Tag Archive for 'Media'

The truth of polls and the epistemology of politics

Published
by
Mark
1 week, 3 days ago
in Elections, Media, Polls, Queensland, Sociology, State/Territory Elections and Victoria
. 13 Comments

The Poll Bludger has the numbers on the latest Nielsen poll for Victoria. Labor leads on the 2PP 55-45.

The Age trumpets this result as Victorian Labor “defying the national trend”. No doubt other papers are saying the same - I haven’t looked.

I’ve been arguing for a while that there is insufficient evidence to conclude that there is a national trend against Labor, and that in fact thinking about disparate polls in seven different jurisdictions with differing political histories, cultures and current circumstances as constituting a trend makes little sense. My contention for a long time has been that elections are unrepeatable and singular events and that epistemologically we can know much less about electoral behaviour and find grounds for prediction with much less certainty than we think. Political behaviour follows few laws and a lot of conclusions reached after the fact are questionable.

But there is a sort of reflexivity feedback loop built into the way we think about politics and the way polls are reported. Particularly at state level - where polls are few and far between - one poll which struggles to form a series can have a large impact on perceptions, and thus the interpretations of the public and the press and the morale of politicians and “momentum”.

Continue reading ‘The truth of polls and the epistemology of politics’

Malcolm’s modus operandi

Published
by
Kim
3 weeks ago
in Media and Politics
. 12 Comments

We’ve been pointing out in a range of posts here that Malcolm Turnbull’s “comment on everything” approach, and, for that matter, the preparedness of journos to let the Opposition lead a lot of the news cycle, may be counterproductive. And the fact that a lot of what he has to say is driven by a lawyerly knack for exploring supposed holes in government statements and announcements.

So, over the last few days, we’ve had Malcolm ask whether the government actually wants to subsidise unprofitable childcare centres, where the detail is on the $22 million support being extended to ABC learning, and so on. This is dumb politically. And the answers to the questions are obvious - that not for profits are negotiating with the receivers, that childcare centres which don’t make a commercial profit can reinvest any revenue in better services and care, and that the situation is a developing one. It’s not rocket science - people want to know that their kids will still have childcare places, not the sorts of answers Turnbull wants.

And Turnbull has been forced to clarify his statements to correct the impression - which you could easily get from his questions - that he wanted to let “market forces” close down the centres. Just as he was forced to clarify an impression left by the only thing anyone highlighted from his “media offensive” over the weekend - that he thought Therese Rein was rude by not becoming his buddy. Now we know that he just thinks Kevin Rudd isn’t polite enough to him.

Let’s be clear about this. Malcolm Turnbull has foot in mouth syndrome.

End of the Road for Surfdom; and the future of independent online media

Published
by
Mark
3 weeks, 4 days ago
in Activism, Blogging, Books, Writers & Writing, Media, Sociology and The Web
. 79 Comments

It’s sad to read that Tim Dunlop is closing down The Road to Surfdom, one of the original Australian political blogs, and one that’s been a great contributor to commentary and discussion over a sustained period of time. It’s not wholly unexpected, but it’s still sad. Tim, the other Surfdom bloggers who won’t be continuing to blog individually, and the joint itself will all be very much missed.

Tim has some reflections on the role online media plays and its value and potential vis-a-vis the mainstream media which I think are clearly heartfelt and incredibly important, so I’m going to take the liberty of quoting his last post at some length. In particular, I want to endorse Tim’s sentiments about the necessity of supporting and growing the independent online mediaspace, and I want to point out how those comments have direct implications for the sort of work we do at LP, and how that work could be enhanced. But more of that later.

Continue reading ‘End of the Road for Surfdom; and the future of independent online media’

US election: Yes we can!

Published
by
Mark
3 weeks, 5 days ago
in Activism, Blogging, Elections, Foreign Elections, Media, Polls, Sociology, Technology and USA
. 16 Comments

Image of spontaneous street celebrations in Harlem courtesy of matt semel at flickr - reproduced under a Creative Commons licence.

No doubt one of the big stories about the US election will be the influence of the blogosphere and the netroots. In many ways, the rise of the intertubes in politics was an unintended consequence of the Rove approach to politics, as Publius perceives:

The bigger story is that this same anger – this same frustration – has led liberals to organize in more numerous and consequential ways. In the last few years, we’ve seen new think tanks. We’ve seen blogs flower. We’ve seen the rise of media sites like TPM and Huffington with real journalistic chops. We’ve seen unprecedented efforts to register and canvass voters.

In short, we’ve seen a new energy driving liberals back to politics.

In an opinion piece at ABC Online, Barry Saunders sums up the changes that net based activism and citizen journalism have wrought:

The impact of social media on this election has been enormous. Whoever takes office will have to deal with widely available factchecking data, embarrassing videos, rabid wingnuts, opinionated bloggers and TV hosts, and a massive number of new voters and donors who feel they have invested in the American political process - as well as two wars and a collapsing economy. Here’s hoping they know what they’re doing.

Continue reading ‘US election: Yes we can!’

Trioli Redux; Murdoch’s ABC frontier

Published
by
Kim
4 weeks, 1 day ago
in Film, TV, Video etc, Media and Politics
. 118 Comments

I’m not really one for breakfast television, but I’d be interested in hearing from anyone who’s seen the new ABC2 Breakfast show, which debuts today. It will also be streamed online. With Virginia Trioli as one of the hosts (the other is Barrie Cassidy, filling in for Peter Lloyd - who’s got some legal problems), I’m not hopeful that it will provide much of an alternative to the rest of the press gallery trivial horse race agenda of the day coverage. It’s not a very hopeful time generally for the ABC’s public affairs reportage and analysis, with the Radio National cutbacks and journos such as Fran Kelly, Chris Uhlmann and Michael Brissenden constantly reciting opposition talking points and doing their world weary cynicism thing. Print has always prided itself on setting the tv agenda and the ABC’s political reporters seem to take their cues from whatever the current News Limited line is. With Fairfax descending further into celebrity drivel and Eastern suburbs navel gazing, it’s a huge pity when the scarce resources of the national broadcaster go to waste in hunting somewhere at the back of the trivial and insipid press gallery pack.

And speaking of News Limited and the ABC, Philosopher King Rupe is delivering this year’s Boyer lectures, billed as “Big Ideas”. Continue reading ‘Trioli Redux; Murdoch’s ABC frontier’

Affirmative action needed

Published
by
Phil
1 month, 1 week ago
in Film, TV, Video etc and Media
. 47 Comments

Just a follow up to a previous post.

It appears that no matter what the ABC does it just can’t find enough sympathetic Coalition voters to balance a Q&A studio audience and keep Senator Abetz happy.

Mr Scott said the ABC pursued “a number of different strategies” to bring together a more diverse audience, including contacting law and accounting firms, the Australian Retailers Association, the Sydney Chamber of Commerce, the Australian Christian Lobby, the Australian Family Association, Young Liberal groups and every state Liberal MP within one hour’s drive of the ABC’s Sydney studios.

“We have tried a number of different things to try and ensure that we have all the viewpoints represented in the audience and I think we have,” he said.

“I understand that Liberal MPs were approached asking whether in fact they were aware of people who might like to come and join our audience.”

Of course he forgot to memo the ABC board and I’m surprised the Young Liberals couldn’t find a bus load of guys like this charming young chap within an hours drive of the ABC studios?

Or maybe it’s just that they are all too busy charting the complicated metrics of bias in our cultural institutions and wasting everyone’s time making Senate submissions to attend.

On abstractly mourning Britt Lapthorne

Published
by
Kim
1 month, 1 week ago
in Disasters, Media, Parenting and Relationships
. 60 Comments

I’ve felt quite uncomfortable watching a lot of the coverage related to the disappearance and death of Australian backpacker Britt Lapthorne in Dubrovnik. In particular, I wondered whether her mother, Elke, was really helping matters any by so publicly displaying her grief and distress - or rather, I wondered also at the ethics of both the media and its viewers in representing and consuming so immediately her emotional reactions. I honestly don’t think this sort of coverage - in Australia - would have had any effect on the investigation in Croatia, and I was wondering whether Ms Lapthorne was taking appropriate care of her own psychological well being by working through her emotions so publicly. It’s difficult to know how to write about these sorts of events - and I really wanted to just link to an excellent piece by Audrey Apple on “vicarious grief”.

Continue reading ‘On abstractly mourning Britt Lapthorne’

Bill Henson, visual shock and the democratisation of art

Published
by
Mark
1 month, 3 weeks ago
in Art, Books, Writers & Writing, Culture, Ethics, Media, Photography, Politics and Sociology
. 27 Comments

As no doubt everyone has noticed, there has been a vigorous discussion in comments about the latest Bill Henson brouhouha. I don’t want to comment explicitly on the issues raised by David Marr’s “revelation” that Henson had visited a primary school in St Kilda to scout for subjects for his photographs, because I honestly don’t think the debate’s much advanced over the last round, which was covered very extensively here at LP in a series of posts, and I haven’t shifted my own view. Except to note that I agree that David Marr is probably the person who should be brought to task for dealing unethically with Henson in his rush to find a salacious story to publicise his book, which was released today. I’m sure we’re quite sensitised now to the confection of “news” to help book sales after the unending Peter Costello sales job. As a professional journalist of long standing, Marr knows better than most how to manipulate a story, and perhaps it’s the ethics of his dealing with his subject that should also be questioned.

I did want to talk about one comment which really goes to the heart of the bigger issues around Henson’s art and his professional practice - and which when viewed from a long term perspective, I think explains more of what’s going on than the framing of the previous debate in terms of “freedom of speech”. Alison Croggon, who organised the petition to Kevin Rudd about Bill Henson’s images some time ago when they were seized by police from the Roslyn Oxley9 Gallery in Paddington, had this to say:

Alison Croggon, who organised an open letter supporting Henson from cultural delegates to the 2020 Summit, said the controversy also exposed distrust of the arts community.

“The thing that shocked me most of all about the debate was the perception that artists were above the law or were asking for special exemptions, but that was never the case,” she said. “There is a responsibility in the artistic community to address that.”

It has, of course, been addressed to some extent with the development of guidelines for artists working with minors by the Australia Council, after a request from Arts Minister Peter Garrett. But that, of course, is not as salacious a topic for the media than a beatup about putative pervs in schoolyards. Nevertheless, the disjunction between “the arts community” and publics who aren’t necessarily normally aware of its norms and practices is at the centre of all this. I didn’t know, for instance, that all manner of cultural and media industries folk seek permission regularly to utilise schools for casting, which has been the defence of Henson’s actions offered - see for example, this article in The Age by Peter Craven. A while back, my interest piqued by the whole Henson furore, I read American cultural historian Michael Kammen’s Visual Shock: A History of Art Controversies in American Culture.

Continue reading ‘Bill Henson, visual shock and the democratisation of art’

Reassembling Journalism and Objectivity

Published
by
dk.au
2 months, 2 weeks ago
in Authoritarianism, Blogging, Climate change, Media, Politics, Sociology and The Web
. 40 Comments

This is a very belated, ambitious response to the Future of Media 08 summit which I attended on behalf of LP.

We need facts.

They underpin all the modern abstract systems we’ve come to know, love and get angry with from time to time. So when facts collapse, we need publics more than at any other time to gather around, examine what went wrong and piece things and institutions together again. In this sense, the rise of projects reattaching facts to theory in recent decades probably corresponds to the decline of the liberal model of Journalism whereby the facts (’just the facts’) are disseminated. Continue reading ‘Reassembling Journalism and Objectivity’

Baring breasts vs. baring souls

Published
by
Robert Merkel
6 months ago
in Life, Parenting, Sociology and Women
. 17 Comments

This post is a joint effort with Cassie Hampden, a postgraduate student in psychology.

One of the issues raised in the Henson brouhaha is the issue of the consent of the children modelling for the photographs, with one judge arguing whether it was really possible for consent to be granted and speculating about the possibility of a lawsuit if a model, later in life, regrets being photographed naked as a teenager.

In that context, a recent story on the 7.30 Report provides a rather interesting counterpoint. It’s a feel-good story about a 17-year-old girl, from a working-class background in a working-class Victorian town, who overcame both these barriers and a battle with anorexia and depression to win a national “Brain Bee” - essentially, a neurology quiz contest for later-year high school students. Through this success, she’s had the opportunity to do work experience at the Howard Florey Institute at Melbourne University, and travel to Montreal for the world final of the contest.

This is a wonderful achievement; and no doubt the horizons opened to her will lead in many interesting directions. But the way her story was told was unsettling on several levels.

Continue reading ‘Baring breasts vs. baring souls’