Much has been made over the last decade or more of the divide between “elite” opinion and popular opinion on a range of issues. George Megalogenis reports on the divide between popular opinion and that of an important category of elites - major party candidates - at the time of the 2007 Federal election, based on the 2007 Australian Candidate Study.
A key issue on which the candidates were out of alignment with the voters is our old friend, global warming. According to the 2007 Australian Election Study, 51.5% of voters considered this issue “Extremely Important” and a further 36.8% considered it “Quite Important”. This compares with 65.5% of Labor candidates who, according to the candidate study, considered the issue important, and contrasts strikingly with Liberal-National Coalition candidates, of whom only 32.4% considered it important.
This raises the further question of what the result would be of polling other right-of-centre elite constituencies on this issue, such as Quadrant contributors and subscribers, conservative media commentators, and staff and directors of right-of-centre think-tanks. One gets the impression it would be lower than 32.4%.
Continue reading ‘Elites versus masses on climate change’
Some of the themes I wrote about in my recent contribution to the Pacific Journalism Review on that tired, tedious and irritating bloggers v. journos meme have been starkly illustrated in recent days - in particular the co-optation of the space of blogging and indeed the persona or role of the blogger by big media. As Kim noted, Andrew Bolt, in a “my hits are big, really” misadventure (demonstrating his capacity to ignore evidence that’s drawn to his attention about what statistics actually mean) suddenly became an outsider Insider, or an Insider outsider. Or something.
Andrew Bolt is so proud of his “million page impressions” - take that, lefty journos! - he’s written a column in the mainstream media paper that employs him to write his blog to decry the media and talk up “blogging”. Which is what he does. Not media. Go figure. I imagine he’ll take his outsider message to Insiders on Sunday.
Then we’ve got a panel at the Byron Bay Writers Festival about blogging where the “blogger” doing the discussing is… George Megalogenis. Continue reading ‘Journos versus bloggers round #49503′
And it’s going to be “gold, gold to Australia, gold” quite a lot at the Beijing Games, if the predictions of US sports magazine (and annual cheesecake purveyor) Sports Illustrated hold up. They’re predicting 22 gold medals for Australia, five more than Athens, and a couple more than the Australian Olympic Committee’s estimates.
As well as the usual gaggle of swimmers, the magazine is pencilling in gold medals in the women’s triathalon for Emma Snowsill, shooters Warren Potent (I’m sure the headline writers are already preparing for that one) and Michael Diamond, a trio of sailing events, and the men’s pairs rowing.
I know I’ll be hanging on every tacking duel, as the smog-blurred images of 470-class dinghies cut their way through the algae-ridden sludge at the Qingdao Olympic Sailing Center, yelling at the screen. Of course, what I’ll be yelling is “get this crap off the television and show me the hockey tournament, you twits!” I may actually start throwing things at the screen after the second replay of Grant Hackett’s 1500 meter heat…
What are your predictions for these Olympics?
Like Andrew Bartlett, I agree entirely with Andrew Bolt regarding the shameful weaseling by the International Olympic Committee regarding the whole idea of granting the 2008 games to the authoritarian dictatorship of China in the first place.
crossposted
UPDATE: It has been pointed out in comments that LP has not discussed the Rudd government’s continued determination to introduce ISP-level internet filtering this week. To redress that lack I’ll quote a post I made at Hoyden About Town a couple of days ago in its entirety below:
No surprises: internet filtering test results show products block legitimate content
We said it would. Despite a cheery press release from Communications Minister Stephen Conroy that all is going well, an analysis of the actual test results shows that the tested filters slow connection speeds significantly (which means ISPs would have to increase capacity, the costs of which would be passed on to consumers) and have a false positives rate that would block at least 10,000 legitimate sites (and that’s for the best product result - most would block more). It gets worse:
None of the products could effectively filter instant messaging, streaming video, peer-to-peer file sharing like BitTorrent, newsgroups or newly-invented Internet protocols except by blocking them entirely. Let’s count them again. None.
How long will the Rudd government continue to pretend that having this cumbersome, costly and ineffective product shoved at us under an opt-out scheme is in any way a good idea?
Via Tim Dunlop at Blogocracy.
We haven’t got around to posting the stats on our readership and advertising income (earned rather than paid still!) for June yet - to come shortly - but I did want to note Tim Watts’ post about Andrew Bolt’s stats post:
Thanks very much for all your support. The figures for the month aren’t all in, obviously, but we’ve already cracked the million: 1,077,334 hits for July.
Watts notes - rightly - that whatever you think of Bolt’s choice of subject matter and approach to it, he is one of the very few MSM “bloggers” who does get the form and do it well. But he doesn’t seem to get metrics. I’m not the first person on his thread to point out that “page impressions” doesn’t actually give you a direct take on the number of readers - if he were to disclose the number of unique visits, it’d be a much more worthwhile exercise. By way of comparison, LP got 1,442,702 “page impressions” (in Bolt’s terms) in July and topped one and a half million in May and June.
For those who are interested in these things, a recent check on how much of that traffic was to images suggests only about 1.4%. But page impressions or page views really just tells you how many of each and every page with a url of its own was viewed. In LP’s case, a not insignificant amount of this is the “long tail” phenomenon and consists of accessing old posts. It’s exclusive of bots doing indexing and spammers, and I imagine Bolt’s figure is as well, but he needs to put it in its proper context.
Update: Andrew Bolt is so proud of his “million page impressions” - take that, lefty journos! - he’s written a column in the mainstream media paper that employs him to write his blog to decry the media and talk up “blogging”. Which is what he does. Not media. Go figure. I imagine he’ll take his outsider message to Insiders on Sunday.
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Boing Boing reports:
The Orwell Prize will mark the 70th anniversary of the Orwell Diaries by serializing them, one day at a time, on a blog — reminiscent of the way that Phil Gyford syndicated Pepys’s Diary.
That’s so cool. Though actually I suspect Pepys would have been the better blogger. He was LJ circa 1660.
The whole revival of Orwell thing is weird and so overdetermined. On one hand, there’s the Orwell as anti-po/mo theme. On the other, there’s Orwell as the “hero” of the “Decent Left” theme (cf. you know, everything Christopher Hitchens has recently written). What’s ignored and effaced totally is Orwell the polemicist in favour of imagining a postwar social democracy. If you read what he was saying in the 1930s, what he was wishing for - as a “realistic utopia” - was something very like what was envisaged in the whole Beveridge/Keynes libertarian social democracy vision. 1984 was also really meant to be more about the distortion of this “new Jerusalem” by the statist Labour Party than “Stalin”. But anyways… Orwell as a writer - and here I’d gesture to the almost forgotten Burmese Days - is also much neglected. Perhaps his diaries will stimulate a respectful consideration of him in regard to his own concerns not some dumbarsed political point scoring about teh war on terror or whatevs.
Warning: snark ahead
According to last night’s Lateline, “A growing number of bloggers are now using the internet to attack the science of global warming. Written by climate change sceptics, the blogs are hosting a new scientific debate over whether the world has become hotter or colder during the past ten years.”
The reporter’s evidence for this “new scientific debate”? Andrew Bolt and Jennifer Marohasy. You know, Bolt. The long-serving columnist with a regular gig in the Herald-Sun and Insiders. And Marohasy, the IPA employee whose glass-half-full schtick on the environment has been making its way into the mainstream media for many years. Both do run blogs (in Bolt’s case, to give him credit, he does genuinely blog in a way that most journalists haven’t tried), but the idea that they are in any way new voices on the scene is complete rot. And their “new scientific debate”? A rehashed version of the “world is cooling” nonsense - based on a high-schooler’s level of data analysis - that they’ve been running for years, which as Paul noted has been debunked in detail by any number of experts.
Note to John Stewart (the Lateline reporter, not the Daily Show host): just because somebody says it on the Internet doesn’t make it new, scientific, or interesting. And if you really want to report on climate change blogging, might I suggest there’s a whole other world of it out there that’s been doing a whole lot better covering not only the problem, but the merits of the various solutions, than your program has managed?
Last year I shared some thoughts on the state of political blogging in Australia. Trevor Cook has just examined the claim that the blogging phenomenon is “losing impetus”. I’m not sure that’s so, and coincidentally, I’ve just sent off a write up of the talk I gave at the Public Right to Know Conference at UTS last year, for a special issue of the Pacific Journalism Review being co-ordinated by the Australian Centre for Independent Journalism. You can read it here [link to pdf].
Continue reading ‘The state of political blogging II’
Amongst the commentary on the Tour de France, Emma MacDonald has used the opportunity to draw out a theme that appears periodically in the press - why aren’t there women competing some particular elite sporting event, in this case the tour?
“Women do not get a fair shake in our industry and this has got to change,” Jet Tanner, owner of JET Cycling, told the US Women’s Cycling Challenge in May. Notwithstanding the obvious physical advantage many men have over women, shouldn’t a world proud of its equal rights allow women to try out for any event if they want to?
Doesn’t anyone wonder how far women could go, since, according to cycling.com, “experienced female riders have been known to kick the backsides of good male racers”. This month a female cycling team — the BRADAGirls — competed for the first time against men in the gruelling one-week Tour of Jamaica, all hardened road racers who have won the respect of their male counterparts.
Continue reading ‘Why there aren’t women at the TDF’
This post is so belated that spoiler warnings are hardly an issue (I suspect) so I don’t think I need to give any, though I don’t warrant all the links are spoiler free.
So the saga began with the anticipation… fueled by the unfortunate non-viewability-ness of the Joss Whedon intertubes serial in Australia. You have to give the guy big props for the cleverness of this model - something not entirely new to the Whedonverse though a bit of an extrapolation. I figure the uneven success rate Whedon’s had with getting projects up and keeping them on air has actually stimulated a lot of creativity - for instance the Buffy Season Eight continuation by comic. If anything’s a great example of the “intercreativity” of fans and various pros in constructing a fictional ‘verse across all sorts of platforms, it’s all things Whedon. So I guess the expectations for Doctor Horrible were pretty high. I thought it was kinda… well, meh. Diehard Whedon fans loved it. Others turned a more critical eye on the Doctor’s adventures.
Bring back Firefly I reckon!
Continue reading ‘The compulsory (if belated) Joss Whedon’s “Dr Horrible” post’
John Quiggin welcomes the agreement to commence power-sharing talks in Zimbabwe, though there’s obviously still some scepticism about. Crikey has a very useful links page to comments from Zimbabwean blogs.
Eye on Big Brother reflects on the end of Big Brother. As always, he trains an astute eye on the broader cultural significance of the show - and of its demise.
Cadel Evans had a terrific Tour de France stage in the Alps last night (our time). He didn’t win the stage. He didn’t gain any time on the two riders a few seconds ahead of him in the overall standings - Frank Schleck and Bernard Kohl - nor did he look like doing so. But, at this point, he’s probably the best-placed to win the Tour. Evans, you see, is not the best climber in the Tour field. Schleck, Kohl, and Carlos Sastre - about 40 seconds behind - are better climbers, particularly in their ability to sprint for a short distance on the climb. Evans can maintain a steady pace equal to them over a long climb, but he struggles to match their acceleration. The other riders and their team managers - particularly team CSC, containing, Schleck, Sastre, and several other expert climbers - try to exploit this chink in Evans’ armour, which they did on Sunday night where he lost a few seconds to Kohl and Schleck. But, over the top of the Cime de la Bonette - the highest through road in Europe - Evans was able to sit comfortably in the middle of a small group containing all those riders. One important rival - Christian Vande Velde - was not, and another rival, Denis Menchov, sat with the leaders pretty much all the way up the hill, only to fall a few seconds behind in the crazy descent down to the finish.
That’s probably not good enough for Schleck, Kohl, and Sastre. They need to beat Evans by a substantial margin over the mountains. On Saturday, the riders will race, one by one, against the clock over a 50-odd kilometre course in a flatter region of France. Evans and Vande Velde are superb time-triallists, as is Menchov. Schleck, Kohl, and Sastre are not quite as good. They’re expected to lose a couple of minutes to Evans in that stage. So they need to gain those couple of minutes in the mountains. They have one more chance, and it’s on the most famous mountain in all of cycling, the Alpe d’Huez.
Continue reading ‘The last mountain’
In contrast to the media coverage earlier in the year when the People’s Republic of China suffered such an overwhelming public relations disaster in the context of protests from human rights and Tibetan activists against the Olympic torch, very little has been heard of Tibet in the mainstream media of late. All that we’ve seen lately in the Australian press is the solemn warnings from the Australian Olympics Committee that any athletes wearing an innocuous t-shirt with a generic human rights message offered to those interested by the Australia Tibet Council would be immediately sent home. Lest they annoy the Chinese government, and violate the “spirit of the Olympics” presumably. The corporate sponsored Olympiad brooks no petty “mixing” of politics and sport, of course.
Continue reading ‘Tibet, human rights, history and the 2008 Olympics’
Elliott Bledsoe reminds us not to take men wearing robes all that seriously. Make sure you look at this photo very carefully indeed.
Note: If you don’t like what you see - tough - it’s now legal to be annoyed.
Continue reading ‘World Youth Day: The dark side of the force?’
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