What is it with the Australian parliamentary press gallery and its obsession with budget deficits? It seems every government initiative is met with questions about what it means for the Labor government’s election campaign pledge (extracted under pressure) to restore the budget to surplus within three years – as if Read more…
The possibility of instant global publication, the growth of social media and the commodification of facts are accelerating the media’s drive to offer ‘analysis’ around news events. More ominously, and knowing reporters are looking for a point of differentiation, agents of power now routinely use social media to manipulate the official record in their favour before the facts are clear.
Of course, the problem with this is there is little evidence that asking ‘why’ before the traditional questions of ‘what’, ‘where’, ‘who’, ‘when’ and ‘how’ are answered is a recipe for good journalism. But commercial pressures, such as they are, encourage reporters to explain before they describe. And there are plenty of voices out there feeding them lines to help them meet those pressures, while generating more heat than light. (more…)
A bizarre year in journalism ends with our dominant media company’s flagship newspaper, an outlet that long ago gave up any pretence of objectivity, declaring war on the press gallery, the blogosphere, the twitterverse and just about anyone that wasn’t a Murdoch lackey sitting in front of a terminal in Holt Street.
The Australian is becoming a case-study in wagon-circling institutional paranoia, knee-jerk hyper-sensitivity, stupefying arrogance and an unending Orwellian capacity for declaring that black is white. Christopher Joye puts its increasingly unhinged behaviour down to insecurity, noting that the paper spends “more time defending its own actions in pushing specific agendas and ideological narratives than any other serious media forum on earth”. (more…)