There’s a bit of a problem with this meme.

In a (now) rare piece of relatively sensible and reality based political commentary, Lenore Taylor, formerly of the Australian Financial Review, wrote in The Australian on the weekend that the “personal destruction of Rudd” thing failed dismally for the serried ranks of Howardistas in government and – were she writing completely honestly she might have added – in News Limited in 2007.

She also neglected to observe that Dennis Shanahan was the most enthusiastic participant in this collective delusion. While Glenn Milne, one might conjecture, did the mud slinging antecedent to the putative glorious Howard re-election that never was.

I don’t think Taylor – or any other commentators – noted that Rudd made himself a small target as Opposition Leader (… yes, they said so at the time, but two years is apparently a thousand weeks in politics in the collective memory of the press gallery). Malcolm Turnbull, by contrast, is a very big one.

He’s hoist on his own petard, and Rudd, Gillard and Tanner only need to stoke the fires now. The Libs – and their false friends in News Limited – will now do the job for them… while the PM again sails up into the non-political nation building good bloke etc. stratosphere, not dented in the slighted by increasingly frenzied rants about “spin” in bizarre articles in The Australian, which in the case of Imre Salusinzky’s latest, consisted mostly of on the record quotes from one John Howard.

[Incidentally, anyone else wondering who the source for the "Howard never would have acted like Turnbull did" meme is? I suspect John Winston himself. His cold dead hand appears to have been all over the News Limited coverage recently, overtly and covertly, and I suspect he's taking the chance to destroy Turnbull, whom he's never loved, and reward his buddy Tone, who made such a big deal of continuing to visit the former Dear Leader's humble North Shore digs to extend the hand of friendship in his time of trial...]

The madness of touting Tony Abbott’s leadership chances just points to how inward looking and utterly disconnected from political reality all this nonsense has become.

The Libs should forget about leadership saviours. Their first step to being politically competitive would actually be to recognise that the Murdoch Empire has no clothes. Everyone else has. They risk going down with the ship. But don’t hold your breath. It’s difficult to breathe from a thousand leagues under the sea.

Nb: Note lack of links to the Taylor and Salusinzky pieces in the OO. I’ve noticed that they’re actually making their content harder to find online, which I suspect is preparatory to the erection of Teh Great Pay Wall of News. Should you wish to refer to the articles in question, you can probably find a copy in a library of the weekend edition. In the meantime, they’re losing advertising revenue from the links I would have otherwise inserted. Sad, isn’t it?

Apparently, the end of the world is at hand. Kevin Rudd borrowed a ute off a bloke. Or something. It’s a scandal! Apparently. Although, why the *fair slice of the Pineapple* PM isn’t receiving high praise for driving such a *dinkum* Aussie vehicle from those who were loudly denouncing him only last week, over their lattes, for his Quinceland vernacular, I don’t know.

But… at Libertarian Central, Christian Kerr‘s second favourite blog (after Club Troppo), they’re all in high dudgeon:

These are extraordinarily serious allegations and, on the news I have seen, it doesn’t look good at all.

Orly?

It gets worse. Poor KRudd. Will he withstand these incomprehensible *though terribly serious* allegations? OMG!

Kevin Rudd will not survive if it is firmly established that he—or even his office—made special pleadings for car-dealer mate John Grant. It is undoubtedly his greatest crisis in politics.

New York Scores Club much?

The kiss of death though – “The Punch [has] more.”

Srsly?

Right, that’s it. Refuse supply! The GG should sack him! Hang on she’s some sort of vaguely liberal vaguely feminist upper class Queensland Barrister… Quick, appeal to Her Maj!

Don’t blame me for this nonsense. I’m just the piano player.

WE not only have the “Education Revolution”. In good Stalinist style, we have the “Building the Education Revolution” plan. We also have a band of doubters and dissidents the authorities have decreed to be counter-revolutionaries.

And in true Stalinist style, these counter-revolutionaries must not just be punished for their thought crimes, but ruthlessly suppressed. Martin Amis used his chilling study of Stalin, Koba the Dread, to talk about the “typhoon of unreason” the tyrant unleased upon his nation.

Is this a new incarnation of Godwin’s law that I wasn’t previously aware of? Or is it just that Julia Gillard has interred 10 millions in death camps and let another 20 million starve to death while my back was turned? Thank heavens Hillary Bray is shining a light into this totalitarian abyss.

Apparently all that stands between us and being worked to death in a labour camp is the unstinting cry of freedom ringing from the Canberra press gallery:

All of Gillard’s huff and puff yesterday simply showed a typhoon of unreason building.

If she lets it grow Gillard will be swept away with the winds.

Whose career do you suppose is going to the gulag sooner? Hillary’s or Julia’s?

Amongst the standard-issue ammunition in the journalism industry’s defensive skirmishes against those pesky citizen journalists and news bloggers is the deceptively simple claim that there’s a clear difference between reporting the news, i.e. breaking stories (which is what professional journalists do) and commenting on the news, i.e. “endless talk” (which is what everyone else does).

It’s a line repeated in the latest missive from Christian Kerr in The Australian – a rabid, self-serving rant against all those online commentators from Possum’s Pollytics to Larvatus Prodeo whom he doesn’t like, curiously claiming in its title that “our blogs [are] too analytical”, as if intelligent analysis is somehow a bad thing. Still, if nothing else, it’s got one thing going for it: if ‘real’ journalists are the ones that break stories, then Kerr himself isn’t a journalist.

One problem with that neat definition, though, is that breaking stories isn’t a particularly common trait of mainstream newsroom practice these days: much of the content of our daily newspapers and broadcast bulletins comes from a diminishing number of global wire services, and is simply processed by journalists to fit the local context. Similar to citizen journalists’ common practice of gatewatching – following the news passing through the gates of mainstream news publications, and then commenting on it – this is a kind of industrial gatewatching, where agency feeds are constantly monitored for new items to be inserted into the locally-produced publication. So, news bloggers and citizen journalists don’t tend to break stories – but neither, for the most part, do professional journalists.

That’s spot on, I think, and the rest of the post is well worth reading.

I’d also observe that the anti-intellectualism is curious. On one hand, there’s probably some sort of a throwback to the “journos are hard men of the streets” school of romantic delusion – which still has its reflections in internal conflicts within universities over the respective value of journalism education and media and cultural studies. That’s the only context in which suggesting that “analysis” is a dirty word makes even a smidgeon of sense.

Obviously, on the other hand, there are some battle scars on display too, as demonstrated by Kerr’s attack on Possum. [His response provoked a rare 'laugh out loud while reading' moment for me.] And probably some echoes of the culture wars – tribunes of the people versus the latte sippers, blah blah blah.

But the dissonance between what one presumes is the target market of the print version of The Australian and the curses piled on those with three university degrees just reflects the dysfunctionality of the mindset that inspires these remarks. Perhaps The Punch is aiming for a more tabloid market, but David Penberthy’s now notorious comments about his desire not to edit a “fancy, la-di-dah site” are cut from the same cloth. [In passing, I'd note that Penberthy also takes a swipe at coffee shops in his post... a strange obsession.]

The related dissonance between “celebrating journalism” through publishing an opinion site has also been widely noticed. As has the irony of supplying ‘content’ for free to News Limited.

I think it is the mythos of the dedicated and hardened journo pounding the mean streets that unifies all the apparently irrational and contradictory assertions bubbling up from the News Limited cauldron. Axel Bruns has demonstrated how out of synch such a mythos is with present reality. I’d add that any profession, industry or organisation which resorts to a fantasy of origins as a modality of defence against reality is going to have a very difficult time indeed in adjusting its practices to current and future actuality.

Elsewhere: Don Arthur at Troppo.

Christian Kerr.

There are the group blogs that cover politics, economics and provide platforms for protagonists in the culture wars; Club Troppo, probably the best and most balanced of them all, Catallaxy for the libertarian right and Larvatus Prodeo, not just for the latte left but rather a stronghold of the fair-trade, rainforest alliance-certified, decaff and soy brigade. Then there are all the one-man bands.

So, here’s the thing Christian, the web is a big place, enough for a number of points of view, everyone develops their own audience, culture (I know you’d like to reach for your revolver at this point) and style.

At LP we like nothing better than a nice fair trade latte while we chase those who disagree over a cliff, at the Oz you’ve never see a global warming denialist idea you haven’t liked.

Ain’t diversity grand? Or is it that you’d prefer it to be like the bad old days when you had the megaphone all to yourself?

Update [by Mark]: The anti-analysts analysed.

It’s a timely book on the importance and necessity of blogging and the open web given recent un-informed opinions by writers like Christian Kerr.

The book is also important in that it more thoroughly expands on ideas expressed in David Burchell’s clumsy opinion piece in the Australian in July of this year where he attempted to contrast the “pseudo-expertise and vituperation” of Western bloggers with their counterparts in the less democratic corners of the world; using Cuban blogger Yoani Sanchez as an example.

The most impressive thing about Sanchez is her complete disregard for the bad habits of Western bloggers. She refuses to engage in histrionics, vainglory, pseudo-knowledge or personal posturing. Instead she trades in the gentler arts of allegory and satire.

Sanchez is also mentioned in The Blogging Revolution and Burchell is right. She does not engage in the histrionics of so many Western bloggers (mea culpa) but then again our personal circumstances are different to those that live in repressive states.

Are critics like Burchell and Kerr right? Are non-Western bloggers really better than their western counterparts? Are they less vituperative and undergraduate in their opinion? Does living in an information poor society mean that their views can be nothing more than that of a pseudo-expert? What do non-Western bloggers sound like? The Blogging Revolution gives us a peek behind the government filters.

Throughout the book Loewenstein introduces us to writers like Caesar, an Iraqi blogger he met in Damascus.

Reading his story, we find that Caesar’s father was an officer in Saddam’s army who fought the Americans in the 1991 Gulf War, but as Caesar states, “my father wasn’t fighting for Saddam, he was fighting for his country” – that kind of distinction comes up repeatedly in different contexts throughout the book.

We also hear that Caesar was a bought man when it came to supporting the American invasion and had even worked for them as a translator for a time before fearing for his life as a collaborator. This soon saw him and his family leave for the relatively safer confines of Syria.

From Caesars and many Iraqi’s perspective, who wouldn’t want to see Saddam overthrown? All media was under state control there was no real ability to openly express your frustrations and views on your society or even to write about that girl you liked.

Similar to many Western bloggers, Caesar writes about issues of both a personal and political nature, his blog covers sexual politics as much as political events, in fact his blog is titled “In Iraq, sex is like snow”.

Is this vituperation and an undergraduate tone, Iraqi style?

As a result Caesar has an online reputation as some kind of “sex maniac”, an odd description given that he is a self described virgin. Then again context is everything and in his world he just may be someones sex maniac.

Caesar also uses his writing to describe what his country looks like, or should look like. In his case it shows what a liberal Iraqi looks like and if blogging is anything at all it’s liberal; in the freewheeling unmediated sense of the word. And while he may be far less freewheeling than many of his Western blogging counterparts his writing is probably no less confronting to the Burchell’s and Kerr’s of his world.

As Loewenstein states:

Blogging was almost invented for people like Caesar. It is unpretentious, revealing and transparent about daily life – and thankfully doesn’t require a tentative editor to censor the explicitness or rawness of the material. Hearing about his displacement in Syria and longing for his homeland made me feel ashamed of our culpability in the Iraq disaster. Those in power in the West have taken no responsibility for the effects of their actions, as if the tragedy was a natural disaster over which they had no control. Without his blog Caesar’s eloquence in the face of such horrors would never have been seen or heard.

Not being seen nor heard is another one of the recurring themes in The Blogging Revolution, outside of a few star non-western bloggers adopted by the mainstream media we have not heard from many others in the growing mass of bloggers in places like Syria and Iran, why? Is it because these voices don’t subscribe entirely to our mainstream media’s political view of the way the world ought to work?

I’m not alone in thinking our mainstream media would better serve us by airing the views of an Iranian female writer who identified as a Muslim secular atheist than that of Lindsay Lohan, but then again why not cut out the increasingly untrustworthy middleman and head right to the source, it is a media revolution after all.

Make no mistake, many of the non-Western bloggers and writers portrayed in the book want much of what we have but on their terms. A thought repeatedly expressed in the book is that they want these things at a different pace, one determined by them, not one forced on them from the outside without their overwhelming approval and they want these things to fit naturally into their specific cultural and political contexts.

At the moment we have the luxury of not having to negotiate our writing through levels of cultural and/or state based censorship, though we do have to deal with attempts at muting our voices through all too regular opinion pieces like Burchell’s and Kerr’s – opinions that seek to denigrate and deny us a growing legitimacy that they would like to preserve for themselves.

There was a quote early in the book which came from a prominent Iranian Shia cleric who recognised the power of the open web and blogging by saying, ‘blogging due to it’s very nature, has the capacity to nurture the spirit of vulgarity….[and is] a destructive plague’.

In this at least, Western mainstream media blog critics like Burchell and Kerr are not too dissimilar to an Iranian cleric or Cuban despot in recognising the inherent power of blogging and the voices it contains. Their motives? To maintain an economic market share not a religious or political one, though sometimes political motives are not to be discounted.

The Blogging Revolution is about introducing us to a different and difficult blogging world but Antony Loewenstein has also succeeding in produced a highly readable addition in the ongoing blogging and open media wars.

Andrew Bartlett points out:

I remain to be convinced that being the best performer at ‘throwing the switch to vaudeville’ does much on its own to attract public support.

Kevin Rudd didn’t defeat John Howard because he had a lot of witty putdowns in parliament. Nor did John Howard win against Paul Keating in 1996 for this reason. Indeed, one could argue that this fixation with Keating’s apparently unchallenged ability to dominate the arena during Question Time was a key reason why so many commentators argued he still had a chance of winning in 1996, well after the electorate had already decided they’d had enough.

Exactly.

Paul Keating knew himself that his aggression in Parliament was a negative with the public, even if it caught the limited attention spans of the press gallery. Hence the move to a more “dignified” Prime Ministerial persona, and the restriction of his appearances in Questions. The opposition, of course, did all they could to bait Keating at every opportunity, knowing full well that mastery of put downs and witty insults translated into a perception of unlikeability and overweening arrogance. And they want to promote Costello because he’d project a similar image? No wonder people talk about a media disconnect.

I suspect this was some sort of pre-emptive strike to try to forestall any credit claiming by Kevin Rudd and Wayne Swan if (as expected) the cash rate is cut by 25 points later today. The politics haven’t played out to script, with Nelson’s comments that he wouldn’t make such a call in government playing into Rudd’s hands.

But it was interesting to hear Nelson’s justification on Lateline last night. Nelson argued that he was reflecting what “many Australians” thought. For those who’ve been paying any attention to what he’s had to say since he became leader, that’s typical. He appears to regard himself as some sort of transmission belt. Hence all the emo-ting. It’s an intriguing view of political leadership because it completely eviscerates the notion of leadership itself. Perhaps it’s one reason why his own leadership is in so much trouble.

Speaking of which, Christian Kerr, who brings you “balance and fact”, occupies his column inches this morning deconstructing Peter Costello’s interjections in Question Time. Perhaps this is his own small contribution to balancing out the purported paucity of analysis on the part of bloggers. It’s really important for our nation’s destiny, after all, to parse Costello’s throw away lines every which way:

“Wow! What about the meaning of life?” Costello exclaimed.

Update [by Mark]: Jason Wilson at Gatewatching espies a tipping point in the Australian political blogosphere.

Anyway, he was baiting for a link. He’s got one. I hope he’s happy now.

Update: [by Kim] More from tigtog at Hoyden.