“Well, dear, on top of hill were the well-armed, but rapidly depleting mainstream media corps defending their turf to the death, or at least until deadline.
One principle in journalism is that the closer you are to a story, the less likely you are to see it. It’s why wire services rotate people around the world. Journalists who work for Reuters, Bloomberg and AP have a frame of reference wider than the average local reporter.
If it hadn’t been Grog’s Gamut, it would have been someone else. The unmasking of the popular political blogger by The Australian newspaper in 2010 served in retrospect as the moment when blogging in Australia gained something of a critical mass.
Until then, the nation’s mainstream media had treated blogs as background noise, at best, unrelated to the real business of journalism and political commentary. But when News Ltd’s James Massola revealed “Grog’s” true identity as a Canberra public servant Greg Jericho, it was clear something had changed.
Just in: Pressure is increasing on Julia Gillard to call a leadership spill amid unrelenting pressure from backbenchers pressuring for a release of the pressure valve holding back potentially explosive leadership pressures.
Sources close to the ABC say talk is growing about an imminent shift of three non-aligned backbenchers to the camp considering a vote for Kevin Rudd in order to silence ongoing media speculation about the release of the imminent pressures. (more…)
Just back from the US, where alongside the endless Republican primary circus and The Madonna of the Superbowl Festival, the media was preoccupied by Groundhog Day, in which the likely length of winter is prognosticated by a rodent.It seemed strangely familiar.
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What do you think the pokies story is about? According to the Australian press gallery, it’s a story about individual politicians and party politics. The prime minister they have dubbed ‘Jul-iar’ Gillard, incapable of keeping promises, has done it again – ripped up a deal, walked away from an agreement and put pure politics ahead of principle. It’s the story her opponent wants run. And , of course, the genuises of the press gallery dutifully report it (‘The Blame Game Begins’, says Seven News).
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A consequence of our “media insider”-driven interpretation of politics is that journalists’ conceit over their proximity to the major agents domestically can leave them blind to the global nature of the crisis in liberal democracies.
Journalists, like commentators sitting cosily in their freebie box seats at the tennis, are so busy praising Abbott’s passing shots on asylum seekers or condemning Gillard’s clumsy backhand on the Malaysian solution that they cannot see that global issues such as the unregulated mass movement of people across borders, man-made climate change and systemic issues in financial markets are at a level of complexity beyond the ability of mere individual states to resolve.
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Sydney’s Sun-Herald this weekend runs a piece featuring former politicians of all colours decrying the rotten state of our politics – from the relentless dumbing down of issues, to the fake polarisation of views to create opportunities for adversarialism, to the rehearsed spin, to the chronic inability to undertake real reform and, as we are seeing now, to the blatant trolling of emotive issues about race and religion to garner cheap votes. (more…)
On the day the nation’s federal and state leaders met in Canberra to thrash out a new deal on health reform, the ABC’s website ran with this headline: ‘Desperate’ Gillard Set to Push Health Reform. Once again, our national broadcaster chooses as its preferred angle the Opposition’s interpretation of the story rather than the facts of the proposed reforms themselves, a baffling tendency this blog has explored before here.
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