Some idea of the way it’s stirred the pigeons can be gleaned from the reaction reported in New Matilda.

Elsewhere: Tim Dunlop.

NB: Previous discussion on LP can be found here.

There are a few key interlinking threads here that I think invite some serious discussion: the state of the Murdoch brand, the UK media context and finally the Australian media context.

The News International media brand, in the United Kingdom at least, has been positively smashed, perhaps irrevocably. When News of the World published its final edition, with all proceeds going to charity, it had trouble finding charities willing to accept its money. The details of recent formal and informal meetings between the Prime Minister and the Treasurer with members of the Murdoch family are now being pored over with genuine distrust and disdain in the public, rather than the indifference that is typical. James Murdoch, the youngest Murdoch scion (strangely relatively unknown in Australia), has had his character brutally tested and his reputation as an executive dragged through the mud by all the allegations of wrong-doing on his watch. Rupert Murdoch’s image has morphed instantly from the powerful media mogul to end all media moguls into a tottering 80 year-old man who you wouldn’t be overly surprised to find in your local nursing home. Corporate dynasties suddenly seem just a little “last century”, relics of a more feudal, slightly more despotic capitalist era. If I were a financial advisor or a stock market activist, I would have some serious concerns about the transparency of the dealings of the various family members perched around the top of the News hierarchy, and advising my clients accordingly.

In the UK, the phone-hacking scandal has emerged in an age where circulation is in decline and newspapers seem on the fast track to extinction in their current form. Prices are being forced down (The Sun is just 20p!) and so is quality. Travelling on the underground in London, it quickly becomes apparent that the majority of people who bother to read a newspaper read the Metro, a free rag churned out by Associated Newspapers, who own the right-wing Daily Mail. Dead paper is – let’s face it – nice on a lazy weekend, but in this age of portable, wireless technology, really quite dumb. Personally, I’ve just subscribed to the Guardian Kindle edition – and boy does it make massive sense: cheaper than the paper edition, more convenient (downloads automatically each morning, readable on a packed train), and so much more environmentally friendly to boot. Is this the future of news?

If indeed it is the future of news, from what I can gather (admittedly from several thousand miles away), it might take Australia more than a little time to catch up. Australian newspaper circulation is of course also in long-term decline. Evolution in the Australian publishing market is also restrained by its diabolical levels of concentration; Fairfax and News Limited dominate the scene to such an extent that their half-life as newspaper publishers in the traditional sense is probably going to exceed that of their UK counterparts. I am not getting the sense that the Daily Telegraph or the Herald Sun are suffering from any significant amount of backlash from the exploits of the News of the World (please correct me if I am wrong in the comments!).

Will this saga be the watershed for publishing and the media/political nexus in Australia that it seems it will prove likely to be in the UK?

Tingle hones in on the virulence of the partisan campaign, not just in the Opposition Organ but across the News Limited tabloids, that has been evident since pretty much the day after the election. Noting that the anti-Labor push was ramped up after Julia Gillard became PM, she writes:

But this was nothing compared with the rage of the News Ltd papers since voters delivered an outcome they clearly didn’t like.

It took just two days before various News Ltd papers started calling for a fresh election and predicting the demise of the nation into chaos and anarchy under a minority government.

She goes on to cite the polls commissioned of the rural Independents’ seats and instanced The Australian‘s downplaying of a Newspoll which found a majority of respondents supported the country MPs’ allowing Julia Gillard to form a minority government. Malcolm Fraser and Bob Brown’s questioning of the ethics and conduct of The Australian are also discussed:

Greens leader Bob Brown – another target of News wrath – has had enough. The paper, he says, “sees itself as a determinant of democracy in Australia. It believes it has replaced the people and it’s time to bell the cat.”

“It’s stepped out of the role of the fourth estate to think it’s the determinant of who has seats in the Parliament, and it needs to be taken on.”

Whether Labor will, in fact, take News on is the central question, according to Tingle.

She notes that Kevin Rudd had refused to put The Australian‘s columnists and journos “on the drip” on coming to power, and that he went public with criticisms of the paper and News Limited’s journalism more generally. Labor figures were first puzzled, but now the company’s stance has become clear as day. Tingle doesn’t go into the way in which The Australian campaigned for Kevin Rudd’s downfall, but she does point to the fact that there’s serious discussion within ALP circles about how to tackle News Limited:

Labor believes it is confronted with the prospect of a ferocious and apparently continuing campaign against its legitimacy.

At some point, senior figures in the government argue, it will have to make a decision about whether it takes that on.

Tingle’s article largely speaks for itself, but I’d add a few observations (as well as noting that the “ferocious… campaign” is surely already evident).

First, I think that people who sometimes argue that we in the blogosphere ought to ignore the MSM alarums, in the hope that they’ll go away, or that we can somehow squeeze them of legitimacy, are on the wrong track. It is vitally important, I’ve always thought, to watch the so-called watchers, and where possible, given the limited resources we have, to expose the artificiality of ‘the narrative’. If you consider that furphies such as the BER “Waste” no doubt helped the Coalition to get as close to government as it has were only possible on the back of a sustained campaign in The Australian, in particular, and how difficult it is for sites like this one and Crikey to correct the record for anything like the same sort of audience, then you have the essence of the dilemma in a nutshell.

Secondly, I do think the degree of expressed dissatisfaction with the MSM, and the refraction of News Limited’s themes through other outlets (including but not limited to the ABC), has reached a critical mass, and is an interesting phenomenon in itself.

Lastly, perhaps that dissatisfaction has crystallised around two events – the absurdity of the heights of “look, over there! shiny!” behaviour by the press during the election campaign (where discussion of policy was foregone almost completely in favour of obsessing over leaks and Latham – with the trope of “but the Prime Minister’s policy announcement was overshadowed by x” employed on a ritual basis), and then the way that the interruption in the game of politics as usual exposed not just a lot of lazy assumptions but a lot of power structures outside their normal context.

Interesting times indeed.

Update: Laura Tingle will be on Lateline tonight (along with George Megalogenis).

Funny how political philosophy is being invoked in an actual political context.

And it was funny to hear Rob Oakeshott skewer the piffle on Edmund Burke served up by Professor Kenneth Wiltshire in The Australian yesterday.

You really wonder what purpose these op/ed pieces serve; except maybe to annoy the people they’re supposedly addressing.

Just by the by, while we’re on the topic of News Limited’s partisan campaigns, does anyone expect “ELECTION NOW!” to carry on if the Independents support the Coalition (which, it goes without saying, Goddess forfend!)…

The poll being talked about was trumpeted by News Limited, but curiously didn’t emanate from either Newspoll or Galaxy – pollsters of choice to The Australian and the metro tabloids respectively. Rather it was commissioned by “Sydney-based public relations and lobby firm Parker and Partners”, for reasons unknown and for a client unknown, and all we know is that it’s a phone poll of 1000 people with 56% apparently wanting another election now. In the absence of any information about the composition of the sample or the question/s asked, it’s probably useful only as fodder for the “Election Now!” campaign.

Some interesting questions about where it comes from, and why it’s being reported in the absence of the transparency that usually exists around the detail of the polling are probably worth asking.

More reliable is Essential Research today, which you can read about at Crikey. Voting intentions were essentially unchanged from the actual poll that counts, and there wasn’t much evidence that many voters would vote differently in a hypothetical new election, though most now anticipate a Coalition win. If you hold to the theory that Labor might have done better in the absence of win expectations being so high (“it was the protest vote wot done it!”), maybe that’s significant.

Of course, no one seems to be reporting that an immediate election is constitutionally impossible without parliament having met, and that in any case, its likelihood is fairly narrow. Whatever might be the putative state of public opinion at the moment (and I doubt too many people are actually strongly concerned about the absence of a gubbermint, or would welcome a return to election mode if it actually happened), it might be worth observing that two years last century in which Great Britain had two elections – 1910 and 1974 – both after an inconclusive first try, produced pretty much the same result both times.

Additionally, there’s controversy over the fact that it’s effectively a privatised campaign forum. Sky News is refusing to provide a clean feed to other tv stations. So it won’t be shown on ABC News 24, thus not reaching a much wider audience with access to a digital signal. Apparently, it will be streamed at the News Limited’s Daily Telegraph from 6pm.

So I’m not going to bother with it.

No doubt there will be lots of chat on Twitter, unified under the hashtag #rooty.

Update: The Drum has a Cover It Live feature enabled on its website.

It’s not an insignificant thing to tear down a Prime Minister in his first term, a Labor leader who’s the first to win a federal election since 1993.

The problem with the poll obsessed apparatchiks is that their horizon is always the next poll. And they tend always to have a static assessment of the political situation.

In a situation like we face today, where it would seem a number of marginal seat polls have given unexpected momentum to a putsch dreamed up by so-called ‘hard heads’ in the ALP right, and talked up through the ‘media narrative’, I wonder whether any thought has been given to the need to persuade the public of the need to destroy a Prime Minister. Any thought that is, beyond simplistic reasoning that hardly goes beyond ‘Rudd’s the problem, so if he’s removed, there will be less of a problem’.

Paul Howes’ appearance on Lateline tonight indicates there isn’t much of a communications strategy within the Gillard camp (where his, and the AWU’s, tent is firmly pitched). The plotters will need to articulate something much more persuasive than ‘the polls made us do it’ and ‘Alister Jordan’s calling MPs offended Gillard’. The stupidity of the ‘Rudd disloyal to Gillard’ theme was apparent, and apparently Howes only belatedly realised that announcements that unions such as his and the HSU had swung their support to Gillard opened the way to the Kristina Keneally attack – a leader installed by faceless union bosses and party apparatchiks.

Indeed, that’s a theme Kevin Rudd astutely exploited in his press conference tonight [full text here].

Howes made nothing of any policy differences between Gillard and Rudd, and continually claimed that the Rudd government was a good government.

I don’t imagine that ‘we were goaded by Dennis Shanahan and Peter Van Onselen’s columns’ would be persuasive either. Unless this really is a “coup by commentariat”. Or Howes’ other line, which equated to a feeling of panic that Tony Abbott and the Coalition would defeat Labor.

Anyone who imagines that, if Julia Gillard is Prime Minister tomorrow, she will have no need to explain why she is, and Rudd no longer is, lives in a fool’s paradise.

It also won’t be long before Gillard’s reported reluctance to challenge is questioned. Did she really first become aware of moves which have obviously been in train for some time earlier this afternoon?

The story follows a report in today’s Fairfax papers that Kevin Rudd’s chief of staff, Alister Jordan, had been asked to take soundings among MPs on the Prime Minister’s behalf, and claims from The Australian that Julia Gillard had done herself and her party a dis-service by not initiating the challenge the paper had been talking up at yesterday’s caucus.

Update: There’s now a report on the ABC News website.

Update: The Twitter hashtag #spill is being revived… though #ruddroll also has its admirers.

Update: Kerry O’Brien says there’ll be more later on in the 7.30 Report. Meanwhile, the most astute summary on Twitter comes from RachWelsh who points out that some tweeting journos with sources are saying something is happening, and others are not.

Update: Heather Ewart on the 7.30 Report claimed that meetings were taking place between elements of the NSW and Victorian Right, and Mark Arbib is said to have defected from Rudd. She reported that Gillard is meeting with Rudd, but of course, Gillard may be meeting with Rudd to quash the unchallenge. Or not.

Update: Fairfax reports (at 7.39pm) that Gillard’s office has said “nothing has changed”.

Update: There’s very little news among all the noise. Bill Shorten is said to be one of those orchestrating the unchallenge, and the AWU has reportedly withdrawn its support for Rudd.

Julia Gillard, Wayne Swan, Anthony Albanese and John Faulkner are reported to be in Kevin Rudd’s office.

Gillard is reported to be not intending to challenge.

This micro-event, it would seem, has been brought to you by the genius “strategists” who talked Rudd into dropping the ETS in the first place, setting in train his plunge in the polls. The NSW Right, as I’ve said before, knows no other response to bad focus groups than to bring on a leadership challenge. Political courage and leadership is unknown among the apparatchiks and Sussex Street types.

And we’ve also had an unprecedented campaign against the PM from the media and the mining industry. While I’d like to see Gillard become PM, the Labor Party would be insane to dump Rudd now, and nor should they.

This will be highly damaging, coming as it does just at the point when it appeared that things could be turned around for the government. If I were Julia Gillard, I’d urge Rudd to convene a caucus meeting tomorrow morning, and personally move a confidence motion in his leadership. And heads should roll in the ALP. Soon.

Update: The Punch, which is live blogging what is still the unchallenge, reports that John Faulkner between Gillard and Rudd.

I’ll repeat what I said before: if the ALP dumps Rudd now, it will be the height of stupidity, and be a demonstration of nothing but craven cowardice in the face of a media/mining industry orchestrated campaign, at a time when the polls indicate, despite a low primary vote, the ALP is still odds on to win the election.

Update: Paul Howes has just Tweeted that he’ll be on Lateline to explain the AWU’s position.

Update: Rachel Hills says it all on Twitter:

I feel like much of the anti-Rudd sentiment recently is more journalists getting bored with him than a newfound excess of crapness. #spill

Update: The Drum editor Jonathan Green on Twitter:

a certain smugness in the media at this coup by commentariat

Update: Sky News is reporting Kevin Rudd will be giving a press conference in the next 5 to 10 minutes.

Update: Lots of Tweets claiming that Rudd is about to quit.

Update: Rudd’s press conference will be televised live on ABC1 very soon.

Update: Rudd has convened caucus to meet at 9am. Gillard will be challenging. He is not standing down.

Update: Rudd indicates he will be running against faction and union domination. He is also running against the NSW Right, indicating that if he wins he will not be retreating from the RSPT, or giving in to calls for a hardline on asylum seekers. He suggested forward movement on climate change.

Update: New thread here.

The holiday national road toll count was a godsend for journalists at the national news agency, AAP.

When the nation was asleep at the beach, news was at a premium. Thinly staffed radio stations around the country depended even more at these times on the steady flow of “rip and read” headlines from the wires.

So it was that the 24-hour news production desk at AAP, using a rudimentary chart on a wall, had responsibility for collating a national holiday road toll count from the individual counts of state and territory police forces.

This “death chart”, as it was called, became the hook for hundreds of largely internally generated news stories over the long, slow summer slumber.

Fresh angles could be created almost at will as overnight rewrite teams sought to freshen the file for the morning TV and radio bulletins:

* “Police are stepping up warnings over excessive speed after a spate of high-speed car crashes….”
* “The road toll is already closing in on last year’s record just three days into the holiday season….”
* “A fatality-free 24 hours on our roads has been welcomed by traffic authorities, but police say they remain on alert….”
* “A run of three fatalities on a horror stretch of road has triggered a slanging match between federal and state politicians over funding…”

It was an exercise in creating news out of very little. For sure, there were real human tragedies behind the raw death count. But telling those stories would require reporting resources and it was simply easier to conjure up a new lead by jamming together ritual phrases around the headline number.

The same effortless riffing is currently evident in the national media’s commentary on political opinion polls. It’s even easier in this case, though, because the event itself is orchestrated by the media.

Indeed, in the case of Newspoll – the most influential of the major polling organisations – a media company owns the poll. News Ltd can gear its entire editorial spin around a single number in a poll created by one of its own subsidiaries. In business, they call this vertical integration.

There is much discussion on Larvatus Prodeo and other blogs about News Ltd’s shameless political agenda. But the untold story is the economic efficiencies generated by “owning” the news.

The increasing squeeze on editorial resources in the mainstream media in the past decade is well documented. Legacies include an intensified focus on efficiency and shareholder value and a reduced sense of journalism as a “public good”. Event-driven news has been commoditised in an online world, leaving mainstream, capital-intensive outlets looking for new ways to create differentiated branded content.

These established outlets are filling the vacuum left by expensive reportorial journalism with cheap analysis and opinion built around in-house columnists.

This is why the front covers of our newspapers are now less about “what happened” and more about what someone says it all means.

News Ltd has taken this a step further by using its own Newspoll to advance its agenda. In this sense, the polling is not so much a reactive tool, but a proactive one. It drives the news cycle in such a way that journalists, once mere spectators, become actual players in the political game.

For a business organisation looking for a new business model in an online world, this makes a lot of sense. Instead of being hostage to externally-driven events that everyone can cover, you now “own” the news itself. The additional costs are very little. The polling is being done anyway. The “journalism” is just someone’s cheap opinion laid over the top.

Hence, we see The Australian dictating that the future of Rudd’s prime ministership hangs on its next Newspoll. Being so influential with such little investment is a sweet result for a margin-squeezed news organisation looking for a new reason to exist.

For an old journalist, it seems a logical extension of the holiday national road toll…..but with our own democracy as the road kill.

Enter the big guns, such as they are, firing broadsides from their Monday columns.

The theme of both Peter Van Onselen and Glenn Milne‘s pieces is that Kevin Rudd has one more Newspoll left in him (or two, according to Milne, if reality fails to play to script and the bar needs to be moved).

Newspoll returns after the return of federal parliament this week, and according to Van Onselen, “Rudd has one week to shape up”.

Milne’s farrago of faint praise points the way for how this story would develop should Gillard take the leadership – the knives are already being sharpened.

Let’s be very clear about what’s happening here. We’re going to read about this ‘narrative’ all week, and the same people writing it will bemoan that the government lacks ‘oxygen’ for its ‘message’, in the hope that having ensured that’s true, they can further shape reality by influencing the Labor caucus, and by necessity, Julia Gillard. If the ‘deadline’ passes and nothing happens, some other set of facts will be invented, and I’m sure that will occur, as Gillard’s far too smart to dance to the News Limited tune.

Meanwhile, Tony Abbott’s suitability for high office and the Coalition’s policy stance continue to go completely without scrutiny from the so-called ‘fourth estate’, and the implicit threat is that will continue, along with the relentless drumbeat of ‘Rudd in trouble’ stories, unless and until the ALP caves in.

Welcome to media politics, 2010 style.