No editor I worked for would publish the rubbish they now produce.
About six weeks ago I cancelled my subscription for The Australian newspaper after getting it for more than 30 years. As soon as this election is over, I will do the same with the Courier-Mail. (more…)
2 March 1996. Journalist:
The commitment to maintain (ABC) funding in real terms … does that stand?Senator Alston (on behalf of incoming Prime Minister John Howard): Absolutely.
6 September 2013. Incoming Prime Minister Tony Abbott:
.. and no cuts to the ABC and SBS.
These reassuring public commitments were soon exposed as lies. (more…)
Rupert Murdoch’s form in abusing power and finding truth hard to handle continues. ‘Turnbull has to go’ is typical behaviour for a man who has done more to damage democracy than any living media person .
I worked with Rupert Murdoch for seven years in the late 1960s and early 1970s. I was General Manager of his Sydney operations. It was then exciting working for him.He derided the stuffy old guard establishment . He was open to new ideas and opportunities. Then it all steadily went down hill. Ending his days in the embrace of the extreme right of the American Republican Party and Donald Trump says it all. What a wasted life that had so much going for it. What a disappointment.
My assessment of News Corp and Murdoch in 2014 follows.Little has changed. The media tragedy and abuse continues. (more…)
American owned News Corp Australia is the least trusted media company in the country and is a cellar-dweller in the Reputation Index of Australian companies. Its behaviour in this election will ensure that it is even less trusted.
Murdoch rewards generously employees who are tame and loyal. But how can self-respecting journalists, and particularly senior journalists, continue to take his coin? (more…)
The media’s coverage of climate change in the election campaign has reflected the Coalition’s long-term strategy of denialism, rather than a desire for genuine scrutiny. (more…)
Central banks, regulators and insurers are starting to acknowledge that the risks of human-induced climate change will have far greater economic and financial consequences than the 2008 Global Financial Crisis. Likewise, global investors and corporations are finally accepting that climate risk is fundamentally changing their business models. (more…)
South Korea expects to create 600,000 new “quality jobs” by 2026 thanks to fifth-generation, or 5G, mobile technologies, and hopes to leverage its first-mover advantage in the sector globally, a senior government official said on Monday. (more…)
The arrest of Julian Assange in London for his activities as head of WikiLeaks has renewed the public’s focus on the role of whistleblowers, and the prosecution of journalists who embarrass governments by exposing their lies, corruption and crimes. (more…)
The law to censor violent content rushed through Parliament last week connected dots between two Australians abroad, when Julian Assange was “extradited” from Ecuadorian territory, in London. I examine the linkages. (more…)
This is in response to the recent New York Time’s commentary on the Empire of Rupert Murdoch, P&I 5th April. Murdoch’s insight has been passed to many of the publishers of commercial media and political parties. It has damaged society and there’s no easy way for it to be countered.
Part 2 of a speech delivered at The Walkley Fund for Journalism Dinner in Sydney on Friday April 5, 2019.
Every year at the Walkley Awards, we honour a craft that holds power in its various manifestations big and small, to account. We should also, all be prepared to reflect on our own failures. (more…)
Part 1 of a speech delivered at The Walkley Fund for Journalism Dinner in Sydney on Friday April 5, 2019.
Forty-three years ago I went to the Philippines for the ABC’s Four Corners, to cover a disaster story—a tsunami that hit the island of Mindanao, killing 8,000 people. After witnessing close up the nature of President Ferdinand Marcos’s brutal despotism, I stayed on to tell another story, of how Marcos had used martial law, which he’d introduced ostensibly to deal with the threat of communist insurrection, to establish a dictatorship under which a powerful oligarchy of obscenely wealthy families—the so-called Marcos cronies—dominated the country. Marcos was well on the way to becoming the richest of them all. (more…)
Social media platforms give governments, extremists, haters and propagandists the ability to excite and incite hate amplified by algorithms. (more…)
On Wednesday 3 April 2019, The New York Times published a 20,000 word article about the influence o the Murdoch family, (Rupert, James and Lachlan) and the developing divisions within it. See link below to the New York Times article.
When no name pulled the trigger over one hundred times as he sluiced his way through the congregations at two Christchurch mosques, nothing he did was new. It was bigger, perhaps more “successful”, and maybe better planned than his role models had been able to realise, but his actions were entirely predictable. (more…)
With Tony Jones announcing his imminent departure from Q&A, it seems timely to take a good look at the little political panel show that his calm stewardship turned into a ratings semi-behemoth for the ABC. (more…)
Independent media continues to grow apace, while mainstream media is at best stagnant. Based on data provided by SimilarWeb – a global online traffic measurement service – independent media traffic has grown by 9.76% from November 2018 to February 2019*. During the same period the top corporate mainstream media sites** grew by 1.1%.
Following the recent success of Dr. Chau Chak Wing’s defamation lawsuit against Fairfax and John Garnaut, Liberal MP Andrew Hastie stated that the judgment will be “carefully analysed”: “The ability to report freely and fairly on national security is a vital part of our democracy,” and “we are concerned about the impact that defamation laws in Australia are having on responsible journalism that informs Australians about important national security issues.” One can only hope that Hastie and related national security hawks do actually read the Federal Court’s 100-page meticulously reasoned judgment before jumping to conclusions about protecting “democracy” and “responsible journalism”.
If Ita Buttrose, AO OBE is appointed ABC Chair of the Board in the next few days it will represent yet another opportunity for her to show her extraordinary talents at confronting difficult media challenges and coming out a winner. (more…)
After a year from hell, the ABC desperately needs stability, leadership, vision and funds. (more…)
In trying to defend the ABC as an institutional pillar of a fearless free media in Australia’s robust democracy, first, we have to confront paranoia.It comes in the form of constant Murdoch Press complaints that the ABC is biased and a force for “left wing” ideology.“All the ABC’s presenters are left wing!” columnists and ABC critics have written.
I found myself on Monday night (4/2/19) on Sky News “after dark” being interviewed on the “Chris Kenny on Media” program. And again the paranoia was in the air.“Name me one conservative or right-of-centre presenter at the ABC?” Mr Kenny demanded.I said I wasn’t going to fall into that trap by offering up a name. And, of course, to do so would be to make an admission that the question was valid and did have a basis in fact. (more…)
The Trump administration has hurtled into its third year and the media circus that’s trailed the 45th president continues apace. Australians who didn’t tune out of the news over the summer holidays were fed a diet of chaos and controversy out of Washington, with the ongoing partial government shutdown featured prominently in bulletins nationwide. (more…)
Here is an idea for how the ABC might deal with the inevitable round of cuts next Budget.
Clever bureaucrats when faced with funding cuts go for the jugular. They attack some popular vote-sensitive function and announce it will be cut. The backlash often results in a funding rethink.
Just hours after civil rights groups called on Facebook’s top executives to step down from the company’s board for allowing “viral propaganda” and “bigoted campaigns” to spread on the platform, demands for CEO Mark Zuckerberg to resign intensified after a bombshell New York Times report late Tuesday detailed a “special arrangement” the social media behemoth had with tech corporations that gave them access to users’ data and private messages without consent. (more…)
To conclude my series of posts on media power and politics, it is worth highlighting how independent media is on the rise in Australia. As we head into the new year – elections looming – trust in politicians at an all-time low, aided and abetted by mainstream media focused on headlines instead of substance – voters can and should seek answers elsewhere.
Much has been said and will continue to be said about the power that Rupert Murdoch wields in our very concentrated media landscape. It is a landscape that continues to change and the ACCC just released the preliminary report on Digital Platforms. New regulations may be needed, but the issues goes to the core of our political discourse which no regulation will remedy. (more…)
The investigative reporter Seymour Hersh, in his memoir “Reporter,” describes a moment when as a young reporter he overheard a Chicago cop admit to murdering an African-American man. The murdered man had been falsely described by police as a robbery suspect who had been shot while trying to avoid arrest. Hersh frantically called his editor to ask what to do.
“The editor urged me to do nothing,” he writes. “It would be my word versus that of all the cops involved, and all would accuse me of lying. The message was clear: I did not have a story. But of course I did.” He describes himself as “full of despair at my weakness and the weakness of a profession that dealt so easily with compromise and self-censorship.”