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.
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
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
Bernard Keene over at Crikey trotted out this little gem in the free Crikey newsletter that added to the clutter already existing in my inbox -
Foxtel and Microsoft joined forces this morning to announce a fascinating new partnership!!!!
Fascinating? New? what planet is Bernard on? Microsoft and News Corp (part owners of Foxtel along with Telstra and a few others) are monopolists pure and simple, in Microsoft’s case it’s been proven in the US courts and is demonstrated daily by the 90% + of computer users who sustain the Microsoft monopoly. Less than a year ago when Murdoch started to firm up his battle lines with Google, News Corp and Microsoft announce this little pact.
So what is actually surprising about Foxtel and Microsoft getting it together on another media platform? Possibly the fact that it took almost nine months…oh how silly of me! Congratulations guys.
Posted 3 months, 2 weeks ago at 6:11 pm. Add a comment
In the CCI 2010 Digital Futures survey, authors Scott Ewing and Julian Thomas report that 71% of respondents would not pay for online news and only 7% would pay the current $1.50 per edition.
You might quibble about the methodology, only 1000 respondents were surveyed and you might also point out that survey intentions don’t necessarily translate into outcomes but the result is still significant. Combined with the decline in TV watching especially marked in the 18-24 age group, the omens are not that great for traditional media players.
Interestingly Australian consumption of online entertainment (since by definition news is not entertainment…) remains fairly static since 2007. This might suggest different consumption models after all digital media is plentiful, relatively cheap and doesn’t necessarily have to be shared over the net. Borrowing friends CD’s or DVD’s or ripped versions are all significant alternatives to paying for them from an online service.
Probably the most significant result for online information and news is its rising credibility. Two thirds of respondents would seek information from the net in the case of a local breaking news story and 73% consider the net to be either an important or very important source of information.
I think the results highlight what is already known or guessed at. High quality media that involves significant creative input is still able to command a price although that is probably under pressure too. Daily consumerable media like news on the other hand is losing its monopoly position over the medium. Paradoxically people still want news but in a highly competitive medium where mind share is contested with other information and entertainment sources, people are less likely to financially rate their occasional news sources as highly as the dead tree versions that fill up the recycling bins.
It also highlights the difficulties startup or alternative news sources are going to have making a buck out of straight news. It suggests to me that the people making money out of providing the network services are in the box seat and possibly it is in their interests to look at funding news as some sort of public service. Then there are those that already have an interest in propagating a particular world view to a mass audience, they are likely to continue to do so using a cheaper delivery model with potentially less credible competition.
Over 18 months ago the fearless poetry spouting leader of the ABC, Mark Scott made quite a splash about another jewel in the Ultimo crown, a so-called continuous news centre. This worthy initiative was mean to herald a 24hr news service to all Australians, not just those who are prepared to pay for Sky News. According to Scott –
A digital age service, the CNC will ultimately deliver news 24 hours a day to every outlet of the ABC
Unfortunately for the Australian public as viewers, the CNC hasn’t really delivered. Sky News has basically murdered the ABC for speed of getting news to air as tonight’s little fracas with the Liberal Party demonstrates.
In the space of an hour and a half from 7pm, the start of the National ABC bulletin, Sky were all over the story with a complete coverage of the Turnbull presser, as well a series of relevant face to face interviews with senior liberal party politicians. The ABC with a Parliamentary news bureau that dwarfs the resources of Sky could barely manage to get a stream of the Turnbull presser out. As for web content, the problem is that while the ABC journalists were busy generating text and feeding the archaic ABC web platform, Sky is going live on the bigpond site around the country.
The other problem is that the public through their taxes pay for the ABC. The Mark Scott CNC sounds fantastic but as Sky has demonstrated via Bigpond, putting a studio output on the web isn’t rocket science. Instead of grandstanding Mark Scott should do the right thing by the journalists and production staff of the ABC and give the ABC news a chance of being seen to be as good as Sky, otherwise what are we paying for?
Yes Sky are playing the continuous news cycle vs the ABC’s carefully considered and measured reporting but when news breaks, continuous coverage wins in terms of relevance. If you win an audience with breaking news, they are more likely to turn back to you the next time. Of course a complete cynic might observe that Mark Scott really isn’t interested in actually promoting journalism and news coverage at the ABC, he just wants to play tootsies with Planet Janet and her boss (who happens to own a third of Sky.)
The evidence…
Posted 9 months, 1 week ago at 8:16 pm. Add a comment
Something about this story bugs me. Maybe its the bare facts, $46 Mil vs $1260 Mil which is about 3% of the total market volume putting eBooks around nuisance value. If you look at the $46M it also includes $22M for one title alone, the ubiquitous Dan Brown so the claim
that eBooks have sold like hotcakes without a marketing or sales strategy
seems a little overblown. Another way of looking at the result is to say that Random House are doing the world’s trees a favour by selling that many versions of The Lost Symbol as eBooks. It also means they are less likely to be cluttering up the second hand market after December.
But given the financial success of TLS and this line about how
eBooks are more profitable than print because there is no physical inventory, and in many cases the publisher has negotiated lower royalty payments
you might be inclined to think this is just another face of innovation driven by corporate greed.
I think when the eBook reader comes out that is 100% recyclable and does not hook the reader into a interconnected corporate web with ongoing consumption and as an added bonus allows for spontaneous media sharing then you might have something that comes close to a good book. It seems like 98.5% of the market agrees…the 1.5% who buy Dan Brown obviously don’t count.
Not long ago I linked to Jason Clacanis’s video where he talked about the potential for News Corp to play off Bing against Google and today the Financial Times has another more concrete looking story which suggests that the Microsoft News marriage is all but done and dusted. News brings a fat dowry of rich media and Microsoft brings Bing and a huge desire to rule the known universe. Should be a beautiful marriage which is sure to beget some truly bastardised progeny.
Normally on the occasion of the happy nuptials one is supposed to wish the newlyweds all sorts of good tidings so in the spirit of the occasion I guess I can say that if ever a couple were made for each other, it is News.corpse and the Borg. I’m guess we will just have to wait for the Windows only version of the newspaper we have to have.
This could become a very interesting little threesome if Google decides to start stitching up some content but unfortunately I think it does herald the beginning of the end of the “free” net. Sure plenty of free stuff will remain but the market for so-called “rich media content” on the internet has just got serious.
UPDATE!
Just for good measure I have decided to disallow the Bing bot from my site until Microsoft decides to offer me money, it seems only fair and reasonable. I mean if the stuff on Murdoch’s sites is worth money…
So I finally got around to watching this lengthy documentary which has been lying around my place for a few years gathering cobwebs. Which is a shame really because it deserves to be watched.
However Youtube is everyone’s friend and it looks like the whole thing is available in bits so knock yourselves out. Highlights for me were the bits on “The Investigators” Fox News story on BST and the story about IBM during WW2. Both stories highlight a key feature of the corporation, that is, its survival instinct dominates any concerns of morality. The allegation against IBM were covered extensively in the book IBM and the Holocaust and the Fox/Monsanto coincidence is also covered in the documentary Outfoxed.
The survival instinct of the corporations cannot be underestimated. As a human invention their existence has produced some of the worst features of capitalism stemming from the sole concern for making money. In other words, human beings invented these things and gave them only one thought, to make money. It stands in stark comparison with the articles in a country’s constitution which might have concerns for the public good, morality, religion, the environment, law and order and so on. And while nation states are constrained by territorial boundaries the corporations have risen to a point where they transcend the power of the state yet at their heart, corporations are still human inventions, we can bring them to heal.
Or can we? These corporations embody a very human characteristic, the will to live. That instinct exists in the hearts and minds of the people who sit in the boardrooms of these things and they understand only too well the possibility that their powerful position could be undermined by the will of the masses. So they will act to prevent any dissolution, just like Murdoch is acting to protect the interests of News.corpse for the battle lines are clear. A corporation that exists with no temporal limits, no certainty of death cannot reflect the true nature of humanity. The corporation fundamentally does not serve the people, it serves itself and its only objective is to make money and money is another guise for power. That’s why the Egytians built pyramids, so their kings could live forever apart from the world that gave them life. So the corporations will engage in activities that make them look like good corporate citizens because their biggest fear, their only fear, is that the people that created them might decide to kill them.
Posted 9 months, 3 weeks ago at 9:36 am. Add a comment
Is this a case of the enemy of my enemy is my friend?
When Rupert talked recently about thieves he referred to Google and Microsoft as well as Ask but this seems like a obvious development, one that probably favours Microsoft because they gain more than just the business in search, it also strengthens their ongoing efforts to monopolise the server OS landscape. It’s probably Murdoch’s last card but it fits in well with how the debate has shifted in recent years away from the monopoly that is Microsoft to the the scary Google monster. Of course that debate has in part been driven by opnions and IT departments that are already firmly tied to the Microsoft product.
Particularly worrying is the idea that you might just have to use Bing to find something, just like you have to use Windows to run certain software. Gates and Balmer must be drooling, their shared vision of ruling the world might still come true.
Posted 9 months, 3 weeks ago at 12:53 pm. 1 comment
Not long ago I 
