There was an ostensible “news” article on the ABC news site about Trump’s executive order (EO) titled “DEFENDING WOMEN FROM GENDER IDEOLOGY EXTREMISM AND RESTORING BIOLOGICAL TRUTH TO THE FEDERAL GOVERNMENT.” The capitalisation is not mine; it is in the executive order FFS! Th...
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What if we held an Australian broadband crisis and nobody came? That's pretty much what happened in Australian broadband policy over the decade to 2025. Governments, forecasters and the media can all learn lessons from this episode. Illustration: Fibre optic cable in a Telstra...
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David Tiley was one of the early generation of bloggers in Australia, starting in 2003, approximately the same time as I started. I first met him at a blogging meet-up in St Kilda (where David lived) in about 2005. Blogging was much more social in those days, and there were fr...
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Adolf never had much time for planet sensible. Here he is after the Reichstag fire with fellow traveller Sefton Delmer who was Berlin correspondent for the "Daily Express" from 1928 to 1933, To the left of Hitler: August Wilhelm of Prussia. In the middle of the picture, half h...
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Amid Australia's justified concern over male violence against women, it seems worth keeping in mind our achievements. Femicide, in particular, has more than halved in the past three decades. Prologue 1 : Violence against women is a bad thing, and it's still bad even when, as t...
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Many of us still venerate books. The evidence says they are not very good at what is supposed to be their primary job: putting new ideas in our heads. We are slowing developing new ways to achieve this old aim. Many of us own thousands of these. They cost too much, too many ha...
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https://twitter.com/abc730/status/1557673265493344259 Peter Dutton is a human being. That’s not a moral point I’m making — I’m just talking about the task of making sense of others — particularly since, if we can’t kill them, we have to live with them. (And trying to kill some...
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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3JlLFKUF_eA This video discussion, audio downloadable here, discusses the issues raised in this post. I've previously expressed some dissatisfaction with what I might call a 'one dimensional' understanding of the idea of liberty. This post explo...
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The twin threats of "hidden persuasion" and artificial intelligence have now convinced most of us that Google and its ilk are almost uniquely powerful. These threats are overrated. The digital giants can do less than we fear – and we risk regulating them where we should not. 1...
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It's here, the booklet I am sure you have all been waiting for. The one which Gigi Foster and Michael Baker slaved over for 10 months . It is also on Kindle . It is dedicated to all the victims of the Panic, in poor countries and rich countries. They include our children, the...
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Posted in Politics - national, Politics - international, Life, Philosophy, Print media, History, Humour, Education, Literature, Society, Religion, Theatre, IT and Internet, Economics and public policy, Terror, Science, Journalism, Media, Libertarian Musings, Health, Political theory, Law, Dance, Review, Bargains, Travel, WOW! - Amazing, Social, Parenting, Ethics, Medical, Public and Private Goods, Death and taxes, Inequality, Social Policy, Democracy, Employment, Sortition and citizens’ juries, Isegoria, Coronavirus crisis
What do you do as an Australian parliament when a foreign company censors mainstream media content in Australia, undermining free speech ? Do you organise an inquiry to hold those foreign companies to account and to see how you might prevent foreign meddling? Or do you fall in...
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Posted in Politics - national, Politics - international, Print media, Society, Films and TV, IT and Internet, Journalism, Media, Cultural Critique, Democracy, Coronavirus crisis
I thought you’d like to know of a venture I’m on the board of which is a global monthly magazine being published out of Melbourne dedicated to publishing the best podcast interviews of the month as a printed magazine for sitting back and enjoying though it’s also being distrib...
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As one the best illustrations of the way our minds deal with uncertainty, consider the following video. Please listen and watch at least 30 seconds so you can experience the three sequences of spoken words. [embed]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PWGeUztTkRA[/embed] Pretty much...
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News Corp is telling us what Google should really pay for linking to its sites. It's telling us in code – HTML code. And the answer is ... $0.00. What is an Internet link worth to the linker? For most of the Internet's life, this question has been pointless. On the Internet, l...
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The legislated "bargaining" process between Google and News Corp is unmoored from reality. Its "final offer arbitration" is unsuited to the task. [caption id="attachment_34634" align="alignleft" width="300"] He's loaded the gun. (Photo provided by Eva Rinaldi on Flickr; CC BY-...
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How are we going to escape the authoritarian nightmare and regain our liberties and zest for life? This long read is written for organisers of new Covistance initiatives, explaining the logic of what others have done and what could further be done. So I am speaking to those of...
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Posted in Politics - national, Politics - international, IT and Internet, Science, Journalism, Media, Libertarian Musings, Geeky Musings, Health, Law, Information, Parenting, Death and taxes, Democracy, Coronavirus crisis
Till 20 year ago, IQ scores in the West increased about 3 points per decade ever since the 1920s, a phenomenon known as the “Flynn effect”. That rise in IQ test scores, which have an average of 100 and a standard deviation of 15, was attributed to improved schooling, improved...
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Posted in Uncategorized, History, Education, IT and Internet, Science, Gender, Media, Social, Parenting, Public and Private Goods, Inequality, Employment
[spoiler alert!] As a fan of the “Hunger Games”, a dystopian trilogy where teenagers are thrown into gladiatorial games to fight till the last survivor in a world that is a blend of ancient Rome and modern America, I eagerly awaited its prequel “The Ballad of Songbirds and Sna...
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Suppose you agree with me that containment and elimination strategies pursued regarding Covid-19 do far more harm than good. Suppose you also believe that having an open economy and a vibrant close-contact social life is vital for the long-run health of the country. You want t...
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Posted in Politics - national, Life, Education, Society, Economics and public policy, Science, Media, Health, Death and taxes, Social Policy, Employment, Coronavirus crisis
https://twitter.com/realDonaldTrump/status/1225553117929988097?s=20 If you know anything about the latest State of the Union Address, you know that after Donald Trump had handed Nancy Pelosi his speech as if she were his secretary when she held out her hand to him to shake han...
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If these kinds of things existed in my country, I wouldn’t need to be running for President to fix everything up. Elizabeth Warren The only thing that didn't leave a nasty taste in my mouth last year was the food. Barry the hypothetical troll from last year (He's been debunked...
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[caption id="attachment_32881" align="alignright" width="300"] An interesting graphic which the SMH thought was better presented in a form in which you can't read whatever was near the right hand margin. NG (ed)[/caption] Claims of a left-wing bias at the ABC are seldom absent...
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Episode 5 of the final season of Game of Thrones showed us a vengeful fallen angle, Daenerys Targaryen, after whom thousands of children in the real world have been named. Even though her enemies had been defeated and surrendered, she nevertheless used her massive weapon, a fi...
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Posted in Life, Print media, History, Literature, Society, Religion, Films and TV, Theatre, Media, Geeky Musings, Law, Ethics, Cultural Critique, Social Policy, Democracy
I was checking out Peter Martin's list of Seven really bright (policy) ideas for a forthcoming article currently titled "What is a policy hack?"(It's a good article which I recommend). When I noticed something. All the links to the original sources are links to articles in The...
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In the dynamic media environment we have in Australia, broadcasting regulation has become an exceptionally tricky exercise. If regulations are to work, they require creative application and on-going monitoring as commercial players will always seek to outmanoeuvre them, especi...
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As I predicted a few months ago , the US security apparatus is going after China relentlessly, mainly in order to have something to do. As I predicted in 2012, Australia is firmly behind the US and the wider Western alliance that will eventually form a block against China. The...
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Leon Gettler interviewed me recently on my exchange with Krugman . As you can imagine, it's a difficult thing to explain in an interview, but I took that as a challenge – if you like to my interview 'technique'. Just as I love doing it with columns, working over what I'm sayin...
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[caption id="" align="aligncenter" width="795"] Google images selected this image as the most relevant to "ABC Trust" for obvious reasons.[/caption] Cross-posted from John Menadue's Pearls and Irritations . Trust is an interesting concept. It takes time to develop trust which...
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[caption id="attachment_32251" align="aligncenter" width="1280"] Who is that man in the corner, and why is he watching you?[/caption] Well folks, as you know, Club Troppo is the only website east of the whole damn Murray Darling system that has the reputation to attract the ki...
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Cross-posted from John Menadue's Pearls and Irritations . The ABC has been an extraordinarily resilient organisation. It has withstood management and Board upheavals, survived remorseless budget cuts and harassment. But the current attacks on staff and on its role are as overt...
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In all ways that we measure these things, physical violence has reduced in Western countries in the last 70 years, particularly mainland Western Europe. What about psychological violence though? Psychological violence, ie the inflicting of mental pain, takes many forms. It inc...
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Posted in Life, Philosophy, History, Miscellaneous, Humour, Education, Society, Religion, regulation, Media, Libertarian Musings, Health, Social, Parenting, Ethics, Cultural Critique, Public and Private Goods, Inequality, Personal
* cross-posted from Screen Hub . The #MeToo sexual harassment tsunami generated by the unmasking of American screen industry heavyweights Harvey Weinstein and Kevin Spacey has hit Australian shores with a vengeance. As an old Monty Python sketch observed: ‘Nobody expects the S...
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Sometimes, it feels like 1910 all over again. Then, a confident Germany was the up-and-coming industrial power house, fearing an even more up-and-coming Russia, with the UK and France desperately holding on to their colonial empires. Now, a confident China is the up-and-coming...
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Posted in Politics - national, Politics - international, Philosophy, Environment, History, Miscellaneous, Humour, Society, Religion, Sport-general, Theatre, Music, Economics and public policy, Science, regulation, Gender, Journalism, Media, Geeky Musings, Climate Change, Political theory, Business, Travel, Immigration and refugees, Information, Intellectual Monopoly Privileges, Innovation, Social, Race and indigenous, Ethics, Cultural Critique, Public and Private Goods, Death and taxes, Inequality, Social Policy, Democracy, Bullshit, Indigenous, Employment
The #MeToo flood of stories of women who feel abused by men – ranging from lurid stares to straightforward rape – seems like a disaster to me for the Democrats. Not because of the stories themselves, but because of how the progressive media and commentators have reacted to it....
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Posted in Life, Philosophy, Miscellaneous, Humour, Religion, IT and Internet, Gender, Media, Libertarian Musings, Health, Law, Information, bubble, Social, Cultural Critique, Bullshit
[cross-posted, slightly updated, from Pearls and Limitations] Observations: About 40% of the population of Catalonia and its capital Barcelona was not born there, but largely comes from the rest of Spain. Internal migration is high , with about 0.4% of the population moving fr...
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Posted in Politics - international, Life, History, Education, Society, Theatre, Economics and public policy, Media, Immigration and refugees, Ethics, Inequality, Social Policy, Democracy
Senator Nick Xenophon, a man of great integrity, has reportedly struck a deal with the government over media reform. One aspect of it, as reported by The West Australian , is that the the government will subsidise 200 journalism scholarships of up to $40,000 a year. (I have no...
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Let me indulge, purely for entertainment value, in some fan-speculation on what we will see on-screen after the Long Night is over and the final 6 episodes Of Game of Thrones are run in 2019. Let me first talk about the end-game aspects I think the books and the tv-series seem...
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Posted in Uncategorized, Uncategorised, Politics - international, Life, Philosophy, Print media, Environment, History, Miscellaneous, Humour, Education, Literature, Society, Religion, Films and TV, Sport-general, Theatre, Music, IT and Internet, Economics and public policy, Food, Terror, Science, Art and Architecture, regulation, Gender, Journalism, Media, Libertarian Musings, Geeky Musings, Health, Climate Change, Political theory, Metablogging, Law, Dance, Space, Review, Startup, Products, Travel, Immigration and refugees, Information, bubble, WOW! - Amazing, Social, Parenting, Race and indigenous, Ethics, Cultural Critique, Medical, Public and Private Goods, Death and taxes, Inequality, Personal, Social Policy, Democracy, Bullshit, Indigenous, Employment
Continued from Part One . The ABC and Children’s Programming - The Highs, Lows and Power-plays Part one here and part two here . The promise of the early years When ABC television first aired, on November 5, 1956, children’s programs presented a dilemma. There was no Australia...
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Many readers will have heard of Patricia Edgar who was a giant force in Australian cultural life from the 1970s. She more than anyone else was responsible for lifting the tone of children's TV in Australia. In any event I was talking to her recently about the current woes of c...
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Experienced Troppo readers will be aware that I fairly frequently post articles about topics relating to crime and punishment, especially crime statistics and patterns. Quite often those articles consist partly of impassioned diatribes against sensationalist tabloid crime “sho...
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ABC Radio National's The Spirit Of Things is a long-running show about spirituality presented by Dr Rachael Kohn. Its territory extends from straight interviews with interesting people to the more way-out fringes of spirituality. Kohn and co-producer Geoff Wood journeyed out o...
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Reg ular readers may know of my fondness for the recent film of Vera Brittain's Testament of Youth, so I was intrigued to come upon this fantastic book on the subject. I say 'book' because in many ways this is how I think books should be written. It's written on a Wordpress bl...
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Last Friday I attended a speech by the new ABC CEO Michelle Guthrie put on by the New News conference which is always good value and a tribute to the forward-looking energy of Margaret Simons - Melbourne Uni professor of Journalism and frequently practising journalism. Simons...
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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TC9DhD0lxCo I expect I'm not the only one to be rather dazzled by Kellyanne Conway's ability to defend the indefensible Donald Trump with sweet reason itself. Here she is more coherent, more compelling, more forensic than pretty much anyone on m...
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I am seeking a lawyer to run an Adverse Action case connected to the recent Fair Work Commission verdict that found systematic breaches of procedures and procedural fairness in the University of Queensland's actions against me following my research on racial attitudes in Brisb...
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Posted in Life, Economics and public policy, Science, Journalism, Media, Blegs, Law, Competitions, Race and indigenous, Ethics, Cultural Critique, Inequality, Personal, Social Policy
La Trobe University has now retreated from acting against academic Roz Ward (as I suggest below that it should). However I concluded it was still worth publishing this post, because it analyses important constitutional and legal issues that arise repeatedly in cases where an e...
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With Fairfax culling 120 journalists (in the wake of previous mass redundancies), Murdoch/News apparently contemplating more cuts, and newspapers in general losing money hand over fist, some pundits are suggesting that Fairfax at least is likely to stop publishing the Monday t...
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Queensland boy Julian Assange seems set to walk out of the Ecuadorian embassy soon, hoping that the announcement by the UN human rights panel on the arbitrariness of his detention will protect him from being arrested. The baseline scenario is that he walks out, is quickly arre...
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Posted in Politics - international, Life, History, Society, Journalism, Media, Libertarian Musings, Law, Information, Ethics, Cultural Critique
The Twittersphere was abuzz with pointless debate a couple of weeks ago when Annabel Crabb had a televisual meal with Coalition hardman Scott Morrison on her perniciously vacuous program Kitchen Cabinet . My own views about that controversy are well encapsulated by Jennifer "N...
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One does not go about identifying the weaknesses of what another person says in order to prove that one is always right, but one seeks instead as far as possible to strengthen the other's viewpoint so that what the other person has to say becomes illuminating. Such an attitude...
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In an earlier post I've talked about how 'performing' government drives a range of pathologies - in the case of the post I was suggesting it generates a kind of soft-secrecy. But it drives other pathologies - like bullshit. I put it thus : Imagine you’re a journalist who has t...
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The announcement by Communications Minister Malcolm Turnbull that the ABC’s budget will be cut by $50 million per year for the next five years has generated predictable kerfuffle in mainstream and social media circles. Whether it will have any real effect on the broader voting...
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Following David's excellent post on the NBN, a somewhat related aside. Malcolm Turnbull was interviewed on AM yesterday about the NBN review, followed by a brief minuet around some current political dramas. What a contrast. By comparison, his colleagues still seem be strugglin...
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Ben Hills has a new book out - Stop the Presses! How Greed, Incompetence (and the Internet) Wrecked Fairfax . It's published by (surprise!) News Corp's HarperCollins. Its essential thesis is that the Fairfax media group, owner of The Sydney Morning Herald and The Age, is in tr...
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https://vimeo.com/90297488 (For the full 27 minute video from which this 6 minute video has been extracted, click here .) Family by Family about which you've heard before is spreading its wings. We've started in Mt Druitt where we've scoped the program investigating how it sho...
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https://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=Yo5cKRmJaf0 I have almost certainly fulminated in various asides against TED talks on this blog, and even one full on cri de coeur against retail profundification . (I promised one on business class profundification but I...
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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WNTk29zXl4A OK so you all kind of know this, but I'm going to go out on a limb and just put it out there as one younger member of my family has been heard to say. It's depressing how much stuff is sent our way which repackages what's already in...
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Remember the last time the Coalition government was insinuating treachery on the part of the ABC, and making like it was about to take a cricket bat to it? That was back in the days when Prime Minister Howard’s government was keenly promoting our mission to bring freedom and d...
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It's on again folks - or at least I've started to receive emails about it from you people. The incredible Troppo Crikey Sub. I've not been able to find, on a quick search, the savings on a one year subscription, but if you can give us the link, please do so in comments. We typ...
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Last Monday I posted 4 questions to see who thought like a classic utilitarian and who adhered to a wider notion of ethics, suspecting that in the end we all subscribe to ‘more’ than classical utilitarianism. There are hence no 'right' answers, merely classic utilitarian ones...
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To defend free speech does not mean you cannot criticise how others exercise it. The very opposite, if anything. With weaker legal restrictions on, say, racist insults there should be stronger social sanctions - criticism, debate, counter-arguments. It’s called manners, and wh...
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Tabloid TV – it’s one of modern life’s little irritations but, thankfully, one that’s easily avoided – unlike Melbourne’s Myki system, the rococo convolutions of bus routes in Melbourn's outer suburbs and numb-nuts who conduct loud conversations on their mobile phones while yo...
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A tweet took me to this article from Time World . And it had a panel of articles 'from the web' at the bottom, each with nice little illustrations making it look like content of sister magazines or at the very least content the selection of which had been 'curated' by Time. Af...
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With racism and racially-charged language much in the news right now, we're getting some interesting signals about people's beliefs. One of the most interesting popped up again in this Mama Mia article by The Project's Charlie Pickering, titled " I know nothing about racism in...
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http://youtu.be/nuIiqKytvnU I saw a preview tonight. Incredible, fabulous stuff. Go if you can.
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A Peculiarly Australian Cause Celebre In one of the less nebulous sections of the Liberals' curiously fisk-resistant manifesto i , you'll find this special promise for Andrew Bolt and his fans and supporters: Protecting freedom of speech – supporting an open media We will prot...
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In Saturday's Australian , Rebecca Weisser argues that the ABC is biased. To fix the problem she suggests creating "a commission of inquiry to rework the charter so that it stipulates that balance in programming is fundamental to the operation of the ABC". For political elites...
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Facts are no match for a compelling narrative, says Jonathan Green . Despite the efforts of left leaning bloggers, conservatives are winning arguments and elections because they have better stories. Voters see themselves as struggling with an ever rising cost of living, the fe...
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Here's a short note to everyone I know in the print media industry; Please, when you bemoan the state of media today, do not tell me that it's "management" that has got the industry where it is. I hear this all the time, particularly from Fairfax staffers and ex-staffers. If o...
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To my astonishment, Catholic Archbishop of Sydney George Pell spent part of a press conference today claiming that the news media are exaggerating the scandal of Catholic Church child abuse in Australia . There was "a persistent press campaign against the Catholic Church's ade...
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Too many political commentators think about social media users as voters who don't matter when they should be thinking about them as an audience that does When Julia Gillard ripped into opposition leader Tony Abbott accusing him of sexism and misogyny, the YouTube video of the...
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The graphic below comes from the University of Michigan's Professor Mark Perry, who runs a libertarian and market-oriented blog called Carpe Diem . It shows, essentially, the collapse of the advertising revenue stream in US newspapers. Adjusted for inflation, US newspapers wil...
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In the torrent of words over the job cuts at Fairfax and News Ltd, not many people seem to have noticed that these events also further undermine the already teetering argument of the Finkelstein Review for a new system of media regulation. How's that? Recall that the Finkelste...
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This week's dramatic events in the Australian media have underscored the Schumpeterian "creative destruction" being wrought before our eyes by the Internet and associated technologies and cultures: Fairfax's announcement of the sacking of 1900 staff, closure of print facilitie...
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As Ken Parish's post below shows, there is now a widespread view that Gina Rinehart will win control of Fairfax , publisher of the Sydney Morning Herald and The Age, and then seek to move their editorial stances well to the right. From people who believe that, you hear both wa...
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From @danilic (zoom in to read some of the smaller text)
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Like lots of people, I've always been fond of Marilyn. She was an interesting and courageous person. I liked her apparent seriousness. And the cut of her ideological jib. She was one of the few people who stood against McCarthyism. Yet I always harboured the view that this was...
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http://youtu.be/TuIbEJz23uY I've often thought that in politics, the signature of honesty is not lack of dishonesty - an impossibility in party politics - but a certain discomfort with the the lies you have to tell. I'm giving Joe the benefit of the doubt on this one. And good...
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This wasn't supposed to be the theme of part two (Part One is here ) but Jessica Irvine's recent and timely column on superstardom and One Direction prompted me to add my two cents' worth - well someone else's two cents' worth but at least inserted by me. First; highlights fro...
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"Make the media more accountable for their sins, and worry less about new technologies and freedom of speech". That's a one-line summary of Ray Finkelstein's Independent Media Inquiry . It argues for a new system of media regulation to apply to journalists, commentators and mo...
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http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YtGSXMuWMR4
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The bank debate now seems officially out of control. Increasingly foolish notions about banking are being served up day after day. One example: the developing meme that claims the banks have decided they will no longer be bound by official interest rate policy. One morning las...
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http://youtu.be/-4V40twk63A Screen tests are fun to look at, letting you peek before the actors peak, as it were (or crash). There must be some good philosophy to be written about the uncanny. (Hasn't Susan Sontag written something on this?) [On checking , it turns out that Si...
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I was rung today for a comment on second hand car imports by the Global Mail . Here's a Guardian blog about it. I didn't know what it was, but that just shows how out of touch I am here at my terminal. It's a philanthropically funded newspaper. And it's philanthropically funde...
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Right now Ray Finkelstein and Matthew Ricketson, the two members of the federal government's Independent Media Inquiry , are trying to finish off their report to the government. It's due by 28 February. Writing these reports is frequently difficult, but Finkelstein and Rickets...
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Here is this pesky subscription drive at the top of Troppo again. I'll pull it down in the next few days. But OFFERS END FRIDAY 17th Feb!! It's on again folks. Crikey subscribers on the group subscription I organise have begun getting presubscription emails. Whether you are a...
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[caption id="attachment_18324" align="alignleft" width="865" caption="A cool graphic curtesy of McKinsey"] [/caption] Hard to believe we have a share of the global film industry revenue which is about a fifth of the revenue of the US industry. Anyway, it's a cute graphic.
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The ABC's Australia Talks program ran a show this week about the troubles of the Australian book industry. Its starting point was that the local bookselling and book publishing industry is in a heap of trouble. Not for the first time, the program did a deal of hand-wringing ab...
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With the Media Inquiry in full swing and the Greens' Bob Brown complaining loudly about News's lack of fairness and accuracy , now might be a good time to travel back in time 20 years. Let's visit another era when a powerful paper was unashamedly boosting one side of politics...
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[Cross-posted to Online Opinion ] I spend my working life running an online media firm - WorkDay Media, publisher of Banking Day - with its owner and editor-in-chief, Ian Rogers. Last month, Ian and I wrote a submission to the federal government’s Independent Media Inquiry. Yo...
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In an idle moment I read this article . It's an adversarial interview. Only it's in the lifestyle section and it's of a celebrity - Dolly Parton, who has always seemed like quite a nice sort, though you wouldn't be too surprised to find out that it wasn't so. Anyway, since it'...
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"Public debate in Australia has been shaped in a profound way by astroturfing", says advertising strategist Ravi Prasad . "If you look at the debate around the carbon tax, the debate around mining supertax, and the public debate around asylum seekers, the public debates in the...
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http://youtu.be/S7ehlw_phys
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I usually disagree with recently reborn RWDB blogger Professor Bunyip, and his potshots at this week's principal witnesses in the Finkelstein Press Inquiry aren't exceptional in that regard. But I have to confess (not for the first time) to taking a certain guilty pleasure at...
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Back in 2006 UK rumour-monger Guido Fawkes boasted that the news is no longer defined by big media . Laurie Oakes is afraid he's right. In his 2011 Andrew Olle Media Lecture , Oakes predicts that bloggers will soon be determining what is news. He says that political commentato...
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I muse at CDU Law and Business Online about the broader implications of Eatock v Bolt in light of last night's Austin Asche Oration in Law and Governance by Federal Court Chief Justice Pat Keane. Discussion is solicited, there rather than here by preference.
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New post by me at CDU Law and Business Online . An extract: Moreover, yesterday’s behaviour by Murdoch’s Brisbane Courier-Mail of publishing edited extracts of a Liberal-National “dirt” file on Queensland Labor MPs rather suggests that it is high time for media behaviour to be...
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Anne Summers' essay on Andrew Bolt in The Monthly is free access for 24 hours. A key extract: Media and politics today are less a contest of ideas and more a continuing conflict of opinion. “Bolt’s genius is that he’s always finding the fault lines and finding an argument,” La...
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At CDU Law Online - Colourful lawyers, police and the media (the Adam Houda wrongful arrest saga).
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From the Sydney Morning Herald this morning. Paris-style train plan for city Jacob Saulwick October 6, 2011 RAIL services on the north shore, inner west, Bankstown, Hurstville and north-west lines would operate as single-deck, high-frequency metro-style trains under a plan bei...
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After his first week of blogging back in 2002 John Quiggin observed that blogging "technology seems ideally suited for individuals and small groups, with no obvious way of scaling it up to corporate level." Maybe he's changed his mind. This week Quiggin suggests that The Austr...
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Two diametrically opposed takes on the Australian Bureau of Statistics' newly released 2009-10 Household Expenditure Survey : Spending survey busts struggling families myth (ABC news item): Claims that many Australians are doing it tough and households are being weighed down b...
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Adam Smith recognised that a well-ordered society can never develop "when a sizeable number of its members are miserable and, as a consequence, dangerous", writes Mary Riddell in the Telegraph . She argues that "social democracy, with its safety nets, costly education and heal...
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One of the heroes of ferreting out the routine criminality at the News of the World is the former Grandiosely titled Minister for Transformational Government, Tom Watson who's been on this case longer than just about anyone and a genuine champion of open government with whom I...
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As thousands of Norwegians poured into Oslo's streets singing, hugging and waving flowers , Queensland academic Merv Bendle sat at his computer fixated on how leftists and Islamists would try to exploit this latest act of mass murder. Maybe the attacks in Oslo an on the island...
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" Enormous Penis Located on Google Maps ". Last time I checked, Gawker's illustrated story about the huge penises drawn on school lawns in New Zealand had racked up over 46,000 views. A more recently posted story tells of how "A man in Russia broke into a hair salon and the ow...
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I knew Rob Chalmers who worked in the press gallery for over 60 years and has just died after what they call in the media "a battle with cancer". Cancer won as it so often does. Peter Martin does the honours here including reproducing a fine letter to Rob from PM Julia Gillard...
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Krugman again : Think about what’s happening right now. We have a crisis in which the right is making insane demands, while the president and Democrats in Congress are bending over backward to be accommodating — offering plans that are all spending cuts and no taxes, plans tha...
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Since some episodes are good and others bad, I could never see the point of being either a declared friend or enemy of Q&A. But the bad have so thoroughly outnumbered the good this year that I'm about ready to concede it's not worth watching. It hit rock bottom last night with...
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According to the ABC's Barrie Cassidy "even the most popular decisions taken by this government [are] essentially public relations disasters". It's one of those self-fulfilling media memes, resulting partly from Labor's deficient PR skills and partly from Tony Abbott's cynical...
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Mr Denmore is unhappy about my recent post ' The blogosphere’s delusions of grandeur ' where I suggest that blogging isn't about to replace professional journalism. Mr Denmore agrees but thinks I'm attacking a straw man: ... just who is saying that blogging is intended to repl...
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Are bloggers writing better commentary and opinion than journalists? According to Troppo commenter Alex White the best blog commentary is more valuable than the best commentary in the mainstream media. In a response to my post on the blogosphere’s delusions of grandeur , he wr...
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I notice that a UK MP has just "outed" soccer player Ryan Giggs as the prominent sportsman who had a well-publicised extra-marital affair. His identity was (and remains) the subject of a "super-injunction" issued by the UK High Court and based on rights to privacy in the Human...
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Freedom of expression in Australia is arguably freer than it has ever been, both legally and practically. Oppressive censorship of art and literature is largely a dim memory from the distant past (leaving aside infrequent moral panics like the Henson naked kiddie pic affair)....
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Murdered toddler Evelyn Greenup Last night's Four Corners on the Bowraville murders of three Aboriginal children some 20 years ago in northern New South Wales made rivetting TV. It painted a picture of a dysfunctional Aboriginal community riddled with alcohol and substance abu...
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http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5DxeCK5Ne_Q I nearly posted on this when the event occurred, though before the denouement. Australian Health Economist and bureaucrat Stephen Duckett was CEO of Alberta Health Services and, in some situation of crisis or at least heightened media...
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I love newspapers and read lots of them. But I don't love any one newspaper so much that I'd pay hundreds of dollars a year to read it online. The kind of package I could be persuaded to pay for would be a subscription to a bundle of my favourite newspapers and magazines. But...
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Thus reads the first of so far 113 comments on the Qld Police's Facebook page in response to a story in the Courier Mail. John Howard took to talk-back radio to give him a direct line through the compulsive world of spin that is the mass media. Now the Qld Police are showing h...
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Veteran econoblogger John Quiggin is the blogosphere's pitbull terrier. Once he gets his teeth into an issue he just won't let go. One of JQ's current worthy obsessions is the utter untrustworthiness of Murdoch's flagship newspaper The Australian (see here , here and here ): A...
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Last year Mayhill Fowler, one of the Huffington Post 's citizen journalists, threatened to stop blogging unless the Post started paying her . After a brief exchange of emails where Fowler explained she was no longer prepared to do her reporting for free, the Post' s founding e...
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Observant Media watchers might have noticed a story on the ABC The Drum site this morning to the effect that Club Troppo and Larvatus Prodeo had quit the Domain blog group headed by Graham Young's Online Opinion . LP's letter to Graham was apparently leaked by person/s unknown...
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Not so long ago I published a post titled: The future of journalism and blogging – chapter 957 . Essentially I argued that, despite all the despairing navel-gazing and prognostications of doom for MSM news and political journalism posed by free content on the Internet, especia...
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Of all the products advertisers and marketers have pitched over the years, the one most vital to their survival, and the one they have been most successful at convincing people the utility of, is marketing. Without selling advertising and marketing, there is no industry at all...
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Those are the words that the sub-editor of the Australian - I presume that is who wrote them - used to describe these comments from Warwick McKibbin. "It is more important to have independent voices (on the bank board) than ever, because the policies being proposed in recent y...
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About to book United Airlines to the United States, I thought I'd let any Troppodillians who don't know of this video, that it exists, and that it's fun (and it lopped around $170 million off UA's market cap according to some factoid crazed journalists). And looking it up, I j...
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Not two weeks gone - and this: Labor needs a comeback. Fast. Julia Gillard's dogged insistence she will return the budget to surplus in 2012-13 is growing old. So she should tighten fiscal policy. You wouldn't want a policy with a three year horizon to 'grow old' now would we?...
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ABC The Drum/Unleashed editor Jonathan Green a couple of days ago: Waiting until just after 3.30 this afternoon before fronting the media and addressing today's asylum seeker tragedy made Opposition spokesman Scott Morrison look the model of restraint. "A day of sadness as wor...
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Fatuous Sydney 2UE radio reporter Latika M Bourke not only won the 2010 Walkley Young Australian Journalist of the Year award but has now been employed by the ABC as its Social Media Reporter . I've unwillingly been inflicted with Ms Bourke's vacuous style of "journalism" whil...
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http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KT6n1S-xBhY&feature=player_embedded
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Canberra Times readers were left to think up their own 5 deck headline for this story by AAP medical writer Danny Rose.
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http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j8y-_vaf6iY&feature=player_embedded Current developments in e-books and e-readers may end up having dramatic effects on the mainstream newspaper industry, about whose future I've been musing in recent days . A significant part of the problems bei...
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Anyone looking for a link between my post earlier today on the future of Fairfax and Paul Frijter's two posts on the Wikileaks saga need go no further than a story just published on both Fairfax sites: Rudd's revenge on US Kevin Rudd retaliates after diplomatic revelations abo...
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Crikey boss and former Fairfax editor Eric Beecher published a scathing opinion piece about his former employer in yesterday's newsletter, in the wake of the sudden departure of Fairfax CEO Brian McCarthy . Of course, as a direct Fairfax competitor, we should take Beecher's op...
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In a recent post, Troppo's Ken Parish suggested that quality newspapers serve a gatekeeping role, ensuring "at least some measure of quality assurance". So what's happening at the Australian? In a recent piece on wind farms, environment editor Graham Lloyd attempted to explain...
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If you regularly copy and paste headlines or paragraphs from newspapers, you'll have run into Tynt Insight . It's the software that inserts the irritating "Read More" URL into your blog posts, emails and documents. As John Gruber at Daring Fireball writes , Insight "is a servi...
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There's more to reporting than quoting from media releases or explaining statistics you've downloaded from the ABS -- or at least there ought to be. And that's why it's so worrying to read this from Alan Kohler : It is now possible for anyone to find out almost anything. Someo...
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Journalists love nothing better than to navel gaze about the future of newspapers and the mainstream media in the Age of Social Media. Some journalists even see social media as threatening their long-term career prospects. It's probably inevitable given the struggle newspapers...
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http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EHlN21ebeak
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Web 2.0 is a great thing not least because we no longer have to rely on journalists for our reading about contemporary events. Particularly in the area of commentary, why read a journo when you can read a Nobel Prize winner in their field. This sentiment finds its apotheosis i...
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I was unaware of "doors duty" as recently outlined by Annabel Crabb , but, I can't say I'm surprised. Anyway here's her explanation of what it is. I remember having a conversation last year with a Labor backbencher who had been on "doors duty" during a sitting week. You know t...
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Enough of critique already. During the election I started a campaign to try to mix a little activism into the numerous well founded critiques of the truly crapulous quality of our media. I figured in this day and age it might be possible to ignite something via some consciousn...
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Here's Annabel Crabb reporting on negative campaigning. Fear Is The Winner Of the 30 TV ads commissioned and aired by the Coalition, 29 attack Labor, and only 6 offer any positive reason to vote Liberal (thanks to Gruen Nation's hardworking research bunnies Xtreme Info, for th...
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I thought I saw the fallacy of the excluded middle. I did. I did see the fallacy of the excluded middle, or perhaps I should say the fallacy of pre-prepared thinking iSnack processed food for thought 2.0. In a story on Mark Latham's call for us all to vote informal , we have t...
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Some great graphics from Tom Scott. I think the warning signs make most impact on their own, but Tom has annotated them on his site . Below, your opportunity to win the coveted Troppo Mercedes Sports and dinner with Nelson Mandela Warnings I'd like to see include: Warning: no...
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The floods in Pakistan have resulted in about 1,600 deaths, with many more expected (even disregarding the possibility of a cholera outbreak), and have stranded or displaced about 12 million people. The worst aspect seems to be that this is just a taste of what's to come, if t...
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Well folks, that's how your mad as hell correspondent feels. I'm refining the #HeSaidSheSaid campaign. After posting it I realised that we really needed a more general term as the pathologies of modern media - what Tim Watts calls souffle journalism - comprehend quite a few mo...
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The most common defence of 'he said she said' journalism is that reporting both sides with wide-eyed ignorance about the merits of their claims is at least 'objective' and it's true in a way. I remember having dinner with some relatives in Italy when a heated argument broke ou...
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One of the things I'd like to do in this election campaign is to draw attention to all the (most egregious) cases where the press engage in the mindlessness of "he said - she said" journalism. That is where they report various sides accusations of the other as if that then fin...
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In a new high watermark in he said she said journalism the ABC news tonight had a story of a school that 'someone said' had been "paid off" to keep silent about education spending overruns. The story seemed to be this: Some school community had complained that they couldn't ge...
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On today's RN News, the ABC reported that Lindsay Tanner had told the Insiders program that Kevin Rudd would lead the ALP to the next election. This was one of the six most important things to tell us at 10.00 am this morning. Why is that news? What was he supposed to say? "Ac...
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I wanted to post this video of Ronald Reagan (not to be mistaken with Ronald McDonald) and James Dean. However WordPress's new software strips the code away - ostensibly because it will handle it all without the code. But I can't master what I'm supposed to do. Anyway, click t...
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Evelyn De Morgan, The Worship of Mammon (1909) An embarrassingly bad story on PM about economics versus Christianity spoiled my drive home on Good Friday. I suppose they need to present something about religion at Easter, but can't they do better than this? The hook for the st...
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[caption id="" align="alignnone" width="464"] Not the ABC's logo, but a very nice looking image whatever it is![/caption] I think this is the first post on Troppo that's 'hoisted from archives' which is to say it's an earlier post that I'm reposting. It was done as preparation...
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A nice piece on how political coverage gets sucked onto the nihilism of race-calling. HT Brad Delong: George Packer: The Top of Our Game : David Broder had a devastatingly unremarkable assessment of Sarah Palin in the Post the other day. Her speech at the Tea Party convention...
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In 1934 an Aussie school teacher wrote a little ditty about Kookaburras that was enjoyed and sung by school kids for decades. She made pretty much no money out of it all, as it was, and is, still legal for kids to sing a song at school without paying the composer, thank the lo...
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Posted in Music, Media, Law
Jumping the shark Untill Tuesday night Ian Plimer was the respectable face of climate scepticism in Australia. Plimer looks the part of the distinguished professor, and as a geologist gives the impression of understanding the long run forces affecting the earth's climate, as o...
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''Hang on, woah woah woah woah!" If you believe Paul Sheehan we can thank Alan Jones for the demise of Malcolm Turnbull and the derailment of the CPRS. Every time a Liberal backbencher is asked why he or she withdrew their support for Ian MacFarlane's deal, the answer is the s...
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Troppo's Paul Frijters, too self-effacing to push his work on Troppo, has a new paper on the effect of the internet on quality news content. I discovered it on a newsletter of new papers. Looks interesting, so I'll have to have a closer squiz when I get the time. Is the Intern...
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Am I mistaken or is this a reasonable description of the last - say - thirty years in cinema. A generation ago, you could do a film about foreigners in a normal English speaking accent. The Sound of Music was done in a mix of fairly unobtrusive (to us) English accents (the adu...
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The High Court this morning rejected an appeal by former radio star John Laws' employer Radio 2UE against a defamation verdict for comments he made about fellow shockjock Ray Chesterton. The SMH seems to summarise the judgment accurately as far as I can see from a quick scan r...
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Alex Sloan at ABC Canberra and I have a chat on air about fortnightly usually corresponding to one of my columns. We had a chat on Adam Smith and the Theory of Moral Sentiments last Thursday and I was in some trepidation that I might become rather incoherent as the ideas are q...
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This man is Dave Bloustien. Why should you be interested? Because you will always remember this man's face as the first sign that being a reader of Club Troppo made you an insider , somone in the know and on the money . Yes, folks, due to our extraordinary buying power, our pu...
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In a little over a week I'll be heading for Europe and back via Bejing. So I need around 40 hours of really good iPodian entertainment. Suggestions are gratefully received. In the spirit of reciprocity, I can tell you that " Not without you " on life matters is a wonderful thi...
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The media are supposed to be finding out and telling us what is going on. They don't do that of course. They spend most of their time reporting on various lamely constructed dramas. The main meta-narrative is racecalling the parties or what I call pub-talk. Is Kevin or Malcolm...
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While it's very unedifying when people are stirred up, I enjoy the odd 'meta' discussion, or at least thinking about what the right principles are for discussion in the blogosphere. So I was intrigued to see them eloquently expounded in Crikey today - by virtue of the publicat...
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STOP PRESS: $55 last day! Offer closes Tuesday 24th February 2007 (told you!) Now Closed. Hi all, It's on again this year - with our group subscription running out, it's time to resubscribe - if you want to. The amount you'll pay is a function of how many takers we have. Here'...
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Is there any left wing version of this ? Is there any Australian version of it? Perhaps Alan Jones' malevolence comes close on the Australian right. Given the prominence of these guys, it's scary. Then again, perhaps it shouldn't be taken too seriously. Like 'World Championshi...
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Comedian laureate of our bullshit drenched age, John Clarke is on LNL tonight. I love John Clarke and, on consulting others in charge of this website - including Dr Troppo - it has been decreed that tuning in is compulsory. Those who are unable to pass a comprehension test (to...
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On the weekend the ABC News reported on the excitement about Bill Henson being given permission by a primary school principal to trawl for photography models. The news then covered the various photo ops put on by Kevin and Malcolm telling us how disgusted they were. (Malcolm w...
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Some of the things reported in this post may not be true. But how many Troppodillians can put their hands on their hearts (well that's tricky in itself if taken literally but you know what I mean) and say that if there was as much half way credible dirt flying around on Obama...
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This post is an illustration of why I find Krugman just soooo good. He will probably get the Nobel Prize at some stage, but he'll get it for a bunch of silly stuff he did which was called, at the time 'Strategic Trade Theory' and which he has since conceded wasn't worth much m...
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The US election and the biggest financial swindle of all time (OK - I exaggerate, TARP is not a swindle, it's a really really inefficient and unfair way of doing something sensible, but perhaps as we speak the Congress are making it better) have got me in one of those times wh...
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I suppose it isn't surprising that sentiment among media professionals about the future of newspapers is so negative. Fairfax's recent culling of several hundred journos in the face of a collapsing revenue bottom line has brought the whole issue into sharp focus, as have simil...
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I just clicked on Amazon's 'add to my shopping cart' and got told that four books had changed price. Usually they have gone up. Or that's been my experience. But things are a-changing as you can see from the excerpt below. Is this deflation, increasing copying, competition fro...
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From this site , via Kathy G , regarding Charlie Chaplin. They were dreadfully poor. Charlie's parents were third-string strolling players. His father died early of alcoholism; his mother was often in asylums, whether through drink or because of periodic mental illness. Whenev...
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An earlier version of this story in the Fairfax press seemed to be trying to beat up a spurious Aussie versus Kiwi stoush by highlighting some obscure survey purporting to show that Auckland was in the world's top 10 most liveable cities whereas Sydney and Melbourne both misse...
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cycad tree ferns rude senile royal turd obsequious Tory blogger
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Nicholas Gruen's post a couple of days ago on American RWDB shockjock Bill O'Reilly's dummy spit has got me thinking. Why haven't local TV programmers inflicted similar current affairs "personality" commentators on Australian audiences? After all, we've had their radio equival...
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The Australian reports breathlessly that Lindsay Tanner can't guarantee that no working families will be worse off, nor that interest rates won't rise in the future. Nor can Malcolm Turnbull, or Kevin Rudd or anyone else. Or to put it more fully, they can't but if they did the...
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I was going on about the renewed importance of public goods to the Review Panel on the Innovation System and so they asked me and another economists on the panel to do a bit of a write up for them. For various logistical reasons, the ultimate document was run up by me the nigh...
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I've never known. Anyway, I've discovered a blogger I'd not read before - a stroppy femmo who's a great read - who seems to have similar views to mine . Go and have a good squiz around her site .
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John Cargher is one of a handful of people who have been part of my consciousness for as long as I can I remember, and who are still doing their thing -- at least, he'll be in this category until tomorrow. There won't be many of these great constants left after that: a quick m...
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Valid till 1 June Valid until Thursday, 1 May 2008 Borders Cashiers: For eligible book do the following: Ring item, select S1, highlight book, select S5, scan or enter coupon #, enter 25%, proceed. *Coupon offer applies to full priced non-fiction books only. "Great Price" stic...
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In a recent post I argued that "Over the very time we were clearing away the detritus of the various collectivist institutions we cobbled together under the name of the Australian Settlement, or ‘protection all round’, while we proceeded with economic reform by deregulating ma...
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Paradox one Over the very time we were clearing away the detritus of the various collectivist institutions we cobbled together under the name of the Australian Settlement, or 'protection all round', while we proceeded with economic reform by deregulating markets to try to opti...
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Good on the monthly for putting up videos of various things related to its flagship publication - the monthly mag. But one request. I virtually never look at videos on the computer. I've got too much else to do. So when I go to Ted if I want to listen to something, I'm gratefu...
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The SMH which published an op ed of mine has just sent me their editorial ethics policy. I have no trouble agreeing to it. But I have some concerns about their journalists. This isn't a criticism of them. And it's not a criticism of the policy - but there is a bit of a disconn...
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" Now listen, you queer . Stop calling me a crypto Nazi or I'll sock you in your goddamn face and you'll stay plastered..." Everyone agreed that William F Buckley was good television. When the American Broadcasting Company were looking for a conservative commentator for the 19...
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I've always wondered. I don't much like his stuff, while acknowledging that the early work was interesting. And I guess you get marks for creating an icon - Ned Kelly. The Kelly series is very compelling. But, though I wouldn't rate my views on the subject as particularly wort...
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Anyone who wants to participate in Troppo's bulk subscription to Crikey! should email me on nicholas at gruenxxx dot com dot au - and remove those 'x's. If you subscribed last year you should get an email from me. Depending on numbers the cost will be as follows. 3 5 Annual Su...
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Andrew Norton mourns the passing of the Bulletin : The Bulletin hasn't had a niche for a long time now. While it still occasionally broke stories, on a week-by-week basis it wasn't providing much you could not find more promptly and at lower cost in the newspapers. I haven’t b...
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I've praised the Asus Eee PC before (though not its peculiar marketing name) as the direction I've been hoping portable computing would take for some time. It seems to have been a success and now they're unbundling their way to success it seems. Three new models are on the way...
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Find out if you want to by clicking through when the word appears in this rather fun review of Christopher Hitchens. Not that Christopher is either my cup of tea or especially interesting. But he is quite fun to watch - so long as you don't devote much time to it!
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The National Museum of Australia has launched its annual Behind The Lines exhibition, featuring the work of the country's top editorial cartoonists. (I didn't submit anything this year so I'm not in it.) This year's review covers everything from the NT Intervention to Kevin 07...
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Well, it's not standard Troppo fare I know - though aficionados may recall similar departures from me in the past , but Natalie Gauci won Australian Idol on Sunday night. Idol is quite a show - for the few who are uninitiated it's a kind of souped up talent quest in the age of...
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Yesterday I started classifying the questions that Kerry O'Brien asked the candidates in his final interview with them. Kerry's got a well deserved reputation as a pretty tough interviewer - I've seen him do a good job. But all his hard questions were really driven by the way...
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Yes Troppodillians, a new Troppo competition - hopefully you'll just keep coming back till 24th November when you will have weightier concerns on your mind. Please record in comments, the stupidist bit of punditry you've seen in the campaign so far. I confess I'm convening thi...
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Andrew Leigh and Joshua Gans' latest attack on the Howard Government is causing collateral damage. According to Helen Smart , the publicity surrounding their latest Baby Bonus paper "spawned a disgusting hatefest on news.com.au and similar forums, with all the usual suspects g...
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What a slimy, condescending, pox-ridden excrescence is ABC's Media Watch program. And Phillip Adams isn't far behind, judging by his response to Helen "skepticlawyer" Dale's complaints about his characterisation of an interview with her that apparently never took place ("chill...
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Mungo MacCallum has an article in today's Crikey which tends to take a similar - entirely pragmatic approach to the Parliamentary snarl that occured last Thursday. I happened to see edited highlights of it on "Order in the House" which confirmed all my previous feelings on the...
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I'd not seen this before - though many better travelled Troppodillians will have. For those that have not - you read it first on Troppo! With the company slogan ruling out evil things, Google continues (so far) to do good things.
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Crikey it seems has a need for 'balance'. What else would explain the quality of (at least some of their) right leaning correspondents. Below the fold was today's effort by the redoubtable Alan Jones and John Howard fan Professor Flint. It is not very good. That a former diplo...
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Writing op eds you often wonder how the subbie will bugger up your meaning by putting a headline on your piece that effectively prejudges the way people will read what you say. Still Catherine Deveny has struck it lucky. The subbie has captured the essence of her writing and h...
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A befriended blogger made a careless comment recently that American newspapers (with the New York Times on top) were 'unquestionably the best in the world'. Being from European stock, and hence growing up with the equally silly idea that everything European is better than anyt...
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Yesterday I received an email advising that Black Inc.'s excellent magazine The Monthly has begun publishing selected articles online for free access. I bought a 12 month subscription for my dad as a Christmas present last year. After reading some of the free access articles l...
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If was only a matter of time before politicians retreated even from the 'doorstop' and handed out audio and video feeds for the media's consumption. I think I predicted this on Troppo somewhere in the dim dark past, if so I can't find where I did. In fact it's a bit unfair to...
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On behalf of all Troppodillians I had lunch with Joshua Gans today. Actually it wasn't on behalf of anyone. I just felt like writing something pompous. Anyway, we spoke about many things including writing columns. Joshua writes all or many of his blog posts in the morning whil...
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On Monday Media Watch castigated The Australian for refusing to correct its misrepresentation of the opinions of Rajendra Pachauri, chair of the IPCC. Anyone who hasn't followed this story can get all background from the Media Watch story itself, from Tim Lambert , who was on...
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While not retreating from my earlier accusations of systematic bias in the main Murdoch press, let me now strongly commend The Australians Mike Steketee for his column in todays edition of the paper. He takes on the business lobby for telling big fibs in their advertisements o...
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I'm sure that when we look back in twenty years, we'll see that some of our declining media were actually sitting on Web 2.0 gold mines that they failed to realise or tried to realise in ways that they completely bolloxed up . Here are some great ideas proposed for the New Yor...
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I believe that the media will play a significant role in deciding the outcome of the next federal election. In particular, the role played by the Murdoch press- which controls some 2/3 of Australias national and capital city news market will be crucial. At this stage, Murdoch...
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As long-term Troppo readers may recall, I don't have a terribly high opinion of the ethics of SMH journalist/"blogger" Jack Marx. But he certainly didn't deserve to be sacked for writing a (deleted) post imagining Heavy Kevy's experiences in a New York strip club. It's a relat...
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On Friday we heard that the Governor of the Reserve Bank stated that he is prepared to raise the interest rate during an election campaign , contrary to received wisdom. This was actually two pieces of news for me, since I'd never heard about the received wisdom in the fist pl...
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Has the electorate's hip pocket nerve finally gone numb? In today's Sydney Morning Herald, Peter Hartcher writes , "we are beneficiaries of the most successful macroeconomic management in the developed world, yet we seem ripe for a government that might want to promise to supp...
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"Australia's online news commentariat that has found passing endless comment on other people's work preferable to breaking real stories and adding to society's pool of knowledge", says the Australian . I can understand that when you've tracked down sources for interviews or pa...
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Real Australians from the award-winning Sentence Management Unit at Wolston Correctional Centre Now that the issue of Haneef's incarceration has been resolved, attention has turned inevitably to how the issue will affect Australians' voting intentions. I was struck by this rem...
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A whip around a couple of sites commenting on the Adelaide Festival of Ideas and the issue of 'MSM v blogging' leads me to post this observation. I think Radio National is a fine thing, but I much prefer it when a program finds someone who's written something interesting, the...
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In recent weeks on clubtroppo and elsewhere, there's been a lot of attention given to untruthful journalism, media bias , and lying politicians . The situation appears the same internationally, with Blair and Bush being criticised for lying about Iraq and media bias being more...
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Earlier today here at Troppo, Nicholas Gruen picked up on outgoing British PM Tony Blair's op-ed lament about the instatiable appetite of the modern mass media for continuous sensational crisis stories. Not surprisingly given his recent 1Q question about the relevance of motiv...
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It is clear to everyone with eyes that the Murdoch press, and especially The Australian, is currently campaigning actively for Howard. The editorials and opinion pages do not matter but the front page stories what is covered and how are having and will continue to have a big i...
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Tony Blair on modern politics. From Crikey, but you can read more (pdf) here . The media world -- like everything else -- is becoming more fragmented, more diverse and transformed by technology... The newspapers fight for a share of a shrinking market. Many are now read online...
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This post follows on from a discussion begun by Paul Fritjers and continued HERE . Most human activity has changed drastically over our lifetimes. And the rate of change is increasing see for instance the next generations user interface for computers. You would hope academics...
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July 24, 1959 , the American National Exhibition, Moscow. Vice President Richard Nixon gently steered Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev towards the model kitchen . He wanted to show him a brand new washing machine . We want to make the lives of our housewives easier, said Nixon...
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A weekly wrap of what's been happening across the Top End news-wise, which might be handy for former residents who really miss reading about this sort of thing. May contain cane toads and/or crocodiles. DING DONG Darwin military police are hunting for a serial flasher who is t...
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A weekly wrap of what's been happening across the Top End news-wise, which might be handy for former residents who really miss reading about this sort of thing. May contain cane toads and/or crocodiles. SUPER TOAD Cane toads on the rampage across the Top End are evolving rapid...
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It's not just western cartoons causing protests abroad. In India Hindu activists are protesting against Valentine's Day. According to Asian News International Valentine's Day has become increasingly popular in India in recent years with retailers doing a brisk trade in heart-s...
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I have the right to fart in a crowded lift, or cultivate halitosis by failing to brush my teeth regularly. And, even if my neighbour is a Hindu, I would be entitled (health regulations permitting) to slaughter and barbecue a cow down by her back fence just to give her the shit...
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Like a good humanist and liberal I have always been opposed to censorship, however in the 1980s I stirred up a debate in the Humanist literature, pointing out that there was a newer wave of pornography about and it was very different from the kind of harmless stuff that prompt...
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