One memorable image from the media’s coverage of politics in recent months was from Sky News during the Labor leadership challenge. Comperes David Speers and Kieran Gilbert were gassing speculatively with their guest panel, whilst frantically scanning the incoming tweets on their mobile phones – seeing who would get the Read more…
Confirmation this week of how metro newspapers in Australia are over-cooking their published circulation figures is a sign of how desperate things have become in MSM land. It’s been plain for a while that Fairfax and News Ltd have been giving away newspapers faster than they can print them in Read more…
With news now an easily accessible commodity and the power of social media robbing journalists of their former monopoly in analysing events in real-time, newspapers increasingly are in the forecasting business. In other words, they no longer are journals of record, but of prophecy. It’s an understandable trend, given yesterday’s Read more…
Along with the rest of the media, The Australian completely failed to prosecute the case against the putative government during the election campaign about their dodgy election costings. Yet the Murdoch machine winds up its fearless media editor Geoff Elliott today to assemble some carefully selected quotes from “senior media Read more…
It’s not often appreciated by the public, but one of the biggest dreads of editors in the mainstream media is not being able to fill those acres of white space and dead air time each day. And those dreads have become more intense in recent years as editors have been Read more…
Rupert’s paid poodles are circling the wagons, proving once again that there is nothing more viciously tribal than a News Ltd newsroom. In an obviously coordinated move, Murdoch’s scribblers sought to ridicule what they clearly had been told to say was a paranoid attack by Fairfax columnist Laura Tingle and Read more…
An aspect of the ABC’s faux balance of recent years has been their metronomic recycling of Opposition press releases. There seems little judgement employed in selecting ‘news’ other than it is the Opposition saying it. It seems plain that the motivation for running these ‘stories’ is not the newsworthiness of Read more…
There’s an fascinating thread over at Larvatus Prodeo about Laura Tingle’s Friday column in the AFR in which she revealed Labor strategists are now seriously contemplating how to deal with the ferocious campaign against the new government’s legitimacy by the Murdoch empire. (For those who missed the AFR column, a Read more…
Annabel Crabb, the charming and witty ABC colour writer, has penned a sort of mea culpa on behalf of the Press Gallery, saying the new climate of continuous disagreement in Canberra will force the media to reinvent its tired ‘he said-she said’ template. This is the world in which journalists, Read more…
During the two-weeks of negotiation after the federal election, The Australian’s resident political editor Denis Shanahan published an astonishing piece in which he told his readers that the nation should “forget the three amigos and go back to the polls”. Accusing the country independents of blackmail and cynically using claims Read more…