Rodney Tiffen writes on the last of three inquiries into the so-called Climategate emails however in his conclusion that the media created damage to popular support for action on carbon he fails to state the obvious question. Why?
Why did the mainstream media give so much credence and coverage to what was transparently a sensationalist stunt with the obvious purpose of derailing the Copenhagen summit?
A simple explanation may well be that the mainstream media, particularly the populist press were keen to reinforce their self importance in the minds of the public by “breaking” significant news. Since their reputation for accuracy is highly questionable anyway, truth was never really a consideration. They simply exploited the big story to sell their product.
While this simple and more conventional argument has some logic to it, there would seem to be a more sinister aspect to the source and motivation of some of the more outspoken mouthpieces for the denialist camp. Clearly they were politically motivated in their desire to undermine the science on climate change and furthermore they were enabled in that process by their position. The obvious objective was always to first undermine any consensus at Copenhagan with a second even more desirable objective to raise doubt in the minds of the public.
Have the reporters, journalists and editors responsible for spreading such a blatant piece of propaganda publicly admitted their wrong-doing and have they been summarily dismissed from their offices? No.
What’s more they wont be because they did exactly what they were supposed to do and did an excellent job of it. Strangely for an industry whose purpose is to manufacture consent, for once the industry decided to undermine popular belief in something it had helped create. It defies belief that such a course of action was merely the work of a handful of independent operators.
ABC management, driven mostly by former Liberal Party staffer and businessman Mark Scott seems hell bent on imposing a technocratic regime on the public broadcaster. In many ways this amounts to privatisation by stealth and Scott’s successes are many and far reaching.
While management has been able to argue that most of its decisions are in the best interests of the ABC it is debatable whether or not they are in the best interests of Australians.
While the ABC service has long relied on technology provided by third parties, dating back to its early dependence on Telecom for signal distribution, the current outsourcing and partnership arrangements do raise a question regarding what is a public broadcaster. Even the term “broadcaster” is questionable as more ABC content is distributed in the non-broadcast space.
A short list of outsourcing and partnerships reveals that the core of the ABC’s technical infrastructure is now captive to commercial operators. These include a lucrative deal with Maquarie Group’s Broadcast Australia for transmission services, a partnership with the privately owned WIN network for centralised TV presentation and an almost exclusive deal with Microsoft Australia for server and desktop solutions.
Fundamentally these arrangements undermine the independent nature of the public broadcaster. However a direct consequence of these outsourcing and partnership deals is to transfer significant amounts of the ABC’s annual budget to a small number of favoured private businesses. This in turn raises questions regarding the decision making and motivations of those dispensing such favours.
Furthermore the impetus for a highly technically centralised ABC based in Sydney is counter to an earlier philosophy of a regionalised ABC and by its very nature one more susceptible to spectacular failure as demonstrated by the new Media Hub’s effort on the recent night of the ALP’s long knives.
Mark Scott has long been at pains to paint this scenario in glowing terms as one that will transform the ABC into a 21st century media powerhouse yet his direct interference with editorial policies combined with decisions which make the ABC captive to private industry players and a wholesale attack on the internal culture of the ABC suggests that your ABC is so only in name and slogan.
Even more worrying is the broader implication of a elitist ABC managed in such a way that bestows as much money as possible into the coffers of private interests while at the same time restricting the actual content of public information in the interests of avoiding contentious or dissenting opinions. The one voice that speaks with authority that is quietly milking the public public purse for the benefit of mates in business. The new ABC model is classic partnership of government and big business combining to manufacture consent, paid for by the very people it supposedly serves.
According to Jeremy, New Matilda died because it wasn’t ratty enough. It lacked the ratbag element, the thing that sustained The Nation Review for years past its expiry date. He then goes on to conclude that New Matilda was killed by the “the weight of its own journalistic responsibility and decency”.
Jeremy seems to attribute a degree of rattiness to Crikey yet the relative economic fortunes of Crikey and NM are poles apart. I agree that rattiness is an important element in popular medium, it helps to differentiate your product from the conformist milieu that dominates the landscape and sucks the lifeblood of financial support out of the market.
However I disagree that NM lacked rattiness. I just think it lacked enough of it to attract a high quality lawsuit that would shoot the publication to national notoriety. But then NM was also a creature of the times, financially responsible and earnest in its desire to good. Maybe if NM does a biblical it will return to us free of the need to make a buck and with totally evil intent.
One thing for sure, NM was always a better read than the SMH.
Like a few people I am rather cynical about the role of the mainstream media (msm). In part this cynicism arises from working in media for a while, in part it is reinforced by the fact that the msm has become a fully integrated component of the capitalist system and as such is unable to examine or question the dominant paradigm that seems to have the world rushing towards a rather unpleasant future.
Yet its role in providing us with some form of public record of events persists. In this regard I am not referring to the vast quantities of opinions or op-edits that clutter most of the press sites or their physical manifestations. Nor am I talking about the gratuitous and highly condensed form of TV reporting that graces our screens around dinner time. I am simply observing the fact that the press still provides a first draft of history, incomplete for sure, but a draft nonetheless. However we also learnt something else from the Rupert’s Australian in recent times.
What we learnt or observed quite explicitly is that the public domain of knowledge about what goes on in the corridors of politics is manipulated by practitioners of spin who are highly connected to media outlets and political sources. We see daily the public fascade of politics, the proceedings of the houses of parliament are public record, and we glimpse the stage managed events designed to neatly encapsulate some minute bit of government policy. And then we get the codified version of the behind the scenes mechanations offered up by the various journalists imbedded into Parliament House.
Imbedded journalists were used by the US recently to improve their media profile during the invasion of Iraq and in the Afghanistan campaign. The idea was that such journalists or media would form a close relationship with their protectors and report a version of the ground war that was largely sympathetic to the US mission. Of course given the life and death nature of combat, the highly charged emotional nature of such environment has parallels with the psychological phenomenon know as the Stockholm Syndrome.
The atmosphere in media circles on Capitol Hill during the few days that saw Rudd deposed in favour of Gillard was highly charged. The twitterverse was alive with random noise and the iPhones were hardly able to stay on charge long enough to work for more than a few hours. The symbiotic nature of the relationship between institutionalised media that is embedded into Parliament House and the political sources was clearly illustrated, both needing the other to play a role in a drama that becomes part of the public record, both reaffirming and legitimising the other.
There is a widespread belief especially among left leaning circles that the media has an overriding right wing political agenda. This view is often expressed when considering the overly political “campaigns” waged by the Australian against things like the government’s roof insulation scheme or school building program. Given such concerns it seems remarkable to learn that certain elements within this so-called left leaning government were using the very same media to conduct a campaign of destabilisation directed against the incumbent Prime Minister.
What is knowable about the events of last week is limited. Public access to the halls of Parliament House is restricted, our knowledge is mediated by professionals. These professionals in turn are locked in with their subject material and on one hand they are dependent on the business of politics to justify their existence. On the other hand they are subject to the demands of efficiency or motivated by concerns for profitability even if such considerations are at arms length to the day-to-day business of reporting on politics.
What is clear from the events of last week and the behaviour of the msm is simply that none of it can be trusted to inform the public with a complete factual record of what goes on. Clearly the media subscribes to the notion that we can’t handle the truth. Also clear is an acceptance and exploitation of this modus operandi by political parties. Equally as likely is the idea that drama of politics transcends the business of government which has serious implications for any concerns about the capacity of government to improve the living conditions of the public they supposedly serve. The soap opera of politics now dominates the inquiring mind of the our fourth estate watchdogs while the broader substantive issues are abandoned to writers who preach from the pulpit of vested interest.
The extraordinary media campaign against KRudd’s Labor government continues in the Oz and it seems Fairfax media has been suckered into the media agenda. Yet if evidence of the failure of the mainstream media to explore the story behind the news was ever wanting then today’s article by Peter Hatcher and Phillip Coorey illustrates just how shallow journalism can be.
On the face of it the SMH story is based on rumours that a KRudd staffer is checking on the party room support for his man. Well blow me down if that has never happened before. Then there’s bit of duboius context before we get something more concrete, that is the concerns of Labor MP’s as expressed in the caucus room, any one of which would surely be more newsworthy than a bit of speculation based on hearsay.
However…
The chief concerns MPs listed yesterday were asylum seekers, the cost of living, mental health, the mining tax, and climate change.
also illustrates the extent of the problems face by KRudd and Co and I think explains some of the optimism in the mind of the Mad Monk. On asylum seekers and boat people the government is faced with a force completely beyond their control. Let’s face it, as the world goes Australia is a pretty good place to live and it’s inevitable that the hundreds of millions of people immediately to our north agree. Short of sinking the boats and and throwing everything we can into protecting our northern frontier we will find increasingly that more people are going to take the risk of a journey in an open boat to our shores.
Likewise cost of living is a problem largely beyond the control of the governments of today since costs are largely determined by the private sector who profit from making life affordable for the masses. Another sharp jump in oil prices for example would be a killer for the government but something over which they have no control. Similarly if food production was suddenly hammered by catastrophic climate change then there’s bugger all the government can do about it. This is a consequence of laissex faire economics, something no socially progressive government with leftish tendencies has actually dealt with in recent times.
Similar arguments can be extended around mental health. I am reminded of an experiment where rats or mice were allowed to keep breeding but their physical constraints were fixed, that is as their numbers increased they became more crowded. Their social patterns became disrupted and individual behaviour became more erratic. Humans are not rats or mice but our 21st century lifestyles are relatively a long way from our hunter gatherer evolution. Does KRudd have a panacea for that?
Of course global warming is a subject far far away for this government but it and the mining tax also illustrates how the combined conservative right in this country is frustrating the will of the people as expressed in the election of KRudd and Co yet simultaneously exploiting the political impasse to gain popular advantage. Without senate control Labor’s laws always had to be negotiated through which meant that anything which upset the myriad of self interested groups represented by the various nutbags in the senate (stand up steve fielding and nick xenophon) as well as the reactionary right as represented by the liberal party and its country cousins wasn’t going to see the light of day. And then Labor gets smashed in the popular press for inactivity or failure.
Australians took a half step towards the left when they elected KRudd and Co but the parliamentary system deliberately constrains the capacity of governments to act. Journalists have no such constraints and they seem incapable of any insight beyond the fascade of sensationalism or opinionated speculation.
Robert’s article hasn’t escaped the attention of the right. Today’s Oz features a Green bash written by Gary Johns whose articles frequently appear on the right wing think tank IPA’s website. Gary is the leftie the right loves, a former Labor minister in the Keating government and now Associate Professor of Public Policy at the Australian Catholic University’s Public Policy Institute, his article is right at home with the Oz’s right wing agenda.
However, not content with smacking down an idea before it gains traction in the public’s mind, Gary has plenty to say about the Greens and the people who might vote Green.After visiting some anonymous polling data (unreferenced of course) that labels the Green voter as young and working in Education (bloody teachers) Gary goes on to vent his spleen on these lost souls…
My theory of the green mind is that they are people who are pessimistic about the human ability to deal with the physical world. This is because their experience, as rich and powerful as it may be in, say, human relations, has little bearing on the world that determines our physical wellbeing.
That would put Gary into the hard deterministic camp. It’s also a sweeping generalisation and one that denies the importance of human relations to our society. Still after 9 years as a senior fellow at the IPA Gary’s social agenda is pretty obvious.
Gary is also guilty of rewriting history. According to Gary the VFT was
abandoned when the cost and benefit study proved it was not viable
which might be superficially true but ignores the roles of vested interests who opposed any serious competition to existing road and air transport operators. This is a structural economic issue. By pricing a VFT out of the equation, the entrenched operators preserve their monopolies which in turn reduces government decision making to ad-hoc market intervention of the type the owners and writers for the Oz consistently attack. It also restricts the choices (reduces the freedom to choose) of future generations.
Financial viability is the great debate killer of our times yet one that is used selectively. The financial cost of our Afghan adventure is never an issue when one of our soldiers die. Yet when a so-called “Green” idea surfaces that might undermine the existing status quo, its financial viability is immediately questioned and declared suspect.
The mistake in Gary’s thinking is that while Green issues do concern technology and economics, these are not the only values that matter. Unquestioning subservience to the gods of economics and technology isn’t really in the best interests of a free society or individual freedom.
Fast flipping through Google this morning tripped the dread alert. The consumer culture was strutting its stuff amid the apocalyptic economic landscape and I was reminded of a line of thought regarding NewMatilda. Sure NM suffered occasionally from ordinary writing or facile arguments but one of its strengths was the plurality of opinions. It provided a soapbox for people who ordinarily might have anonymously blogged about something and that message had a chance to reach a larger audience. It also paid a skeleton staff and some of its contributors.
By comparison, Crikey is a fully professional publication and it shows, the writers, the ads, the presentation etc but such professionalism costs money. Meanwhile, blogs like LarvatusProdeo that have an associated commentariat, throw up a topic and get a variety of opinions but at the end of the day their broad appeal (an hence their market reach) is limited. It generates debate amongst a few and the process is enabling for those voices who come to LP looking for a left of centre perspective. NM seems to sit somewhere between Crikey and say the blogs like LP as a very cheaply run professional organisation that offered a regular-ish publication schedule, a more polished look and paid for some of its content. Interestingly its feedback or comments were less numerous than say LP which seems to suggest that people who go to LP do so to engage in the debates, whereas the Crikey and NM reader is more passive.
Now it also seems to me that the silent majority like their news and opinions pre-packaged because the mainstream media has been delivering it this way for some time and the hordes seem to accept that as a legitimate form of information. Debating sites such as LP or Anonymous Lefty argue a position vigorously but does this have any substantial effect on public opinion in general? On the other hand Crikey mightn’t generate as much debate on its main site but is it more broadly influential? I suppose it boils down to whether you think its politics or Politics.
Anyway these musing have a point. Mark at LP hinted at some moves to pick up the slack potentially left by NM’s expected demise. It could be an aggregation site like the Domain. The advantage of aggregators, like Google FastFlip or The Domain, is that they simply collect what’s already there, package it up neatly and give advertisers a bigger target. The cost of aggregating is relatively minor since things like RSS are geared towards such syndication and the headline front page virtually self edits.
But there’s a down side and it relates to the people actually generating the content in the first place, the writers. Now there are two fairly distinct categories of bloggers or writers. Some grab a topic, a quote or some news and post a paragraph or two offering some particular point of view supporting or criticising the original item. Quick, simple. Others like to structure an argument in detail, some of them actually do a bit of research, and their contribution is usually longer and the language can be more dense. It boils down to time.
Now if no one is getting paid for their time or if the pay is not a reflection of the time spent, ie by article rather than by length, then such a market situation is likely to lead to a dearth of in-depth writing. That is not to say that good writers wont write or that good in depth stuff wont occasionally make its way into the public domain, but it is to say that the tendency will be for more quick and dirty postings that rely on the audience to debate the issues.
Again some might see this as a good thing. But it does pose a few problems, not the least being the financial situation for writers. One issue that comes to my mind revolves around the business model. Let’s say an aggregation site is successful in its aims to deliver a variety of interesting content to a suitable number of eyeball, the sites generate lots of public debate, people fire off their comments and everyone seems happy. The advertisers see a potential market and plonk down so dough, the hosting company gets their bit and the owners of the site are happily turning over a profit. But what is the source of their content? Other sites, and if they are relying on voluntary guest posts or free quick and dirty little one liners, the bulk of the content is actually supplied by the public to the sites for FREE. In other words the audience who generates the content that drives the aggregators which in turn enables the advertisers to ply them, the audience, with ads. And the business that puts the deal together collects the loot.
Whether or not those businesses then decide that quality matters in their content is up for grabs. It might be that business comes first which risks undermining the public concerns about the future of journalism and writing often expressed in these very forums.
For a newspaper that promotes itself as fit reading material for the intelligensia, you might think it would disengage its blatant neo-conservative rhetoric and treat issues with a degree of detachment. Now in case you might be wondering if it was the newspapers unashamedly pro-Abbott viewpoint, its slavish support for the mining industry in its campaign against any new taxes or its long running campaign to denigrate and destroy the governments educational building program that has prompted this post I will point you to today’s outstanding example of journalistic nonsense in the guise of a front page story (with heart rending photo) “Floodwater won’t reach Murray mouth”>
Verity Edwards tells her readers that not a drop of the once in a hundred year floods in Queensland will make it to SA. Ok, hardly a drop, and if you read the front page you might be excused for thinking that somehow it’s the fault of the government which has “failed to deliver on its troubled deal with the states to manage the river system”.
Really? I can sympathise with the plight of Langhorne Creek grapegrower Tom Keelan and the people of Adelaide who depend on the Murray for drinking water (poor bastards) but buried in the story by Verity are two or three interesting facts.
Estimate of water entering into the system from Qld – 6700 GL
Water reaching Minindee Lakes system (now empty) – 2100GL – note this is public water for use of the town of Broken Hill and backup to Adelaide’s storage
Water extracted or diverted to private storage – 1700 GL
which seems to leave about 400GL arriving in South Australia ( a bit more than a drop).
Apparently the land where the water landed is very flat – who would have guessed – and the water has a habit of seeping into the ground (really) or evaporating! I guess this is meant to explain why the 6100 GL of water falling in the catchment area means a third of it makes its way into the river at Minindee except for – the little gestimate of 1700GL which gets diverted to PRIVATE storage.
You see for the agricultural business sector, there are two sorts of water, mine and what’s left. Mine comes first, it’s the water that disappears into private storage, all those dams that farmers throw up across all the natural water courses on their properties. When those dams fill up they overflow to the next dam and the next until eventually a bit of water makes its way into a public water course.
Then there is the water that disappears underground and makes its way into the underground water table. This table might become a spring somewhere else so any self respecting private enterprise agricultural businessman knows they better sink a few hundred bores and get that water before it runs out.
What’s left is what private interests haven’t managed to lock up. A third. And because it’s a shrinking cake the politics are bitchy. So one state wants more than the next and all the time private interests are looking to grab more. Instead of slating the federal government for trying to do something the Oz would do better to actually explore why it is that so little water winds up in a public resource and how we might deal with that in the future. What the Oz want’s its intelligent readers to think is that the issue is how the government manages a public asset, which is one aspect of the story. What the Oz doesn’t want the public to question is the political and moral questions surrounding the seemingly untouchable notion of private property even when the property is water. Its what you get for reading the Oz.
Posted 3 months, 1 week ago at 1:54 pm. Add a comment
In news that will certainly be greeted with knowing smiles in the boardrooms of News, Fairfax and the ABC, NewMatilda.com announced today that it will be shutting up shop at the end of June.
Citing the obvious, costs are rising and ad revenues are hardly worth talking about, the fate of NewMatilda echoes difficulties experienced by Crikey not too long ago and although the business models are considerably different both cases highlight the problems now faced by New Media startups.
When Crikey editor Jonathan Green joined the ABC he claimed success in
“dragging Crikey to a position where it is taken seriously as part of the broad media landscape.”
however such success wasn’t as certain as the opportunity to be editor of the ABC’s Drum, the new analytical online offering from the publicly funded ABC. Simply put Crikey’s financial viability is a long way from the hundred of millions of taxpayer dollars funnelled into the ABC every year and that IS a consideration.
How does this relate to New Matilda? Well as the mainstream media players continue to extend their operations in the online space (The ABC’s Drum, News Ltd’s The Punch, Fairfax’s The National Times) the financial life support system for new media players becomes more stressed. New Matilda is a casualty, driven to the wall by decreasing advertising revenue and fixed operating costs.
Unfortunately New Matilda is unlikely to be the last independent voice lost as the online environment matures. Hopefully the tradition of independent voices finding a public forum will continue somewhere…
Although Rupert and Micro$oft tried to steal the limelight last week with their joint venture on Foxtel the big story appeared in the NY Times months ago where it wrote
Google and Intel have teamed with Sony to develop a platform called Google TV to bring the Web into the living room through a new generation of televisions and set-top boxes.
Strangely the story in the Oz avoided any mention of Google TV however it did disclose the fact that News owns the OZ and 25% of Foxtel. However readers of this blog might suspect the Oz’s motivation since Rupert and Micro$oft are allies in the fight to prevent world domination by the evil Google monster.
Posted 3 months, 1 week ago at 10:21 am. Add a comment
