The ABC of Trust

With Australians trusting media platforms less than do people in just about every other country, why would you set about dismantling the one institution they trust the most? The Australian Broadcasting Corporation, our 86-year-old taxpayer-funded and constantly beleaguered public broadcaster, regularly tops surveys as one of the country’s few remaining Read more…

Us and Them

If you’re a government propagandist, the silly season always provides a happy hunting ground. Newsrooms are thinly staffed and there’s little beyond the holiday road toll and bushfires to fill the bulletin until the sports report kicks in.  This means the bar for ‘news’ is set abnormally low. A perfect time, then, to flick the ‘Our-Welfare-Bill-is Out-of-Control’ switch. (more…)

Talking to Themselves

One of the tropes of media election coverage is when ‘jaded’ seen-it-all ‘insiders’ proclaim to the wet-behind-the-ears public that it’s all over. The ‘people’ have already decided. Call off the election. The conservatives have it in the bag. These stories are invariably based on opinion polls and written by telephone Read more…

Fenced In

old rusty barbed wire with hand on the dark background

“Our job is not to step in, our job is just to reflect, it’s just to report on what happens.”

That’s a quote from the ABC’s head of current affairs, Bruce Belsham, in the transcript published by New Matilda of his conversation in 2013 with the public broadcaster’s then technology editor Nick Ross about the National Broadband Network. (more…)