Qed

Outrageous

Andrew Bolt is dining out big time on his stouch with the PM. Frankly it was stupid politics on the side of a PM to personally name a journalist especially one as cunning and conniving as Bolt who will exploit his notoriety to the max. If there is one thing a Murdoch journo understands it is that the government is essentially untrustworthy, a Labor one infinitely more so and the Prime Minister is essentially the bullseye in the game of nailing the anti-free enterprise socialists. It’s a stupid game. One thing is certain, Bolt will keep it up for as long as it drives readers his way. Andrew Bolt is outrageous!

Meanwhile slightly less outrageous is the rumour that one Liberal Party politician labelled another Lib a “fruit loop”. Oh dear, how shocking! The only problem with Chris Pyne’s denial is that the term has his cultural fingerprints all over it, I mean who else but the sweet adorable Christopher Pyne would use the term “fruit loop”? Huh?

But the big news story strangely missing on the front pages of Murdoch’s little Perth Now and the other beacon of truth over in WA, the West Australian is the the story of Peter Abetz. Now there’s a juicy bit of outrage.

THe front page of Perth Now

The West Australian

The Western Patriot

The problem is it’s hard to get motivated this morning to give a rat’s arse about any of this. Bolt and others like him are a law unto themselves, the Libs aren’t the real opposition anyway so who gives a toss what they say about each other and the lack of censure over Peter Abetz sums up the real state of play. History is so easily forgotten, who was it that said those that fail to learn the lessons of history are condemned to repeat its mistakes? Abetz is outrageous, but the lack of media interest in his invocation of Nazi history to justify increased police powers is even more outrageous. But outrage only goes so far…

The National Times has gone nuclear

Prominent in the National Times this morning is another opinion piece by Professor Leslie Kemeny, a member of the International Nuclear Energy Academy.

Professor Kemeny’s opinion is so valuable that there are two of his articles appearing in the Times this morning.

Obviously Fairfax believes two nukes are better than one, an opinion backed up by their editorial opinion “The nuclear merry-go-round” also appearing today.

But just in case you were wondering about that wonderful journalistic notion of balance in reporting, Fairfax includes Mark Diesendorf’s article on “Forget Nuclear and go natural” But there’s clearly an agenda here. First there is the trivialisation of the debate implicit in the headline to Mark’s article, then there is the matter of two pro-nuclear articles written by a serving member of the nuclear industry, backed up by an editorial. Add to this the curious placement of Mark’s article, not alongside the articles by Kemeny that appear in “Politics”, but in “Society and Culture”. Maybe it was a scheduling thing, the Kemeny articles went live at midnight whereas the Diesendorf article doesn’t appear until 7.30 am however it seems Fairfax is determined to shape public opinion in favour of the nuclear option.

WITN?: Yahoo didn’t sentence 200,000 Iranians to death, and other misadventures in online journalism

Amusing blog post on the perils of blogging which I think illustrates a couple of things about the blogsphere. The lack of editorial oversight implicit in the system obviously produces problems now and the speed of propagation is a friend to the headline. Less obvious is the role of “a thousand eyes” in correcting any obvious falsehoods. Its a form of quality control, one mind and a pair of eyes might not see a problem if there is one, but scrutinise something with a million critical minds and if there’s a problem there is a much better chance of someone spotting it. Obviously this form of oversight can work well for high volume content but getting it right before something goes live is still a better option IMO.

Clearly the system is evolving and as news continues to shift to a decentralised shared environment away from the rigid structures of the past, more issues are bound to arise from the lack of pre-publication editorial oversight. Sites that depend on their credibility will have to move to address the problem or lose their audience. Sounds very much like journalism 101 needs an editor.

WITN?: Yahoo didn’t sentence 200,000 Iranians to death, and other misadventures in online journalism.

Apple Tablet To Redefine Newspapers, Textbooks and Magazines – apple tablet – Gizmodo

Can you imagine the paper boy tossing these around? No. But think about this, four years ago Apple made a phone, now it is arguably the best mobile phone on the market and iTunes is clocking up billions of transactions. Not just the model works for Apple but the device and the applications that run on it just keeps getting better.

Now apply that kind of development model to a media tablet. Add Google books with the ubiquitous internet and this might be another iPhone in the making. Of course do we need it? Are there better things we could be doing with our resources and intelligence? Relevant questions but considerations like those have never stopped consumer technology before and they are unlikely to do so in the future.

There’s another consideration. When the day comes and networked information becomes the only way you can get information, will the generous and transparent nature of the information owners continue? In other words, if someone’s personal consumption of information can be monitored and controlled at every point, what’s to prevent it from being stopped or alterred at the whim of some other agency? Call me paranoid…

Apple Tablet To Redefine Newspapers, Textbooks and Magazines – apple tablet – Gizmodo.

What’s important to the Age…

Alright the Age isn’t perfect but sometimes you wonder if their formula for the news couldn’t do with a bit of variety. Here’s the front page, top left corner (the big hitter in web terms) and of all the headlines, down on the bottom right is a little post about our near neighbour, the Philippines.

Somehow I think a story involving 246 lives lost deserves more than a tiny little headline underneath a huge picture of some football coach whose team finished 8th in a season just finished. Just a thought…