Archive for the 'Media' Category

Editorial interference by the ABC’s chairman

ABC Chairman Maurice Newman made a few comments yesterday that may go a long way to explaining some of the pressures editors and producers at the public broadcaster may be under – specifically on the issue of anthropogenic global warming (AGW).

This collective censorious approach succeeded in suppressing contrary views in the mainstream media, despite the fact that a growing number of distinguished scientists were challenging the conventional wisdom with alternative theories and peer reviewed research.

While claiming some of his best friends were journalists, Newman attacked the profession for uncritical group thinking on a range of issues (Enron, tech meltdown and the GFC) and further outing himself – with language that could only be described as that of climate skepticism.

Of course Newman is welcome to hold whatever views he wishes, that is not the issue.

As Friends of the ABC spokesperson Glenys Stradijot pointed out in a statement, “this looks like an attempt to influence ABC programming to be more favourable to global warming skepticism.

“Mr Newman needs to explain why he took the step of criticising the media’s coverage of global warming and why he addressed that criticism to ABC staff.”

Stradijot also alleged that Newman’s former position as chairman of the Center for Independent Studies (CIS) might be a factor in informing his world view on the subject.

A transcript of Newman’s interview and explanation with Brendan Trembath of the ABC can be found here.

Further reading: The inimitable Stilgherrian and Crikey’s Eric Beecher.

So, how about that hospitals plan?

Tony Abbott’s performance in question time today, and the timing of his parental leave thought bubble more generally, suggest that his major imperative was to switch the topic of debate from health. That’s despite the Coalition running a very active scare campaign about hospital closures in the bush, but it’s probably because of the polling on Rudd’s initiative. I suspect also that it wouldn’t be going out too far on a limb to venture a modest prediction that that Labor might be headed for an uptick in the polls.

Some Coalition MPs have suggested that this plan came about so suddenly because Abbott had become privy to private party polling.

I strongly suspect that the Labor Party might have had a bit of a turnaround – perhaps related to the National Curriculum and health, and Abbott might be responding to that. It could also explain why he felt he had to release some ‘positive policy’. It could well be that his negativism has had an impact; I note that Labor Ministers have been reiterating the ‘Senate obstructionism’ line again this morning.

In short, on where the parties actually stand, one shouldn’t believe what one reads in The Australian.

Meanwhile, whether or not Abbott makes health a focus of his parliamentary attack, the Premiers continue to ponder the National Health and Hospitals Network. Kevin Rudd has wrought his own ambush, confident that there’s no political skin to be lost picking a fight with the states on this battleground. But that doesn’t mean that some of the Premiers haven’t been posing some good questions – interestingly, probably more from Kristina Kenneally than John Brumby.

And while the headline politics might have been the primary focus of media attention, some good work continues to be done on analysing the policy itself. I’ve posted some salient links over the fold. Continue reading ‘So, how about that hospitals plan?’

Reaction to Abbott’s parental leave plan

As noted, Abbott’s International Women’s Day announcement of a paid parental leave plan has created a lot of debate here on LP [read previous threads here]. And it’s attracted a lot of commentary in the wider blogosphere and media.

Gary Sauer-Thompson at Public Opinion has a handle on the politics:

So the Coalition’s strategy [of] messing with the system by throwing anything at the Rudd Government that comes to hand continues. It doesn’t matter about the contradictions –introducing a big tax when the promise is no new taxes—as it is about getting noticed and destabilisation with whatever-it-takes to oppose the Rudd Government on everything.

The strategy is to wedge Labor—’’supporting big business over working families” is the new talking point— and to win back female voters who have been deserting the Coalition.

Trevor Cook asks whether Abbott is really a Liberal. Meanwhile, in The Age, Leslie Cannold disputes the claim that parental leave is solely a women’s issue and Julia Perry in the SMH examines who should pay.

I’ve built on the arguments I made in a post here yesterday in a piece for The ABC’s The Drum Unleashed to nail the canard that Abbott’s plan is more ‘generous’ than Labor’s policy, and set out my reasons why it’s not something progressives should support.

Unfairness and Abbott’s parental leave non-policy

A lot has been said about Tony Abbott’s parental leave speech yesterday and today on this blog, on these two threads. As I suspected would occur, most of the qualifications and the actual non-policy aspect of the policy were not reported in today’s press, and the general line was that Abbott’s scheme was ‘better’, because it offered income support for a longer period and at a replacement level of income, rather than the minimum wage.

That’s highly questionable – or rather, it would be ‘better’ for those who are already relatively advantaged, and worse for many who are not.

Let’s put some facts on the table.

Continue reading ‘Unfairness and Abbott’s parental leave non-policy’

Abbott’s parental leave non-policy

Tony Abbott has chosen to mark International Women’s Day which is, to his mind, of course, all about “benefits… provided to families with children”, by announcing a policy for six months’ paid parental leave at actual salary levels, funded by a levy on big business.

Or has he?

That’s the impression given on the tv news tonight, but a reading of Abbott’s actual speech shows that it’s not a policy announcement.

Rather, Abbott is determined to show that a Liberal government would:

let people know what it has in mind well before positions are finalized because the job of government is to make the best decisions, not to pretend to have all the answers from the beginning.

So, what’s been reported is actually not firm, and is supposed to be some sort of example of Abbott’s idea of the policy making process, to provide a point of contrast with what he alleges the Labor government’s approach to policy to be. This is something he has in mind, rather than an announcement, and it will be subject to consultation and further reflection, and so on. It will be interesting to see if this is the way it’s reported, and whether all the qualifications, musing and speculation in his speech make it into the papers. Continue reading ‘Abbott’s parental leave non-policy’

Climate change and climate science

Jonathan Holmes’ piece on the Carter Drum brouhaha (see Phil’s earlier post for general discussion on this topic) contains many disturbing aspects. But there’s one bit that particularly caught my eye:

Climate change is a vast topic, with aspects that are political, and moral, and even religious, as well as scientific. Principal relevant views clearly include those that hold that the science isn’t settled, and even that global warming alarmism is a global green conspiracy.

The first sentence is clearly true. But it adds nothing whatsoever to the truth or falsity of the second statement. In fact, the existence of additional dimensions beyond the scientific has no bearing whatsoever on the relevance of the tiny minority of scientists who think that the consensus science of anthropogenic climate change is fundamentally wrong. But since it seems to be confusing one of Australia’s most prominent journalists (one whose work I have long admired, for instance, his work on energy topics at Four Corners was truly excellent), it’s worth examining what the role of science, and scientists, in the broader public discussion on climate change is, and the role of journalists in reporting it.

Continue reading ‘Climate change and climate science’

Government: Don’t feed the trolls

The last couple of weeks have seen a fair bit of furore about those intertubes. Anna Bligh wrote to Facebook about the defacing of a couple of memorial sites for a child and a teenager who’d been murdered in Queensland. Nick Xenophon suggested an Internet Ombudsperson, a suggestion Kevin Rudd applauded. There’ve also been numerous controversies about high school students posting racist groups, or offensive ones (for instance, effectively calling for attacks on sex workers). All this no doubt warrants condemnation – but it’s also worth observing that only a certain subsection of offensive content (usually involving children in one way or other) comes to the attention of the media and politicians. Little outrage is directed to the much larger subset of racist groups on Facebook (which don’t happen to be set up by high school kids), or the everyday misogyny that permeates much of the online space.

There’s no doubt that there are problems with Facebook’s method of dealing with offensive content. But the fundamental errors in this debate are twofold:

(a) Social networking sites are far more akin to phone networks than a traditional publishing model. A huge multiplicity of users constantly and simultaneously post content. Unlike talking on a phone, it leaves a permanent trace, but it’s a much better analogy;

(b) The direction of causation is the wrong way round. It’s not that the internet encourages people to do dumb and wrong things. It’s that people do dumb and wrong things, and they do them on the internet too.

The noise coming from politicians, and the ’solutions’, make one wonder whether they understand at all how social networking works. Part of the problem is one very easily resolved through taking more responsibility on the part of group creators for the little bit of the internet they set up, and using privacy and content management tools intelligently.

There’s an interesting take on all this from Colin Jacobs of Electronic Frontiers Australia, from whom I’ve borrowed the title of this post, and for a deeper examination of the issues, I’d also recommend the Oxford Internet Institute’s report on balancing freedom of speech and child protection online, which seeks to find some common ground between interlocutors who often seem to talk past one another.

Get Carter!

All sorts of dark conspiracies are alleged at Quadrant.

Quadrant Online previously reported that the ABC had invited Bob Carter to contribute to an online debate on The Drum following their publication of a series of five articles by Clive Hamilton.

Left internet newsletters and blog sites were outraged that sceptics were to be allowed to comment on their ABC.

Professor Carter submitted his article, on James Hansen and the Hansenism cult, and the ABC has rejected his article – which Quadrant Online is privileged to publish.

James Hansen is visiting Australia. We can only guess at the pressures which have been exerted on the ABC to close down criticism of Hansen – and the cowardice which saw them conform. So much for Australia’s brave freedom fighters of the press.

You can read the entire text of the voiceless Carters spiked piece at Quadrant.

Added commentary on the ABC’s ‘balancing act’ supplied by Media Watch’s Jonathan Holmes.

*All links added to the Quadrant pull quote are mine.

Germaine Greer trashed in The Monthly

I don’t know what qualifications you need to be a public intellectual. I think you get such a gig because readers of The Age have voted for you, or something. But apparently playwright Louis Nowra is one.

In 2007, he wrote a short book, Bad Dreaming, which to put it mildly, met with some legitimate criticism. Nowra, disavowing the work of Indigenous women, took it on himself to solve all the problems of Indigenous Australia himself. Last month, he published what could reasonably be described as a laudatory piece on the life and character of one Tony Abbott in The Monthly.

He’s now followed that up with an amazing rant about Germaine Greer, to be published in the same mag on Friday. Allegedly, it’s to mark the fourtieth anniversary of the publication of Greer’s The Female Eunuch.

You can get a taste of it from this article in The Independent:

In the essay… Nowra not only attacks Greer’s work, but criticises her appearance, her character and even her sanity. “She will do anything to get noticed,” he says, adding that when Greer appeared on the reality TV show Celebrity Big Brother, she looked like “a befuddled and exhausted old woman” who reminded him of “my demented grandmother”.

Yet Nowra has the gall to accuse Greer of misogyny. Nowra says that Greer doesn’t understand “what makes women tick” and that her work is too “middle class”. Presumably he is immune to such criticisms because:

Nowra… lives a studiedly bohemian life with his writer wife, Mandy Sayer, in Sydney’s red-light area, Kings Cross…

To allege that because women still wear make-up, Greer’s work had no value at the time it was written is risible.

This is not the first *controversial* editorial decision Monthly editor Ben Naparstek has made. What possessed him to commission such a piece of abusive raving? Were there not any women who might have written a fair and measured reflection on Greer’s influential book? To build sales? I won’t be giving him the satisfaction of buying a copy. I’ve already read more than enough of Nowra’s “intellectual” contribution.

Elsewhere: tigtog at Hoyden and [H/T Gummo] Philippa Martyr at Quadrant.

Rudd unwhacked

Newspoll came in last night with essentially a status quo result, with both parties one point up on primaries (and the 2PP changing one point down each way to 52-48 because of a measured fall in The Greens’ primary.)

I doubt that Kevin Rudd ever expected the ‘whacking’ in the polls he trumpeted. Rather, this was part of the rhetorical structure of the weekend of apologies – convincing the public that he’d already taken his medicine, and that they should think again about the government’s virtues (which he, and Ministers, have used the sorry-fest to remind everyone of) and think harder about the Coalition. A very similar line has been working wonders for Gordon Brown of late.

In other words, rather than offering the proverbial commentary on the polls, Rudd’s remarks are part of a set piece of political manoeuvring aiming to draw a line in the sand, and to establish a contrast between the government’s new policy announcements (the national curriculum and health) and the opposition’s negativity. That’s potentially quite an effective play when everything we’ve seen of of Abbott et al over the last few weeks has been pure opposition.

Incidentally, I’d repeat the point I’ve made a number of times before – among all sorts of other influences, commentary on the polls has an underlying and perhaps unexamined premise that a Liberal majority is the natural state of affairs. Otherwise, it’s hard to explain the narrative of trouble and crisis when Labor is still comfortably ahead. It’s as if the Coalition ever overtaking Labor spells doom and destruction for the Rudd government. It would not. It’s worth underlining the fact that governments are often behind in the polls, and come back to win elections. John Howard frequently appeared headed for defeat in each electoral cycle after his first win.

Trevor Cook provides a useful reminder another point of comparison – to the Rudd opposition of the late Howard years.

Speaking of which, those who talked about Howard’s comments and policy changes around the time of the Aston by-election in 2001 were making the better comparison than the chorus of ‘Beattie reborn!’ songsters. The difference, of course, is that Howard appeared headed for a genuine whacking in early 2001, while Rudd is sitting pretty.

While we’re talking polls, I’d also recommend a squizzy at Possum’s fascinating tables on the Essential Research questions about the assessment of leaders’ attributes.

Crikey group subscription

If you’re interested in a subscription to Crikey at a discount price, go round and check out Nicholas Gruen’s post at Club Troppo.

Kevin Rudd’s political contrition

Kevin Rudd has flicked the switch to contrite over the insulation kerfuffle, and his failure to deliver the health overhaul on time.

For his pains, he’s received a kicking from just about the entire Canberra press gallery.

Take your pick: Phillip Coorey, Dennis Shanahan, Glenn Milne, Michelle Grattan.

Given that the self-same press gallery has spent the last fortnight or so demanding that the government take responsibility for its many sins, one wonders what else Rudd was supposed to have done?

The default position appears to be to characterise Rudd’s mea culpa as ’spin’.

All this is probably predictable. What might be more significant is that a number of the journos in question appear to have elicited quotes from Ministers expressing scepticism about Rudd’s strategy. That’s something I don’t recall having seen during this term.

Lead buried

Drum Editor Jonathan Green appears to have capitulated to braying demands for a false balance.

Next week: The Drum-Unleashed will feature a series of pieces commissioned from noted writers on the sceptic side of the climate science debate. Included will be Alan Moran, Tom Switzer, Mark Hendriks, Bob Carter and Jo Nova.

My questions to him are these:

Will the commissions be drawn against the ABC’s editorial policies that demand information be factually accurate?

Or will he give these already widely published writers a pass and allow them to disseminate their speculative theories without them having been drawn against the scientific facts for accuracy prior to publication?

Will this opinion at the Drum defy gravity; somehow exempt from objective fact?

Update I: Alan Moran is first cab off the rank and sure enough there is at least one big misrepresentation. A total misquote of Phil Jones’ position on the pace of warming.

Warming itself has appeared to have stopped, perhaps temporarily, a fact that even the defrocked high priest of the rising temperature trend, CRU’s Professor Phil Jones, has been forced to concede.

Moran cops a hammering from the smarter commenters but the usual denialist trolls come out to play, and Green cynically gets what he wants, with 498 comments to date.

Update II: John Quiggin gives us a whole post centered around Phil Jones’ quote. Another reason why Green should pull Moran’s post and abandon his misguided “project balance”.

Update: [by Mark] Bernard Keane takes aim at the ABC’s “balance without judgement” and rebuts Moran and Tom Switzer’s Drum post today.

What is truth?

The other day, I mentioned Clive Hamilton’s series of posts on climate change denialism at The Drum. In today’s edition, Hamilton comments:

Indeed, those who study the climate itself rather than the bogus debate in the newspapers and the blogosphere understand that climate science and popular perceptions of climate science are diverging rapidly, not least because the news on the former is getting worse.

Indeed. But there’s something of a perception lurking around here that ’science’ is one thing and ‘politics’ another, which I think is false.

It’s certainly the case that whatever ammunition denialists use against climate science is not itself part of the ’skepticism’ which is said to be integral to the scientific method. Rather than proposing an alternative hypothesis which would better explain the range of observations made, any line of attack is used, no matter how contradictory with others it may be. So, what we have in denialist discourse is all politics, and no science. No scientific method.

It’s important to underline this point. What denialists cannot provide is anything which can approximate to a truth statement. Methodological doubt, Cartesian style, is supposed to be a prelude to the uncovering of a truth, not a rhetorical strategy of dismissal. Climate change skepticism, contrary to the claims of some of its proponents, has absolutely nothing to do with ‘The Enlightenment’. Quite the contrary.

Their other classic move is to hold science itself to an impossible standard. Somehow the findings of climate science have to be unequivocally true. What we actually see, then, in this contre-temps is a debate over what constitutes truth. Statements made by the IPCC, for instance, are couched in terms of Bayesian probabilities, rather than ‘predictions’. It’s the same form of statement as with genetic predispositions individuals may have to particular diseases; having such a predisposition does not imply that one will necessarily develop the disease. Probability is not destiny or fate. But probabilities of 90%, as in the IPCC’s Fourth Report, are very strong indeed.

But asking science to articulate truth, if truth is understood as incontrovertible knowledge, is asking it to do something it cannot do.

Continue reading ‘What is truth?’