The media strenuously builds a personality for itself and then promotes it like hell, this includes SBS and the ABC. What do you think the ID stings and jingles are for?

John Norton – http://www.adb.online.anu.edu.au/biogs/A110048b.htm – was an early example of media as an idiosyncratic identity who was part of the news.

To claim now something different is perpetuating a tired myth, that very few believe anyway.

BTW, I would love to take the stockwhip to Penberthy myself (see link, above).

But it’s rarely very different. Culture is part determined by forces and also determined by the gradual building up of practices, rationales and so on. Parliament was a pretty corrupt place in the early nineteenth century. It’s always been a roughhouse of a certain sort. But out of the practices of the eighteenth and nineteenth century a bunch of ideas emerged about the right relationships between various institutions – executive and the parliament – the Westminster tradition. It was a noble thing – even if it was of course never perfectly in evidence.

I think we need to push towards some understanding of what an ideal media role would be and I’ve offered a few scratches on the sketch pad. But of course it can’t simply be wishful thinking. One has to somehow show that it could arise out of the concrete circumstances we find ourselves in.

I hope that makes a bit of sense.

And what you say asks of the questions I asked: to what extent should, can and is it best that “media” chooses its source(s)? Where from and why?

The ideal of a media as conduit between source and public throws open these questions, among many: which sources and what public?

Gee, it’s a minefield perhaps. Including, further to the above concept of media “drawing from the source” – which opens up the question of market demand: the thing which would seek or might suck information from those sources whosoever they are and howsoever they are chosen. That’s “the public”: the public seemingly demanding that information. Who and how are those people determined. And how else could they be done so.

Enough to drive one mad.

So that question arises: why press on?

Nicholas, perhaps it’s about relationships? At the end of the day, it’s not about right or wrong, punishment or edification?

All good questions but questions which take a lot of explanation to answer properly. I don’t think the media should be a ‘player’. That’s my objection to Late Line defending itself in the way it did – it made itself a player.

On the other hand we know now (and it was obvious given some thought I would argue) that a formal transparency, a formal even-handedness is a farce enabling people to pit Nobel Prize winners against hacks and hired guns as if they were equally worth listening to.

So I want the media to be active players to the extent that they actively and responsibly make the editing decisions they make rather than make them according to some faux even-handedness. So if someone has form for consistently misleading us – then that should be made clear as context to viewers. When Bill Clinton said ‘I did not have sexual relations with that woman’ I immediately thought ‘what a strange expression’. I wonder what it hides. So the next ten interviews Clinton had he should have been asked “why did you choose the expression ‘sexual relations’ and when the inevitable ‘we have to move on no further comment’ arose the press should have said ‘so you don’t deny some sexual relationship with Ms Lewinski.’

Similarly the comments of the Government on children overboard were already transparently on this plane before the election was held, words were being chosen very carefully to mislead and and they relied – as did Clinton on a kind of good manners – from a bunch of people who are anything but – to keep the lid on it for a little longer.

I hope that gives a bit of a sense to it.

When you say “yes, a role of the media is to make people pay” (if that’s an ok summation), another question would be: isn’t the role of the media – in the greater context – to inform? Isn’t that what a medium is? The source at one end, the public at the other, and the medium as conduit? Aren’t you really seeking better source, and less judgement, from media? Or, in the role of questioning, more drawing power from the source itself? And more stability and respect for that conduit role (not being swayed, eg)?

Or do you see the role of media more as a player, as identity?

But one of the things that I’m drawing attention to is the fact that in this instance they are making people pay – but in this case for the egregious sin of criticising their program. Some standards they are.