Over at Gatewatching, Jason Wilson references Andrew Elder’s very good question about the Australian Women’s Weekly being a graveyard for politicians, and asks another good one – given the magazine’s truly huge readership, were Tony Abbott’s comments ill advised?
The Weekly is a colossus, that really does reach an incredibly wide sweep of Australian voters. Looking bad in it means looking bad to a lot of people. For a man who is struggling with women voters, Tony Abbott has at the very least taken a huge risk with his comments. If they really were off the cuff, and really do hurt him, he will come to regret going unprepared to an encounter with the Weekly, one of Australia’s most important political publications.
To reiterate Mr Elder’s question – one that of course many feminists asked before either of us did – why aren’t magazines like the Weekly taken more seriously, more often, by more journos, scholars and political junkies, as both public sphere institutions, and as places where politics happens?
As summer holidays end, and Parliament prepares to resume, we’ve seen two stories this last week which have had lots of normally not so engaged voters talking; Abbott’s remarks about young women’s sexuality (quickly spun away as ‘private advice’ to his daughters when their potential for embedding a negative perception of his persona became clear) and Julia Gillard’s launch of the Myschool website.
Despite my own reservations about the latter, I have no doubt whatsoever it’s been a big political plus for the Government as the election year begins in earnest. Can the same be said for Tony’s thoughts about sexuality?
There’s been some discussion on the ABC’s decision to introduce a 24 hour news channel on a related thread, and it deserves consideration in its own right.
Mark Scott’s announcement was accompanied by the now ritualised shots across the bow from News Limited columnists. As Margaret Simons observes:
…it is another example of how one of the chief battles of the media decade will be between public broadcasters and commercial viewer-pays services.
Indeed. But it also raises the question of whether the ABC’s limited resources should be targeted towards jumping into the same space already occupied by Sky News. Mark Scott’s strategy for the ABC, when you substract some of the bells and whistles about ‘user generated content’, is increasingly looking like turning the ABC into a major competitor in a range of news and public affairs spaces.
The temptation in these debates is to default to a simplistic response, something along the lines of ‘the enemy of my enemy is my friend’. But profound shifts in the public broadcasting landscape require a more nuanced evaluation. As Simons herself notes, the question of the ABC Charter will be raised, not least by commercial vested interests.
However, as Jason Wilson argues at New Matilda:
…as news consumers and taxpayers, we’re entitled to pause for a moment and wonder whether it actually makes sense for us.
Go read the rest of Wilson’s piece.
His conclusion: Continue reading ‘ABC News 24/7′
Jason Wilson has a spiffy piece up at New Matilda on the rise and rise (and fall?) of the “trollumnist” – the op/ed columnist who provokes for advertising’s sake. He instances Miranda Devine, David Burchell, Planet Janet and Catherine Deveny. Riffing off Devine’s recent rant about cyclists, he writes:
But really, Devine’s column isn’t there to express a view shared by real people, but rather to disagree with a particular group. The column is aimed at cyclists, and those who are prepared to get angry on their behalf. Anyone who — like Devine — uses Twitter will have seen the outrage cranking up as soon as the column was posted. Along with the expressions of anger come links to the online version of the column, where metrics are collected and advertising hosted. In a fragmented media marketplace augmented by real-time social media, networked irritation drives traffic. Devine’s columns look more and more like linkbaiting, pure and simple.
I’ve rarely seen a better analysis of just why exactly all this ranting and raving is the lifeblood of a declining media than Wilson’s. But it does beg the question – what is it, precisely, about our culture that fosters the desire to be indignant? One wouldn’t want to credit the “trollumnist” with too much originality. The ground has to be prepared.
At New Matilda, Jason Wilson takes on the prevailing wisdom about the News Limited paywall plans:
The notion that News Corp’s proposed paywall “won’t work” is in danger of becoming common sense. The problem with this is that, on the contrary, I can see how it might well work.
While some of the caveats Wilson enters about the received narrative are no doubt valid, I don’t know that he is actually providing “facts” that have been “overlooked” – as the tag line says (though that may be a bit of sub-editing, rather than Wilson’s opinion). Among other points, he argues that bundling selected niche content might find a market, in a similar way to Foxtel style channels.
I can (just) believe that there’s a chance that people might pay for sport, but I think if there was a huge paying market for right wing opinionistas, they wouldn’t be giving Quadrant away free to so many libraries.
The missing question that needs answering is how much of the content News generates is actually stuff people want at all, and then how much do they want it… I suspect MX is a better representation of what most people want to read, but I doubt anyone would pay for it. You can bundle up celebrity stories with a heap of other stuff and make a magazine that will be purchased at the check out, but I’m still not sure that most of this ‘content’ has any market value online – in part because the way people read online is very different from print.
Elsewhere: Debra Adams.
An American Court has required Google to disclose the identity of a blogger who allegedly defamed a New York model, Liskula Cohen, so that she could take an action for libel:
Judge Madden rejected the claims by the blogger’s lawyer that the comments were mere opinion or “trash talk”, and that only factual assertions could be considered libellous.
“The thrust of the blog is that the petitioner is a sexually promiscuous woman,” Judge Madden wrote in her judgment, noting that the comments were run alongside photos of Cohen in suggestive poses.
The blog, which was shut down in March, was almost entirely devoted to slagging off Cohen. It contained just five entries, all of which were published on August 21 last year.
It’s interesting to ponder how some of the comments on prominent blogs hosted by mainstream media organisations might fare if this precedent were followed in Australia. We all know what I’m talking about, but for a sample of the sort of bilge that is far too blithely published, see the quotes in Jason Wilson’s piece yesterday at New Matilda.
To some degree, bloggers on MSM sites have a practical, if not legal, immunity because of the deep pockets of their employers. But those who effectively make money for those mastheads, as Wilson argues, by eagerly responding to the elicitation of grossly offensive and personalised comments, might pause and consider whether they’d individually be prepared to defend them in court. I doubt the bloggers who foster attack speech would offer anything other than rhetorical support.
Some comments threads on independent blogs might also be problematic. I can think of some blogs where the comments consist almost entirely of vilification and abuse of individuals.
It’s also well worth noting that misogynistic slurs were the basis for this court decision.
Elsewhere: Mashable.
Update: Bronwen Clune.
Update: Legal Eagle.
Update: Kate Harding at The Guardian’s Comment is Free.
Judging by some conversations I was having this morning, and some buzz on FB over the weekend, a lot of folk are starting to focus on the reality of what Queensland will be if the LNP wins government. No doubt there’s not much mileage in it for Anna Bligh, but there is truth in the perception that the absence of an authoritarian regime and a much freer climate more supportive of creative endeavour has made a real difference to both a lot of Queenslanders who might otherwise have done the well worn trek to Melbourne, Sydney or elsewhere and also to the diversification of our state’s economy into knowledge industries of all kinds. There’s some real apprehension around about the clock being wound back.
This might, of course, be dismissed as a set of metropolitan concerns. I doubt that’s true. Cities such as Toowoomba, Ipswich, Townsville, Rockhampton and others are increasingly promoting themselves as university towns, as creative and educational hubs. Some of the Brisbane v. the regions and elite v. populist stereotypes beloved of just about everyone on either side of the purported dividing line may be false, or at least much blurrier than usually conceived.
Still, the geographical and cultural spread of Queensland makes elections here hard to read – or rather, for those sitting in Brisbane, harder to read as the crow flies further. There are real gaps between social and cultural and economic interests in this big state which are difficult to bridge. Whether we end up with an LNP government holding fewer metropolitan seats than Labor, or a Labor government with a much diminished regional representation (or a minority government whose complexion is determined by rural and regional independents), the next state administration is going to find it more challenging to govern in the interests of all Queenslanders.
That’s particularly because – on both sides – the vision has been so barren.
Continue reading ‘Bridging the gap: What does it mean to be a Queenslander?’
Folks might recall the criticism from Jason Wilson bloggers were subjected to over the Windschuttle/Wilson hoax. John Quiggin has written an excellent post in response to the implicit claim that bloggers are “lazy amateurs”. In so doing, he also highlights the invalidity of one of the premises of the interminable “journos v. bloggers” arguments – the assertion that journalists report news and bloggers provide opinion. Go read!
As a bit of a sequel to Helen’s post on Radio National’s travails, I wanted to draw attention to the public consultation initiated by DBCDE on the government’s inquiry into the future of the ABC and SBS. For those who missed it, the discussion paper is here, and as Margaret Simons observes at Content Makers, the public submissions have now been published – and there are 2400 of them, which certainly suggests a lively interest in the direction of public broadcasting.
I was also interested to note that Derek Barry has written a post at Woolly Days on the submission from my QUT Creative Industries Faculty colleagues Terry Flew, Stuart Cunningham, Axel Bruns and Jason Wilson (now at Wollongong Uni). Drawing on some lessons from an ARC Linkage Project on citizen journalism (and folks might recall the YouDecide2007 site which was a centrepiece of the research), they argue that public broadcasting needs to be reframed as public service media.
Continue reading ‘Public broadcasting as public service media’
I feel like I’m flogging a dead horse here a little, but there are still some interesting posts being written on some of the issues arising out of Katherine Wilson’s hoaxing of Quadrant [see past LP posts here]. Most of the focus is now on the role of the blogosphere in revealing her identity, as Don Arthur at Troppo reacts to Jason Wilson’s claims of unethical behaviour at Gatewatching [here, here and Wilson's response to Arthur is here]. Meanwhile, more positively, Legal Eagle discusses why she thinks blogging is different from journalism, and some of the overlaps, and Margaret Simons reflects further on some of the issues.
A salient point in reply to Wilson’s claims about the obligations of bloggers regarding fact-checking might be synthesised from Legal Eagle’s post and a comment on Simons’ thread from Mediamook. Continue reading ‘Wilson/Windschuttle Quadrant hoax: the links continue!’
There’s an interesting debate proceeding on a post by Jason Wilson at gatewatching on Katherine Wilson’s hoaxing of Keith Windschuttle and Quadrant [previous LP posts here]. I think there’s some useful clarification of some of the ethical issues in the thread, and it also goes to my contention that the bloggers v. journos frame really should be put to bed. In the process, I think some of the gaps in current academic research about blogs and blogging are being highlighted, which hopefully will be a useful (if unintended) contribution from the whole exercise.
Meanwhile, John Quiggin looks at Windschuttle’s political trajectory.
In that vein, it’s worth noting that the culture wars have largely been fought between ex-lefties and – in the Australian context – liberals masquerading as “the left”. I don’t think David Marr and Robert Manne actually are “the Australian left” in any meaningful way, and I think it’s significant that Manne comes from a background as a cold warrior. What all this implies is that the targets and the terms of culture wars debates have always been both illusory and disconnected from political reality. There’s also a certain style of debating and argument which is usually ad hominem, full of rhetorical trickery and dedicated to sniffing out secret or hidden allegiances. For a range of reasons, I think Wilson has written herself into this script. I also think that this whole episode should demonstrate just how irrelevant and fundamentally pointless the culture wars are.
I’m of the view too that Crikey editor Jonathan Green is right that there’s something awry with Wilson’s approach to “activist journalism”. While the word “ethics” has been tossed around with gay abandon in all these conversations, I think there are significant questions about the politics of the hoax – its motivations, target and efficacy – which have been glossed over by all the side taking and point scoring. Some relevant questions could also be asked about whether journalism and activism go together.
Elsewhere: More from Margaret Simons.
Update: New post with more links around the ethical issues here.
Anonymity, blog commenting and defamation
An American Court has required Google to disclose the identity of a blogger who allegedly defamed a New York model, Liskula Cohen, so that she could take an action for libel:
It’s interesting to ponder how some of the comments on prominent blogs hosted by mainstream media organisations might fare if this precedent were followed in Australia. We all know what I’m talking about, but for a sample of the sort of bilge that is far too blithely published, see the quotes in Jason Wilson’s piece yesterday at New Matilda.
To some degree, bloggers on MSM sites have a practical, if not legal, immunity because of the deep pockets of their employers. But those who effectively make money for those mastheads, as Wilson argues, by eagerly responding to the elicitation of grossly offensive and personalised comments, might pause and consider whether they’d individually be prepared to defend them in court. I doubt the bloggers who foster attack speech would offer anything other than rhetorical support.
Some comments threads on independent blogs might also be problematic. I can think of some blogs where the comments consist almost entirely of vilification and abuse of individuals.
It’s also well worth noting that misogynistic slurs were the basis for this court decision.
Elsewhere: Mashable.
Update: Bronwen Clune.
Update: Legal Eagle.
Update: Kate Harding at The Guardian’s Comment is Free.