It is 2020. We are on deadline. And the professors are in charge. Seven years since the imposition of the News Media Council – and anti-democratic academics are editing our newspapers. Bookish elites – thinkers not doers – are defining news for the ordinary people. And our freedom – Our Freedom! – lies bleeding to death in the gutter of our dreams. (more…)
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| Photo: Lucas Coch, AAP |
Life as a TV news cameraman in Canberra is not one normally filled with adrenalin. Most of their days are spent trudging from doorstop to doorstop. Once in a blue-moon, there’s a leadership spill and they get to walk backwards down a corridor as the new leadership team promenade for the press. But riots? In their dreams only.
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If the world of politics is now so dominated by spin and media management that ‘reality’ is whatever you choose it to be, what’s the proper role of journalism?
It’s to find the truth and report it, right? Journalists are employed to serve their readers and viewers by cutting through hype, digging out red herrings, challenging misleading statements and exposing what’s really going on. You would think so, wouldn’t you? (more…)
Good journalism these days tends to get done despite rather than because of the institutions that support it. As anyone who has had to put up with me and many others banging on in recent years, the slow death of the business model supporting journalism has decimated the craft in the past decade.
But amid all the press release churnalism and he-said-she-said stenography and feeding of a relentless 24/7 cycle and low-cost opinionating and manufactured culture wars and dial-up controversy, some great journalism still finds its way through the cracks of the crumbling edifice of the MSM. (more…)
Where else but Australia would the media work itself into a frenzy over a ‘MYEFO’? Perhaps if you told the Brits it stood for My Youthful Exotic French Odyssey, they might bite. But Mid-Year Fiscal and Economic Outlook? Hold the front page.
In Australia, journos scribble millions of words every year about data that has little or no bearing on the lives of most of us – like monthly forecasts of volatile unemployment data (a throw of the dice by the statistical gods) or, worst of all, whether the federal budget ends the financial year in a small surplus or a tiny deficit. (more…)
Journalists are a curious bunch. Priding themselves as professional sceptics and reflexively cynical about those who pursue grubby advantage under the borrowed banner of universal morality, they nevertheless are incurably romantic about their own craft.
Indeed, for those of us who have sat through the debate over the recent Bolt judgement, in which Australia’s most popular and most powerful tabloid columnist was found to have breached the Racial Discrimination Act, it has been impossible to follow proceedings for all the people in the front rows suddenly standing on principle.
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Over at Club Troppo, Don Arthur has run a post titled ‘The Blogosphere’s Delusions of Grandeur’, regurgitating the now ritual meme that pits the apocryphal self-aggrandising blogger in pyjamas (usually venting about the meeja) against the hard-working professional investigative journalist risking everything for his readers. (more…)
Do people want the truth, or a dressed up and airbrushed version of the same? The difference in the dollar price between the two is the margin between journalism and public relations. While it shouldn’t surprise anyone that PR costs more than journalism, the hard part these days is distinguishing between the two. (more…)
