Category Archives: Print media

Gerard Henderson: welcome to the blogosphere!

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There is an interesting new boy on the block! Gerard Henderson’s Media Watch Dog is sure to be stimulating read because he has a good memory and he knows where a lot of bodies are buried. He has a long and honourable history as a media watcher, starting in 1988 with a print version appropriately named Media Watch, lately published in The Sydney Institute Quarterly. The original Media Watch for some time carried a revealing and amusing series of reviews of the book reviewers by Stephen Matchett.

Gerard kicked off on March 6 with some comments on The Monthly as a debate free zone.

The second issue focussed on the way the ABC interprets the concept of diversity of opinion in broadcasting.

Garard has a great pioneering record, he was one of the first to blow the whistle on the self-serving wage fixing industry, first in the field of systematic media monitoring, and the program at the Sydney Institute which he took over circa 1987 has set a benchmark for disinterested social and political discussion and commentary.

The art of garbled polemic

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Am I the only newspaper reader who expects an opinion column to develop a coherent thread of argumentation, as distinct from a series of provocative comments stuck together precariously with specious howevers and therefores? The editors who approve these pieces evidently think that a reader who can pay attention from the introduction through to the conclusion must be a person with too much time time on his hands, and hence not worth taking seriously.

Yesterday was a day for bizarre essays in the Sydney Morning Herald, as much as in The Age. First there was Miranda Devine’s piece on World Youth Day. Miranda knows only two ways to write about event X. If event X was bad, Miranda can show it was caused by The Cultural Left. If it was good, she will show how The Cultural Left did everything to prevent it, but that common sense and traditional moral standards prevailed. Yesterday’s was in the second category. The Cultural Left, since the 1960s, has done everything in its power to derail traditional morality, and enshrine moral relativism, drugs, sexual indulgence, and family breakdown in its place. But World Youth Day shows that the newest generation is determined to escape from this cesspit, and return to ‘orthodox religious faith’.

Catholic or not, most people want love and goodness in their lives and the contrast between the radiant faces of the pilgrims and the strained masks of their most strident condom-waving detractors was striking.

So there you have it. If (Catholic or not) you have any disagreement with the Catholic Church’s teachings on contraception, homosexuality, divorce, or the role of women, and — worse still — might be inclined to voice these heresies in public, that makes you a strident, condom-waving, moral relativist libertine.

But, as a case study of the garbled polemic genre, Devine’s piece pales beside Joe Queenan’s critique of ‘new classical music’. Continue reading →

Club Meh

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Pity the poor working journo!

Journalists face tough deadlines. Sitting in front of a screen, they need to produce thousands of words to print or read out every day, only a fraction of which might actually make it to print or get on the air. Then people have the terrible rudeness to push numbers in front of people who are, after all, professional wordsmiths.

Is it any wonder that they engage in a little corner-cutting here and there?

For example, there’s the old favourite, Press Release Arrangement. In this game, the quotes in a press release are pruned and arranged into a pleasing order; much in the same way flowers are arranged in a vase by a wedding planner. Though not always to the same degree of acclaim.

Then there’s the Two Sides And That’s A Story gambit. Get quote from person A, repeat it to person B. Then you’ve got two quotes. That’s as good as objective reporting, isn’t it?

But every once in a while comes a story so delightful, so catchy and jaunty, that it just about writes itself11. I Darwin: For editorial staff at my former employer The Northern Territory News, these are stories about crocodiles or cyclones. The latter are especially wonderful, because they can be spun out for days with dramatic satellite photos, a two-page analysis of the Met Bureau’s latest report, and a few reprinted recollections of people who survived Cyclone Tracy. [↩]  — especially when it’s been supplied by a wire service.

Such is the story about the German schoolboy who corrected NASA’s figures on the asteroid Apophis. The story started with a wire journalist who wasn’t quite able to check that NASA had, in fact, got it wrong.

“Impossible!” I hear you cry. “Journalists are magicians of maths! Numerical Nestors! Differentiating Desperados!”

Terrible, I know; but the story went around the world several times before NASA pointed out that, in actual fact, they had been right all along. Sorry kid.

Hat Tip: Tim Labert.

The Great Calculator Heist

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Quoth Christopher Pyne in an interview on ABC Radio this morning:

There are a thousand ideas, there are 660 minutes of discussion on the summit program, which means for every idea there are 39.6 seconds put aside for discussing that particular idea.

So far this claim has been repeated by the ABC and others, without contention, for about 4 hours. It’s a great soundbite.

But 39.6 seconds of contemplation will show that Pyne’s maths is faulty. It runs thus:

660 minutes of talk time / 1000 ideas = 39.6 seconds per idea.

All good and well, except that ideas won’t be getting discussed serially. They will be discussed in parallel.

The conference is divided into 10 subject areas of 100 participants each. Assuming serial discussion in each stream, that takes the time per idea to 6.6 minutes each. Assuming working groups are composed of ten people, that takes it to 66 minutes each. About an hour per idea: brief but not all bad.

I can only assume that the journalists have been deprived of desktop calculators: multiplying and dividing things by multiples of ten is of course notoriously difficult to do mentally.

Maybe the terrorists stole them via email?

Update: Brendan Nelson spotted on tonight’s SBS news making the same argument. Does he doctor his own figures?

My 20/20 submission and my little imbroglio with The Australian

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I did not apply to participate in the 20/20 summit but I did submit a 500 word piece on employment policy. Although Club Troppo readers would have heard my views before, the submission is set out below.

I also had an interesting disagreement with The Australian editorial writers on the appropriate fiscal policy, which I have reproduced below.

Continue reading →

Paddy’s End

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Paddy McGuinness died this morning. He was 69.

As a columnist and editor McGuinness thrived on controversy. As Matthew Ricketson wrote, he was "loved and loathed in roughly equal measure, and that is the point — and the trick — with such columnists." At Catallaxy, Jason Soon remembers him "making a very strong and coherent case for the legalisation of ‘hard’ drugs".

For McGuinness, nobody was above criticism. As editor of Quadrant he once addressed a letter to God. "It is difficult to address a letter to a wholly fictitious figure", he wrote:

But if you were to exist, by creating Man with the capacity for evil as well as good (and quite a lot in between) and deciding to condemn to eternal punishment those who according to your not altogether clear criteria are not good enough (not just evil) you have in effect created a multitude of people who, brought into this world often as a result of a mere spasm of somebody else’s pleasure, can end up in an eternity of torture. That is a good god? If the fictitious you created Hell (in whatever its current doctrinal meaning is—I remember the Passionist fathers threatening us little boys with eternal fire and pain) then you are by my merely human standard of judgment as evil as the Hell you created, as the people you create who end up in that Hell, and you are responsible for the extremes of evil that are manifest in our world. As many people, especially Jews, asked after the Holocaust, could such a god exist? Would not such a god deserve our condemnation, our contempt, and our rejection?

But as God pointed out (via Peter Coleman) one of McGuinness’ innovations as editor of Quadrant, was to open up its pages to Christian argument. And there’s nothing Paddy McGuinness liked better than a good argument.

Et tu, Noel?

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A sense of gloom settled in as I ploughed through The Weekend Australian yesterday. It felt like February 2003 again, only worse. Then, an optimist could at least excuse the thumping of the drums of war as the triumph of hope over experience. In the light of the last four years, that excuse is no longer available.

In The World section on page thirteen, Gerard Baker (US preparing to beat Irans bomb) produced a paean to the wonders of high explosive and muscular diplomacy. All directed at Iran, of course. Were it not for Mr Bakers previous efforts, one might have been tempted to view the entire article as a mildly amusing parody. Consider, for example, how he finished the piece (emphasis added):

But it is starting to look as though, with not much more than a year left in his term, Bush has decided, as he surveys the unedifying global territory of ideological and state-backed terror, that he needs to clean house.

And a 13, 600kg MOP [massive ordinace penetrator] might be just the job.

Immediately above this anti-exemplar of quality journalism, Martin Chulov and Abraham Rabinovich (Syria quick to clean up bombed facility) have a little go at Syria and its purported nuclear ambitions. Whatever the truth about these ambitions, and on balance international views (including those of the IAEA) appear very sceptical, this article was of the nudge, nudge, wink, wink school of journalism. You know . . . . implication, innuendo and Continue reading →