Our weekly (mostly) look at media spin tactics: let’s dissect the PR and propaganda that aims to blow one’s own horn, bury one’s errors, resurrect the shambling zombie corpses of well-flogged deceased equines, and ooh look! A Big Distracting Thing!
Busy threads here over the last week have been various aspects of the aftermath of the Queensland floods (especially the orchestration of media outrage over the flood reconstruction levy), the annual Australia Day navel-gazing, and a typically tedious stoush about sexist media coverage of Julia Gillard. If you have something to add to these topics, best leave it on the appropriate thread.
For other discussion, check out our latest roundtables and the 50 Most Recent Posts list in the sidebar on our general archive page to see what else has generated most interest since last week, and what got overlooked. Perhaps an issue came up on the latest open thread which you feel deserves some more discussion.
Some of those stories are still in the headlines, others are getting hardly any attention. What other stories are being buried while more flashy stories are hogging the limelight?
Professor Mirko Baragic’s contribution that the NBN should not go ahead because the Internet is making us dumber is a fascinating conflation of apples and oranges.
http://www.theaustralian.com.au/national-affairs/flood-of-bad-decisions-from-gillard/story-fn59niix-1225997082458
Given that Deakin University is a major provider of online distance education, this does not bode well for his assessment of the quality of his students or their learning experience.
My goodness me, Terry. That one is a load of garbage indeed.
The reactions to Julia Gillard’s interview with Neil Mitchell are interesting. I first learned of this in the blogosphere where the reaction was thank heavens she’s finally told the shock-jock trolls where they get off. Next day in the MSM it was all about a ladybrain hissyfit, how deplorable.
It has been unspeakably depressing returning, after summer hols, to my morning drive to the station with Fran Kelly and Michelle Bloody Grattan. Grattan’s boosterism of Tony Abbott and continual anti-spin towards Gillard is truly sickening, and I say this as someone who has no tickets on Gillard. Today it was all about Gillard Not Coming Across as Prime Ministerial (perhaps, as Mindy points out elsewhere, that’s partly because people don’t refer to her as PM.) They also talked up Gillard’s “failure” to sell the flood levy without mentioning Tony Abbott’s disgusting and cheap opposition to it. Kelly was talking with a tone of lip-licking glee as she sank the boot. Really, they should rename the AM spot Liberal Hour.
…Oh, and also – any threat to the passage of the levy bill is down to the government. There is no discussion of whether large sections of the Australian public itself has become neoliberal, selfish and kneejerk reactionary – I’m talking about the types who are yelling in the letters pages about a Tax Slug even though they will be paying less than the price of a cup of coffee a week. No, it’s just the Government’s “failure” to “sell” it.
Give it another 10-15 years and this country will become ungovernable.
Unless it is of course a News Ltd/ABC/Sky News approved government.
Or maybe 10-15 months!
Indeed. The Spin is such one can’t help but suspect they’re orchestrating a coup. It doesn’t seem, given Windsor and Katter’s latest comments, or at least the ones I’m aware of, that its going to work. That must really annoy the people who think they should have the power.
See The Failed Estate on the orchestrated opposition to the flood levy and how easy it is to spin the media.
Curious – has Glenn Milne succumbed to the leftist group think at the ABC and turned his coat?
Gillard has fired her chief of staff. Let’s see the spin on that.
Helen @ 3, Grattan and Kelly are so vomit-making that you should consider changing stations. ABC Classics FM, 3MBS FM, even ABC News Radio have to be better than the bilge masquerading as comment on RN at the moment.
Yeh Bismarck@8. They will, of course, try “Ms Lampe had resigned for personal reasons”. Ha, ha, ha.
None of that will satisfy us, though. Tones will tell us “the rats are abandoning the ship”, or something. He never spins and what he says will be true.
Bismarck at 9: you’ve already provided some spin of your own on that: according to The National Rupert, Amanda Lampe has resigned as Gillard’s chief of staff. No doubt it will be spun as a tale of Amanda Lampe being pushed out of her position, further proof that the government is in crisis etc, but please try show at least as much subtlety as our chief “organ of record”.
As it happens, I know a little bit more about this than you are likely see in the initial press reports. But you guys are the citizen journalists, right?
Jeez sorry Bisy, didn’t realise you woz an insider.
It’s times like this when I wish I had kept at least a clippings file! When the milk levy was instituted by the Howard government I distinctly remember reading an article in “The Cold Heart of the Nation” about a dairy farmer who’d used the levy to exit the industry and received $300,000 as a result. Some time later when going to his letter box to check his mail he was shocked to find he’d been sent another check for $300,000 which he didn’t even know was coming. The article made it plain that this was by no means an isolated incidence in this district. It would be nice if someone (somewhere!) in the MSM reminded the public of such instances whilst Tony Abbott tries to portray himself as Captain Fiscal Rectitude.
Feel free to scoop us all Bismarck, Citizen Journalist.
Bismarck,
Oh, I should take this seriously. Gillard faces a very recalcitrant press and they seem to have been particularly awful in the run up to the opening of the coming parliamentary session. God knows what sort of deals the Lib[turds] have done with Murdoch and coWho have to make money somewhere. They’ve stuufed up in UK with the phone-tapping scandal, have little or no credibility among the powerful in the US, having created the environment for Tucson, whether they caused it or not. The only place Rupe is going to get a break is Oz, and given The OZ and the Murdoch stable of anti-labor monsters, I can’t see Gillard being nice to him, from what we know of her. She’s going to make Rupert eat more than dogfood, I hope.
She arranged the Mitchell interview, right?
Posted questions for Mr Denmore’s excellent ‘Instant controversy’ piece at flood announcement thread. Interesting suggestion below in how to re-frame climate issues in ways which Australian, like Americans, might take seriously. As it is obvious now that the science and maths of change too much for ABC/media/liberals. No amount of deaths and chaos in climate will ever- it seems -persuade ideologically entrenched they need to do anything.
Not sure how to make it easy link but hopefully this helps a little.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/cifamerica/2011/jan/30/climate-change-climate-change-scepticism
It is not a Flood Levy, it is “the controvertial Flood Levy” as refered to by the muppets on the ABC24 breakfast show this morning. That pair giggled with delight at the prospect of conflict and some percieved Labor problems.
Realy, call me naive, but I was originally happy that ABC24 was going to happen, but now I am not so sure.
Ah well, when Tony Abbott overthroughs this government, he will probably can ABC24 or sell it to FOX NEWS.
Given how she got to be PM, Gillard must be about aqs jumpy as a drug smuggler in a Bali jail. If I was her I’d be wanting to sleep in the same room if not bed as Shorten and Combet.
Sacking Staff is like rearranging the deck chairs.
I’d love to see Rudd have another roll of the dice. Heh!
I say we start referring to the MSMs “controversial coverage of the flood levy”.
Bernard Keane is no fan of the flood levy, but likes Gillard being “cranky” and “blunt” against Neil Mitchell. So, he reckons, would most people. I would take his opinion over Kelly and Grattan’s pretty much any day of the week.
I agree with Keane. JG should unleash the mongrel on this scurrilous and completetly BS liberal + media hack agenda.
Frankly, Its an offence to the ordinary Australians who’ve suffered loss in the floods.
Helen @ 3 yes…breakfast was quite good over the summer; now that Fran and Michelle are back it’s like they have to make up all the time they missed pushing their blatant right agenda…pukesville….get the CD player on instead
I heard Julia Gillard on Jon Faine this morning and listened to the Neil Mitchell interview the other day and think everybody should just give up on the advice and let her get on with the job she was elected for. And that includes Keane and the ‘pump it up’ line. She is more than capable and can do without it.
@1
I picked up on this via Loon Pond and then followed you link. It’s absolute tosh of course, especially the bit about the internet. The worry I have is that all of the comments are gushingly supportive and also that an academic can make a statement such as:
“It is not clear whether the internet is doing more harm than good to the human species”
and still have a job in a university. The internet is a technology, a tool. It’s up to us what we so with it. I suppose Mirko would have said the same thing about the telephone. It’s gobsmackingly stupid. And this bloke’s somehow earned a PhD. I’m glad I didn’t bother.
Loonpond is indeed very funny/great on this Mirko madness.
http://loonpond.blogspot.com/2011/01/bargric-burchell-and-little-blithe.html
“Pity the poor students, I say.”
And yep.
Terry @ 1 – it is indeed a load of garbage, and hardly what one would expect from an academic, ‘Professor’ no less! And what a company of ignorant sycophantic supporters he has in the comments which follow his article. Your point about Deakin’s prominent role in providing on-line education suggests that a formal complaint about Baragic might be appropriately made to that University about his shameful views on the internet generally.
There is more background info on how this individual is not suitable for any role mentoring the young at http://www.sauer-thompson.com/archives/opinion/2011/01/politics-as-usu.php#more.
The knowledge that there exists a Professor Mirko Bagaric (to say nothing of a Professor Ian Plimer or Professor Bob Carter) pretty well puts me off any aspirations or pretensions I might otherwise have had to further academic progress!
Talk about not wanting to be in a club that would have me as a member!
“And what a company of ignorant sycophantic supporters he has in the comments which follow his article.”
And I wonder how many comments like the one I submitted were blocked by Newscorp Censorship. Their team love freedom of speech as long as they agree with it.
Obviously I didn’t put up a new spin post yesterday. I’m wondering whether having the spin posts open for more than a single week might be useful in terms of spotlighting long trends as well as the short spikes. That’s my story and I’m sticking to it, anyway.
The floods, fires and cyclones around the country over the last weeks are obviously offering a wonderful opportunity to bury inconvenient stories or to run a line of spin for longer than usual before understandably busy people can take the time to counter it.
Patricia WA – re that Gary Sauer-thompson post you linked to – am I to understand that Bagaric, a professor in a university which provides online learning, is opposing the NBN????
*Blink*
*Blike*
OK then…