Our media is crap

[Jovial Monk]

Warning: couple of links to threads on my board. If you feel you can cope with that, read on. . .


Our media is crap, and is in trouble. To me those two things seem to be cause and effect. The proprietors and those we laughingly call journalists seem to think they are unrelated.

Before I go on I exclude biased fuckwits calling themselves “commentators” like Andrew Bolt and Piers Akerman. They may have been journalists but are not now. Bolt produced a chart of temperature increases with a “smoothed average line” based on some weird long interval, 23 years or some such—in any case a period used for smoothing that didn’t make sense BUT left the line heading downwards right in the current year—the guy owning the crank denialist site must have sat there with his spreadsheet and tried 10 years, 11 years. . .23 years That this junk non–science appears in a major daily (or its website) just shows the press is fucked.

I say proprietors appear to think their crap product is not the cause of their media companies/ conglomerates being in trouble is that they hire crap journalists. Michelle Grattan is still working for the Age but just writes pap (typically like “Libs have stuffed Labor, or maybe its the other way around or maybe neither have done anything to the other”) which just puts people off. Fairfax have also fired tons of subeditors, the heart of any news organisation.

A lot of emphasis is on dead tree media moving online, proprietors talking of their content. If the content is crap tho, does it really matter what format it is in? If content is important you need good journos and subbies! I remember reading the Australian, Age, quality press in those days. They had LONG articles, articles of over a broadsheet page! Now you get a column, mostly of claptrap, and that’s it!

The ABC “their ABC” is dreadful. ABC24 is sucking money out of other parts of the ABC so on ABC 1 you just get repeats of repeats of repeats and they are little more than “Murdoch lite.” The 7.30 report is such crap these days, Uhlman is not a journalist’s arsehole. His “interviews” of Abbott are so soft, so obviously rehearsed and edited they are valueless.

Blogs like PB, Possum provide the analysis I look for. Bilbo provides a summary and analysis without agenda, can’t be found elsewhere these days. The Guardian, the BBC, Al Jazeera and (because of the issue of austerity) the Irish Times for world news and decent coverage/analysis. Larvatus Prodeo used to be my fave blog but they have gone way downhill—I jeered that on a post on recovery in Labor vote that they and their commenters had not mentioned the brave, clever, determined lady that made that possible, PM Gillard. One long post and over 20 comments and no one had mentioned Gillard! So, no thanks, if I wanted to read crap I would get the national shit sheet!

Even the electronic media—radio, TV and commercial media websites—are not doing well. The London Times website and paper apparently are not making money (taking it online apparently was a disaster) and are for the chop as soon as ‘Rupe is in that linotype in the sky.

Are there any decent journos in Australia? Some. Paul Bongiorno at 10, Steve Cannane at the ABC, even Leigh Sales and Tony Jones on a good day (tho I have stopped watching QandA) Laurie Oaks even, sometimes some of the Fairfax journos, George Megalogenis for economics. Fucking pitiful, eh, 6 halfway decent journos in all of Australia across all media? Disgraceful!

If you too are sick of crap media we have a thread “Useful Political links” http://www.polanimal.com.au/viewtopic.php?f=5&t=348 where there are links to all sorts of media, from the Courier Mail to Pravda! Also there are a lot of links to blogs of all kinds that provide analysis!

The best analysis is from non–commercial bloggers! WTF? Journalists have access to VAST resources, libraries from nearly every paper in the fucking world and they get beaten by people just setting up a blog? And you want to tell me the Australian media isn’t sick?

I haven’t covered the shockjocks, just yobbos screeching out, like a parrot (ha!) what they are told to screech. Just more Andrew Bolts, just without his veneer of respectability, of professionalism and that is as much as I can be fucked talking about them.

Now there are some rays of hope. http://inside.org.au/ presents decent size articles and, from tomorrow,http://www.theglobalmail.org starts—stay tuned for that.

If you are at all interested in the media Mr Denmore’s “The failed estate” is a must–read! Mr Denmore is a former journo. thefailedestate.blogspot.com/

Tomorrow I will cover the Global Mail and put some more links in the links thread. BBC, Guardian, Al Jazeera are head and shoulders above other media outlets in MNSHO while Irish Times, Pravda, India Times and http://news.xinhuanet.com/english/ round up the errrrr roundup of media.

[mantra]

Warning: couple of links to threads on my board. If you feel you can cope with that, read on. . .


Our media is crap, and is in trouble. To me those two things seem to be cause and effect. The proprietors and those we laughingly call journalists seem to think they are unrelated.

Before I go on I exclude biased fuckwits calling themselves “commentators” like Andrew Bolt and Piers Akerman. They may have been journalists but are not now. Bolt produced a chart of temperature increases with a “smoothed average line” based on some weird long interval, 23 years or some such—in any case a period used for smoothing that didn’t make sense BUT left the line heading downwards right in the current year—the guy owning the crank denialist site must have sat there with his spreadsheet and tried 10 years, 11 years. . .23 years That this junk non–science appears in a major daily (or its website) just shows the press is fucked.

I agree with you on the biased journalists, in particular Akerman - but I doubt he gets much respect from either side of politics. Bolt at times isn't too bad. He proved that in the last year of Howard's reign by asking the hard questions and writing about them. He is of course pro-Liberal, but I have seen him make some fair commentary over the years raising some valid issues about both parties.

I say proprietors appear to think their crap product is not the cause of their media companies/ conglomerates being in trouble is that they hire crap journalists. Michelle Grattan is still working for the Age but just writes pap (typically like “Libs have stuffed Labor, or maybe its the other way around or maybe neither have done anything to the other”) which just puts people off. Fairfax have also fired tons of subeditors, the heart of any news organisation.

She would be burnt out by now. She used to have some fight in her, but I doubt she even thinks about what she writes anymore - just repeats what she remembers.

A lot of emphasis is on dead tree media moving online, proprietors talking of their content. If the content is crap tho, does it really matter what format it is in? If content is important you need good journos and subbies! I remember reading the Australian, Age, quality press in those days. They had LONG articles, articles of over a broadsheet page! Now you get a column, mostly of claptrap, and that’s it!

The ABC “their ABC” is dreadful. ABC24 is sucking money out of other parts of the ABC so on ABC 1 you just get repeats of repeats of repeats and they are little more than “Murdoch lite.” The 7.30 report is such crap these days, Uhlman is not a journalist’s arsehole. His “interviews” of Abbott are so soft, so obviously rehearsed and edited they are valueless.

Blogs like PB, Possum provide the analysis I look for. Bilbo provides a summary and analysis without agenda, can’t be found elsewhere these days. The Guardian, the BBC, Al Jazeera and (because of the issue of austerity) the Irish Times for world news and decent coverage/analysis. Larvatus Prodeo used to be my fave blog but they have gone way downhill—I jeered that on a post on recovery in Labor vote that they and their commenters had not mentioned the brave, clever, determined lady that made that possible, PM Gillard. One long post and over 20 comments and no one had mentioned Gillard! So, no thanks, if I wanted to read crap I would get the national shit sheet!

Even the electronic media—radio, TV and commercial media websites—are not doing well. The London Times website and paper apparently are not making money (taking it online apparently was a disaster) and are for the chop as soon as ‘Rupe is in that linotype in the sky.

Are there any decent journos in Australia? Some. Paul Bongiorno at 10, Steve Cannane at the ABC, even Leigh Sales and Tony Jones on a good day (tho I have stopped watching QandA) Laurie Oaks even, sometimes some of the Fairfax journos, George Megalogenis for economics. Fucking pitiful, eh, 6 halfway decent journos in all of Australia across all media? Disgraceful!

If you too are sick of crap media we have a thread “Useful Political links” http://www.polanimal.com.au/viewtopic.php?f=5&t=348 where there are links to all sorts of media, from the Courier Mail to Pravda! Also there are a lot of links to blogs of all kinds that provide analysis!

The best analysis is from non–commercial bloggers! WTF? Journalists have access to VAST resources, libraries from nearly every paper in the fucking world and they get beaten by people just setting up a blog? And you want to tell me the Australian media isn’t sick?

I haven’t covered the shockjocks, just yobbos screeching out, like a parrot (ha!) what they are told to screech. Just more Andrew Bolts, just without his veneer of respectability, of professionalism and that is as much as I can be fucked talking about them.

Now there are some rays of hope. http://inside.org.au/ presents decent size articles and, from tomorrow,http://www.theglobalmail.org starts—stay tuned for that.

If you are at all interested in the media Mr Denmore’s “The failed estate” is a must–read! Mr Denmore is a former journo. thefailedestate.blogspot.com/

Tomorrow I will cover the Global Mail and put some more links in the links thread. BBC, Guardian, Al Jazeera are head and shoulders above other media outlets in MNSHO while Irish Times, Pravda, India Times and http://news.xinhuanet.com/english/ round up the errrrr roundup of media.

Sadly the media can only report what it's allowed to. We've reverted back to the 60's and 70's when everything was censored and Labor is mainly responsible for it. Howard used to have items pulled after a short time if they were particularly damning, but Gillard won't let us read the truth at all.

Blogs are fine if you want to read about assumptions and often you agree with the writer, but they don't know the truth either.

[AiA in Atlanta]

Cable news has become entertainment. Don't spend 15 minutes a week watching that crap.

[Jovial Monk]

Some sources to read when you get sick of pap from our local crap media:


Poll Bludger: http://blogs.crikey.com.au/pollbludger/
Possum: http://blogs.crikey.com.au/pollytics/
M Farnsworth http://australianpolitics.com rightwing blog
Ben Raue's http://www.tallyroom.com.au/ election results
Adam Carr psephos.adam-carr.net/ Online archive of various election statistics from around the world, sorted by country and region.
Weather underground: http://www.wunderground.com/
http://english.aljazeera.net/
http://english.pravda.ru/
http://www.chinaview.cn/
http://news.xinhuanet.com/english/

[Jovial Monk]

More (sorry, there is a 10 URL limit here)

http://www.alarabiya.net/english/
http://www.bbc.co.uk/
http://www.abc.net.au/
http://www.guardian.co.uk/
http://www.irishtimes.com to see how austerity is kicking the crap out of Europe. Ireland is furthest down that path and sort of speak English
http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com
http://bilbo.economicoutlook.net/blog/ Modern monetary theory, not that I agree 100%
http://moslereconomics.com/ Another MMT blog
http://petermartin.blogspot.com/
http://www.businessspectator.com.au

[Jovial Monk]

http://www.economist.com/
http://www.prudentbear.com/index.php/th ... t_id=10339 US economics blog
http://www.aph.gov.au for a whole heap of stuff, broadcasts of House & Senate, committees etc and Hansard
http://www.openaustralia.org/ Better than Hansard in some ways, more searchable
http://thefailedestate.blogspot.com/ about the crap state of our pess
http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=SourceWatch
http://www.cnn.com/POLITICS/ US/world politics
http://www.nytimes.com/pages/politics/index.html US/world politics
http://www.thedailybeast.com US politics
http://www.huffingtonpost.com US politics

[Jovial Monk]

http://www.thepoliticalcarnival.net/ US politics
http://crooksandliars.com/ US politics
http://www.americablog.com/ US politics
http://www.democraticunderground.com/ US politics
http://www.thepoliticalcarnival.net/ US politics
http://www.thedailyshow.com/
http://www.blognow.com.au/lonewolf/ An article by ele on Iraq war
http://headonradionetwork.com/ Internet radio
http://www.newscientist.com/ (bloody interesting===> http://www.polanimal.com.au/viewtopic.php?f=3&t=1808)

[Jovial Monk]

http://www.zerohedge.com/ economic/financial
http://christopherjoye.blogspot.com/ rightwing economics blog, with inflation at 1% this guy would be calling on RBA to raise rates!
http://delusionaleconomics.blogspot.com/


I recommend that you occasionally look at some of these. I have tried to get quality press and interesting blogs, no all leftwing, to read occasionally. Guardian, BBC and Al Jazeera are standout news sources, the chinese ones interesting, Times of India is a mess!

[Mattus]

Journalism is dead. A self inflicted gunshot wound to the head in 2005. But the problem is not local, it is across the globe, nor is it a result of biased commentators.

Bias in journalism is healthy, it's fine. In fact, it's the pathetic attempt at unbiased reporting which has served to water down the delicious whisky sour that once was political journalism. The media, and in particular the self-loathing ABC, feel that in order to prevent a perception of bias, whenever they provide airtime for any point of view, no matter how well supported, they must provide equal airtime to somebody, anybody, no matter how utterly unqualified, who holds and alternative point of view. It's this sort of nonsense that keeps us from any real progress on issues such as global warming, for whenever it is brought up, they feel the need to invite some crackpot nobody to stoke the (non-)argument that it's all a crock of shit.

Facts are facts. Providing airtime to someone who is abjectly uninformed and outright wrong does not create balance, it simply distorts the facts. Journalism without facts is nothing. It's not even opinion. This is one area where journalism has failed.

"Get your facts first, and then you can distort them as much as you please." - Mark Twain

Trust in the media has plummeted. This is partly because of this instinctive desire to provide airtime to dodgy sources, in the name of balance or, more cynically, to wring some juice out by creating a controversy where there is none. What is journalism without trust? Even advertising requires some level of trust. How far have we come when journalists command less respect than the advertisers which pay them?

60% of stories in UK newpapers are verbatim press releases. Only 12% of articles are the original work of a journalist and only 12% show any evidence of an attempt to corroborate the central statement. This is abject laziness of the profession.

But the blame for this cannot fall entirely on the shoulders of the journalists. They are only responding to what the market wants, and the market wants trivia, not journalism.

"..editors, producers and journalists, just like politicians, craft stories around their audiences' desires. They mine the deepest prejudices and fears of a particular demographic group, and regurgitate them dressed up as news.." -Lindsay Tanner.

The serious journalism of last century has been replaced by the infotainment of The View and The Daily Show (in the interest of "balance" I'll mention Glenn Beck and Shawn Hannity too). Most of the blogs and websites JM lists are no different. Bite-sized McNuggets of journalism drowning in a cloying and high-calorie sauce of frivolity. High on opinion, low on evidence. Much like our beloved PA. Even poor old PA has spiralled down this particular S-bend over the past decade... but that's a topic for another thread, lest this post be pruned away into the vortex.

I blame google. With it, anyone with half an hour to spare can pass themselves off as an expert, and we buy into it. But google is not research, a web search does not provide expertise. It provides only shallow factoids, many of them untrue or dumbed down for the lowest common denominator. It's not worth printing this Wikipedia journalism that dominates the blogosphere and has found it's way into the mainstream media.

"I work in a corrupted profession" - Nick Davies

The rot has set in, globally, and irredeemably. The only cure is to raze it and start again. And we will get what we need in that regard. Newspaper after newspaper collapse and the media giants who once strode the earth are beginning to count their pennies and wonder if there's still money to be made in online porn. Cable news giants like CNN and MSNBC are losing viewers and losing money as their audience turn to The Comedy Channel and Google for their serious journalism (or worse still, Fox News). The industry will collapse, it's not too big to fail. But with it will come a chance to build it again. A chance to build an industry that will attract journalists who are the smartest people, not the prettiest people. One that won't be distracted by a royal wedding or other such fluff, and whose sources and topics are more credible and relevant than Shane Warne's latest twitter.

“The smarter the journalists are, the better off society is. [For] to a degree, people read the press to inform themselves-and the better the teacher, the better the student body.” - Warren Buffett

[Jovial Monk]

I have put a link to Mattus’ reply on my board.

I don’t think he said much that I didn’t say but did say it entertainingly and eruditely.

I do think the media has a problem, dead tree media slowly dying, convergence of TV/Radio/Computers etc but their main problem is their content is crap. And that, I think, is the fault of proprietors more than journalists, or maybe it is the fault of the consumers of the media?