-pleaser.
I don’t know which is worse – the heavily reactionary nature of most of the Murdoch news and opinion or the shallow silliness which passes for content in much of the commercial media. Or far worse still, what the Howard government gets away with.
I suppose by blogging I/we try to provide a small antidote to all this, but some days it can feel like a hopeless enterprise. And I imagine it can only get worse under the recent cross-media ownership legislative changes.
So what do you read, watch or listen to in the mainstream media that keeps you informed and engaged and maybe occasionally inspired?
Mother Jones (best journalism in da werld!)
(related: MoJo blogs)
The Sunday Age (read the Age too, but Sunday is better)
The Monthly (sometimes: it’s hit and miss, but improving all the time)
Friday’s Financial Review (sometimes good essays)
Guardian Weekly
non MSM:
Griffith Review
Overland
Meanjin
Heat
American Scholar
These days I stick mainly to the blogs. I find a daily perusal of the sites A-listed on my sidebar give me the stories I’m interested in, together with links to relevant MSM stories (often with clarifying commentary by the bloggers) in various parts of the world.
On a daily basis I’d only go to the Oz MSM sites when I’ve mined my favourite blogs. Even then I usually look mainly at the OpEds, but they are a very mixed bag. Michael Costello in The Oz is generally good.
I’m a bit disillusioned with Australian papers too (totally agree about the SMH website, and the Age is no better), but internationally there is plenty of good stuff. Online I peruse a bit of the Christian Science Monitor, Slate (which has become a daily obsession), and NPR. And there’s always a bit of the NYT and Washington Post in there for good measure. Not much in the way of inspiration, but I also try to keep an eye on what’s coming out of Xinhua, Aljazeera and Haaretz for certain stories.
My daily reads are The Smage and The Oz (usually the night before, thanks to the time difference), and The West. I also read AM/PM and 7.30 Report/Lateline.
The Fin Review is the best newspaper, but too expensive ($2.70!) to read daily. I read it whenever there’s something going on in the news that I’m especially interested in, and I buy it more often on Fridays because of the legal affairs section and the Fin Review and Boss magazines. I also try to save some money by reading it at a cafe.
Oh, and I’m a Crikey subscriber. I guess it counts as mainstream these days.
I watch the RSS feeds from a few Google News searches, which I display on my Netvibes page (do a Google News search, click on the RSS link on the left, copy the code into the Netvibes “add content” box, and you’ve got a really work-friendly tracker providing you with a ticker on any issues you want to follow: to decide if a story’s worth reading you just wave the mouse over the link to get the first couple of sentences). This has turned me into a completely promiscuous news
papersite reader.I also track LP and about a dozen other blogs on Netvibes. LP is a particularly good blog to track with an aggregator, because the entire text of the posting appears in the feed – you only have to go to the LP site if you want to read the comments.
Another good thing to track in this way is a del.icio.us page. When you find someone who’s posting on the issues you’re interested in, you just track their links page in Netvibes.
I tried Newsvine, but I suspect it hasn’t yet gathered a critical mass of Australian users, so the Oz content is a bit thin. It appeared to be really good for tracking celebrities, if that’s your thing.
I’d cite skepticlawyer’s piece at Catallaxy on the Catch the Fires case as better commentary than you’re likely to find in the MSM.
Robert, but do you LIKE reading The West? I don’t find much in it of value, though I guess it is the best source for local news (if by best you mean only).
I read the smh website, LP, various websites on Australia and the US, and listen to the radio. The ABC website has breaking local news as well, which is good. I buy the Monthly. I’m probably not very switched on to the meeja, not like I used to be when I worked in publishing in Sydney and buying the paper to read on the train was the thing to do.
I know you didn’t ask for a (s)hitlist, but I can hardly stand the weekend Australian anymore, and I have a particular loathing for The Sunday Times, our local sunday rag thing. It’s just AWFUL.
Thank you, Suz; the medium and the message get me down too. Particularly The Australian’s opinion and commentary; for short sharp reporting some of the Murdoch papers aren’t too bad.
I think The Monthly is pretty fantastic. It’s still depressing reading much of the time but at least the depressingness is confined to the content, which the long-format essays The Monthly publishes are very well suited to exploring. I agree with Weathergirl that it occasionally misses, but it’s always well worth the cover price.
I don’t know if the Quarterly Essays would count as news media (though they are definitely current affairs-oriented) but I never miss those either. The only other print publications I scrupulously read in hard copy are The Big Issue and the London Review of Books. I read several newspapers online but patchily.
I read lots of blogs too of course and use them as a de facto filter, clicking through to linked MSM stories.
Blogs and RSS news feeds move too quick, I am beginning to feel. There is an essay by Anne Manne in the current Monthly about the mainstreaming of aesthetics and attitudes derived from pornography which touches at various points on discussions we had some time back on this blog and elsewhere (ie the Corporate Pedophilia report) and which I now think we moved on from rather quickly. Manne has had the advantage of thinking things over in a way we blog people perhaps don’t always grant ourselves.
Our household took a $1 a week deal on the Daily Telegraph delivered for 6 months. It is an excellent deal, even for such a crappy paper. The deal runs out in 2 weeks and they want us to continue for another 6 months at $2 a week, but we’ve decided to drop it. However, there is one shining light within the DT. Every Wednesday, Maralyn Parker publishes her education blog. She is one of us. Here is her blog at the DT site.
http://blogs.news.com.au/dailytelegraph/maralynparker/index.php/dailytelegraph/
Also, every morning, I check out what I consider the best US blogsite – Smirking Chimp.
http://www.smirkingchimp.com/
i feel for you, Suz, the SMH was particularly grim today. For instance this, this and this.
The last one being due to a deliberately lit fire. Sheer bastardry pure and simple.
Although I do like the NZ firies with their haka.
D’oh, straight in to the spaminator with that one…
I don’t think you should feel obliged, suz. I for one would prefer to see posts linking to and commenting on stuff from intelligent and interesting sources of whatever provenance – rather than takedowns of op/edders. We are in a sense almost obliged to do it – because they’ve got so much influence over the debate – but I think there’s tons of space for discussing other things in the blogosphere.
On the Fairfax websites – they’ve gone for traffic at any cost. Hence all the tabloid celebrity stories and the moronic blogs like “Sam and the City”…
It’s the Fairfax legacy – obsessed with as many advertising dollars as possible. No more rivers of gold? Google whore on the SMH and Age pages to get readers interested in “britney spears upskirt”. It’s dumb – both as a business model and as a devaluation of their so-called journalistic standards.
News Ltd is running rings around them in terms of online content.
Oh, and expect it to get a lot worse under the new cost-cutting at all costs Fairfax management…
I still read the Age, especially on Thursdays when I get the Green Guide. The Australian is a pretty pointless paper and it has shifted too far to the right, but it is nice to get some principled conservative point of view (although in recent months it’s gone a bit too far).
I don’t by the Herald Sun, but I do drop by at the library to read it, and I do read the Andrew Bolt column if there is one. The same for Akerman when I am in NSW.
I flick through MX sometimes on the way home from work. Pretty blah affair that one.
Ain’t nothing better than Chinese daily commie propaganda on the net!
The old man used to call The Australian the Troglodyte Times. It’s got worse.
Kate, re a hitlist: we had one of those telephone deals from which we had the weekend Australian delivered for 10 weeks for half price, or something. This was about a year ago. I conscientiously read it all and was horrified at how far right the international news/commentary was. It has gone a long way to the right post-9/11. We let the deal run out and when they rang to ask why, I told them it was because I didn’t like the political bias – but I can’t imagine this got back to the newspaper (and would it make any difference to them? – no.) I guess I find that hard right bias very hard to read every day, which is why I ration my reading of that newspaper as a form of self-protection. I have to keep acquainted with the commercial media for work purposes and that does my head in as it is.
I watch the 7.30 Report most nights too. And Laura, I’m about to take out yet another sub to London Review of Books, which I love too though I usually find I don’t have the time to read more than one or two essays or reviews per issue.
Mark, it’s not so much that I’m intending to write comments on mainstream op/edders as that I’m trying to be diligent about following various political news stories which interest me in detail. Though there’s just not enough time in the day.
I was just saying, suz, I’d love to see some links to and commentary from high quality sources like OpenDemocracy and Tom’s Dispatch (which I lerve!)…
Just on the theme of the horror of it all, though, suz, for about 2 years after the Waterfront dispute I didn’t buy any newspapers at all or watch the tv news. Then I realised that ignoring the Howard era wouldn’t make it go away, and I had a duty to engage with it and fight it. I was much happier ignoring it and the Australian media though.
I use to subscribe to the Age, but not anymore. I’m sick of the ‘lifestyle’ publications that gets bundled with the paper. The one I loathe the most is the (melbourne) magazine. If I wanted to be dumbed down I’d pick up magazines like Zoo or Cosmo thanks. At least they don’t pretend to be sophisticated.
Also, how many trees are murdered just to publish the crap the comes with the Saturday Age these days? After-all, their editorials always stress for environmental protection.
I used to say ‘I read the Australian for the facts, and the SMH for the truth’. Unfortunately, neither is in any sense true. The bias that pervades the Oz’s reporting, especially their Caesar-job on Beazley, makes it near unreadable some days, and the op-ed (particularly Albrechtson’s loathsome ‘civilise the Aborigines’ rant last week) is cringe-worthy. Unfortunately, the SMH is even worse; it’s practically narcissistic in the way it just ‘wants people to like me! Why do they all pick on me and read the Daily Telegraph instead!’. As part of this desperate strategy, it has become a tabloid on broad pages, especially in the sickly Stay in Touch section. Still, being wishy-washy is better than the right-off-the-planet of the Australian; it tries to be evenhanded, which is an admirable goal.
But then, whenever I lose hope, I see the Daily Telegraph, ‘and things aren’t so bad’. But honestly, I think I’d get better news coverage if I just made up stories.
I used to avidly read the weekend Oz, listen to AM, PM, the World Today, watch ABC news and 7:30 report, and often the SBS news as well.
Stopped a several years ago, as I found that it was all a bit too depressing – right wing bias, sloppy journalism and a general failure of the vast majority of the media army to hold Howard and his cronies accountable for their abuse(s) of office, or to challenge the most flawed arguments put forward with respect to issues such as the wharfies, East Timor and the Iraq invasion.
One of the most significant of “the straws that broke the camel’s back” was when an ABC reporter referred to “Honest John’s” nickname as earned through his honesty and integrity !
For the last few years I have indulged my love of fly fishing, travelled widely through our (still) beautiful country and steadfastly endeavoured to avoid at all circumstances exposure to the MSM – and it’s done wonders for my health, too!
For my media and current affairs fix, I lurk (and occasionally contribute) here, and a couple of other blogs, as well as the WhatReallyHappened site – mainly as a filter to Haaretz, the Guardian, Al Jhazeera etc.,.
I’ve found that when even this limited diet becomes a bit too depressing, spending time outside and taking the time to appreciate the beauty of the living planet around me works wonders.
Researching my PhD thesis (history) I’ve become intimately acquainted with the Age and the SMH in 1917. What is striking is how much detail there is in their local coverage. They get the war and the Russian Revolution completely wrong, but, when it comes to reporting what was happening on the ground, they clearly had reporters going out and finding out what happened – witnessing it themselves if they could. They didn’t simply parrot press releases or run agency reports.
It’s particularly noticeable with the coverage of stop work meetings (during the general strike in 1917). They describe what was said in the meeting, interventions from the floor, and what the atmoshophere was like. There’s stuff about how the militants sat up the front and made noise – in one delightful account playing “ragtime tunes” on a handy piano to drown out their opponents.
This sort of detailed reportage rarely happens today. As for international news. It was crap then and its crap now. In September 1917 they tell you that “the German spy Lenin is dead” and that the allies are making major gains at Passchendaele. The embedded coverage of Iraq has a long lineage.
The problem with the local coverage today, however, is not just political. It is a consequence of the same neo-liberal orthodoxy that dominates everywhere. “Do more with less” it goes. We have this wonderful whizzbang internet so why do we need to pay money to hire reporters?
Give me Lois Lane and Jimmy Olsen any day.
I read the SMH for city factoids, the local rag for local gossip and the Tele to find out what teh people are being fed. If there’s a copy of that nightly railways newspaper going I’ll read that too, even if it is just ripped off the wires. I used to feel enriched after reading the news, now I just feel amused and, on days when the Tele is doing things like the Iktimal expose, soiled.
Crikey used to be fun, but now it’s dull. Financial Review lite at its best, a capture of leaks at its worst. If it wasn’t for Mark, Weathergirl and Margaret Simons I would unsubscribe. I am annoyed that there are people blogging who are far superior to Miranda Devine, for instance, yet she gets to call herself a ‘columnist’, and takes home mega bucks.
I could not breathe without the ABC’s radio and TV current affairs coverage.
Lyn: thanks for the compliment, but I think Guy Rundle writes some of the finest pieces in Crikey (I read it mostly for Simons’ pieces on the media: some of the best media commentary you get anywhere). There are often interesting pieces by Jane Nethercote and Antony L and others. The tough thing about Crikey reporting is that it’s so short, and there’s little room to tease out nuance (little different from newspaper reporting, there). Articles, by virtue (or not) of their brevity, have to be hard-hitting and there’s a preference for partisan journalism, which is good and bad. I have often seen Crikey break news that’s then taken up by other media (who don’t acknowledge the source). Also (and this is just my impression: don’t know if it’s true), I think Crikey often strives to beat other media to stories, and as it comes out early afternoon it has very little time to investigate fully.
I agree with Robert Bollard. You’d read the local print-based media for local stories. The problem is that there are few local stories that could be classified as more than random tidbits. Before globalisation of news, sermons in local churches were reported, as were the proceedings of city councils and regular meetings of a wide range of community groups. There was extensive coverage of State Parliament.
Print-based doesn’t do it any more and many of these groups haven’t seen fit to do it for themselves on the WWW. There’s a reason for this. By definition news is information that someone doesn’t want you to know.
By contrast, we have access to an enormous volume of information via the WWW. I use blogs like LP to help me to focus my attention on issues. And then I use Google to find the facts that challenge or confirm my preconceptions.
ZNet, TomDispatch, Counterpunch, TomPaine.com are excellent on-line journals for my interests.
On the Fairfax web strategy, see the aptly named “trashtalk” blog:
http://blogs.theage.com.au/lifestyle/trashtalk/
Mark wrote: Then I realised that ignoring the Howard era wouldn’t make it go away, and I had a duty to engage with it and fight it.
Mark, I’m interested in what your notion of “duty” is and where it came from.
Suz, Mark will answer for himself, but it could be that if you have some Prussian heritage you don’t have to go looking for a sense of duty. You just have it!
mainstream media are crap, because the readers are crap. the wildebeest only runs fast enough to escape the hyena, the hyena just fast enough to catch the wildebeest. it’s darwin, again.
the people are crap, because they have no political power. having no power, they don’t waste energy on education. having no education, they have no power.
but ecosystems are constantly changing, new possibilities arise- some for self destruction.
that looks a good bet right now, the smart money is on catastrophic population collapse, triggering world war and adding nuclear pollution to mass famines.
Jeebus al, happy xmas to you too.
“it could be that if you have some Prussian heritage you don’t have to go looking for a sense of duty. You just have it!”
Zis ist vat I haff alvays said.
Herr Brian, I salute you!
I’m with you on the Fairfax online strategy, esp. blogging. It’s so disappointing that o/s papers like the NY Times and, more especially, the Guardian in the UK, manage intelligent blogs and online articles. It’s like Fairfax think that their readers leave their brains behind as soon as they log on. Trashtalk, Beauty Spot, etc., the dominance of Paris/Britney/Lindsay no underpants stories over real news … Susan Wyndham’s new SMH books blog is promising.
Still, I read the Age and SMH online and the Weekend Australian’s Review section. O/S, Guardian, NY Times and Salon.com online.
I also read and enjoy The Monthly, which seems to be picking up again after a period of being a bit dull and worthy and featuring dodgy men in suits on the cover – Rupert Murdoch, Alan Jones, etc. This issue is excellent. Love Griffith Review. Quite like Meanjin. I subscribe to Crikey and enjoy it sporadically. Yes, it’s good for leaks and ‘Media Watch’ type stuff, and I love Margaret Simons. Antony Lowenstein also good.
It probably did get back to them – they wouldn’t ask otherwise.
Make any difference? Probably not. There really isn’t much of a market for an AB demographic right-wing newspaper in this country, but they’re keeping on plugging away anyhow.
The Economist and the New Yorker.
“When I want to know the news, I read Byron.”
– Frank O’Hara
A lot. Some friends say I absorb the newspapers.
Suz, if you cut yourself off from ideas you don’t agree with you’ll become very happy in your very own personal garden of ideas without being aware of what anyone else thinks.
While I think less and less that the SMH is a serious newspaper, I think that it’s a mistake to think that the writers in The Australian, or many other newspapers, offer a homogeneous, monolithic approach to anything – and you must constantly be prepared to consider ideas from all sorts of sources, lest you cut yourself off from something worthwhile.
For example, Noel Pearson has written a good opinion piece this weekend reflecting his impressions of different approaches to govt indigeneous policies – it may be uncomfortable reading for some on the left but should be compulsory reading for all Labor MPs. He’s charitable to Jenny Macklin in her new role as Shadow Indigeneous Affairs Ministers. To me his piece read as if just reflecting his personal opinions.
In addition to the SMH and The Australian web-sites, I read the ABC web-site, The Age, Mercury, Courier-Mail, The Advertiser, The Mercury, BBC, CNN, Washington Post, NZ Herald, Sacramento Bee, Scientific American, New Scientist, and lots of others (including blogs). I also read some of these magazines, The Economist, local rags including (Sydney) City Hub, some of the local gay mags (which are all isomorphic), National Geographic, the monthly publications of the Planetary Society, the American Mathematical Society and the quarterly publication of the Australian Mathematical Society. This is all I remember. I also watch BBC world-wide and sometimes see bits of CNN and Fox, and (less often now) watch Lateline and the 7:30 report. Sometimes I read the Financial Review. I suppose my idea is to read and evaluate things – it’s no good to just say “bah, these thigns are just terrible, there’s no point to me reading them”. You’re doing yourself a disservice if you think that.
(I don’t read all these sources every day!)
Sacha wrote: “Suz, if you cut yourself off from ideas you donât agree with youâll become very happy in your very own personal garden of ideas without being aware of what anyone else thinks.”
Sacha, I can assure you there is little chance of that happening. I work in the very area that we are discussing so there is no chance that I’m not exposed to a wide spectrum of content. I’m in touch with more media than I mentioned in my post – I was primarily trying to make the point that the Australian newspapers (primarily the SMH and the Oz, for me) make for depressing reading these days, for different reasons.
I suppose my idea is to read and evaluate things – itâs no good to just say âbah, these thigns are just terrible, thereâs no point to me reading themâ?. Youâre doing yourself a disservice if you think that.
I think I’m doing myself a service! It’s the only way I can manage to maintain a few shreds of optimism. I know many people who’ve cut off from the mainstream media altogether as they can’t take it any more.
Btw, good word, ‘isomorphic’ to describe the gay rags (which I also hardly ever read any more, though I like the Pink Broad.)
Today Tonight and A Current Affair.
suz: good to hear you’re reading all sorts of material. I didn’t pick that up in your post and thought you might have been cutting yourself off from much-circulated material.
You could say that most MSM is isomorphic from day-to-day too – but you could particularly apply it to the gay mags modulo the subject of their major stories (the themes are usually the same though). My maths background comes through in using “isomorphic” (and “modulo”) – I use it in a way that means “may not necessarily look the same but is basically/essentially the same” which is connected to its maths meaning. Isomorphism is a powerful tool in algebra!
The 9.30pm SBS news, Tony Jones, SMH in the morning, sometimes the Tele (a quick glance at the splash and page 3) and the back-page splash on sport, during work a read of the Arts & Letters Daily site and a trawl through online NYT, London Times, the Guardian, Independent. The newsagent Humphreys Manly has the New Yorker (nearly always worth buying). The Herald is unfairly maligned – it ran hard and strong on AWB – and it has excellent furrin correspondents, i.e. Paul McGough, Craig Skehan, Hamish Mcdonald, plus stringers and buy-ins, and is always worth a read. Admittedly, its coverage of state issues verges on the pathetic and is a bit self-absorbed like The Independent. Fran Kelly on RN is good value in the morning, ABC’s AM and PM in the car. I’ve given up on Crikey, as it’s essentially into carrion eating, it breaks very little by way of news, choosing to put its own spin on things. I mean who gives a fuck? Blogs are not quite there yet. Emails from friends are now full of attachments that are mass mailed.
Now that’s an underrated news feed/channel, what say youse?
I’m so disillusioned with Australian tabloids, so much so I feel for the trees.
My news comes via the web and is usually international. It’s no guarantee of quality or accuracy and forget about local issues, but it does help keep another tree rooted to the ground.
Jet, yes I get a lot of attached news/analysis articles too, though many are from the US – which of course I want to keep up with, but some are very localised.
I also receive a few free subscription emails, such as the Immanuel Wallerstein commentary and Tom’s Dispatch.
Internal trackback:
http://larvatusprodeo.net/2006/12/18/the-new-opedders/
To answer your question, suz, I felt quite bad about retreating to my own private concerns and ignoring public ones because I’ve always felt an obligation to do something for others by acting on my politics.
Political biographies are often very interesting.
I agree that the SMH’s foreign correspondants are generally very good, although I think they’re relying too much on buy-ins from other papers. Paul McGeough, especially; I would buy the paper just for his coverage of the Iraq War.