Not whining, Complaining

Niki Savva’s article in The Australian (Commentary 12, 8/11/12) is a scraping of the bottom of the barrel in an attempt to concoct a story.  You would have to be a talented spinner to turn an Obama election victory in the US into an attack on Julia Gillard, and spin she does.

Obama wins…(leap to) Niki Savva relates the story of Obama’s response to the comments of his paster, Jeremiah Wright…4 years ago!....as a dignified performance, and then compares his response to that difficulty…and his handling of his being a half black, half white man, to Julia Gillard’s response to Tony Abbott’s misogyny (of the “prejudiced against women” variety: Oxford & Macquarie Dictionaries).

Note the extraordinary leaps and odd segues:  Obama wins the election…Obama is a good guy…(leap & odd segue)) he gives a dignified response to a problem he had 4 years ago…(big leap & odd segue) Julia Gillard’s response to Tony Abbott’s misogyny was not dignified, according to Savva.  

How about this: once upon a time there was a good man, any man will do, but let’s make him topical, so we’ll choose Obama.  We will talk about how good he is so that when we then say somebody else is bad it will ring true.  A good spinner plays on the natural polarity of humans: black and white, good and evil.

So there is this good man, yadda yadda yadda, now look at this bad woman!  

Obama was dignified in response to attacks on his race, so who is this Julia Gillard to complain about attacks on her sex?  She should learn “that it’s about winning not whining”.  This is ridiculous on two levels.  First, Julia Gillard IS a winner.  She has won an election, gazumped (run circles around) Tony Abbott in negotiating a minority government, run that government for two years in the face of unrelenting attacks from the opposition and News Limited.  Suffered with dignity years of misogyny from shock jocks like Alan Jones, and has survived this and through great leadership and astounding performance has managed to turn the polls around to be within a winning shot of a Labor third term.  Dear Niki Savva, the woman is a winner.

And after suffering with dignity for two years she eventually turns on Abbott and calls him out.  It is a magnificent performance and the whole world applauds.  And Savva writes this miserly hateful response.

Next bullshit comment in the article: “Nothing stopped Gillard getting where she always wanted to be, not her sex, not even a prime minister yet to complete his first term”(my italics).  This is the sort of claptrap that writers at The Australian sneak into their sentences.  It is a blatant lie because under our great system of government prime minister’s do not own a set term as prime minister.  There is no “his first term”.  By describing it this way the intention is to give the impression that something improper occurred, when in truth something very proper occurred: it is good that parties can change the leader when they realise that they have got a dud.    Good for the party, good for the country.  All of these “stabbing in the back” metaphors are turning a serious discussion of our political economy into crime fiction, film noir.  This is grossly irresponsible.  Kevin Rudd and Kevin Rudd alone was the author of his demotion.  Who becomes a prime minister, with all the power and advantage that that position holds, and then loses it so spectacularly?   

“Nothing stopped Gillard getting where she always wanted to be, not her sex…”.   Gender may not stop some women, Niki, but what if it has stopped many others?  How is it right for Martin Luther King to complain about prejudice inherent in racism, but not Julia Gillard to complain about the prejudice in sexism?  Was Dr King whining too?  Should he have shut up?

Of course this is all just concocted to attack Julia Gillard, it has no logic or consistency whatsoever.

The last 500 words in her article are just a rant, a sneering smear attack on everything that labor does or says.  Every tiny irrelevant comment, every decision, every position, every person in the party.  It is a roaring hatefest, a glimpse into the heart of darkness at The Australian.  You’ve got to read it to believe it. 

Not Whining, Complaining 2

We have grown up with two types of newspaper, the tabloid and the broadsheet.  The tabloid is seen as a simplistic and sensational rag that is for a mass market of a relatively uneducated and unsophisticated readership.  The broadsheet is seen as the more intelligent and sophisticated newspaper that is read by the minority educated, professional, political and establishment readership.

As we know the paper size of about 36 x 25cm for the tabloid, and about 75 x 60cm for the broadsheet is the general rule, but ultimately only symbolic of the content.  The exception to the rule has often been where a sophisticated broadsheet style newspaper has adopted the tabloid size for convenience.  Good examples are The Guardian in London and The Financial Review in Australia.  I haven't been aware of any examples of the opposite case, until now.

Reading The Australian and talking to many of its readers over the years I have come to realise that it is a deceptive product.  It represents itself as being a broadsheet in the traditional mould, but its sophistication, to the extent that it has any, is in its duplicity.  The Australian is a hybrid, a cross between a tabloid and a broadsheet.  Its tablarity is riddled like a cancer through its political and economic articles, features and editorials.

The Australian specialises in a sinister sort of bias that is so concocted that it could only be the product of an organizational policy.  The “style’ is utilized by its team of hacks who are on message, and have obviously been employed for their propensity for this type of partisan writing.  The stamp of proprietors and editors are obvious, both in their choice of staff and in their enforcement of both the house “style” and the partisan view.

There is hardly a word, a sentence, a heading that is not slanted to the purpose.  The extent of this is so practiced as to have become an art form for some of the chief perpetrators.  Some articles are rancid with subtle slants, slurs and slanders.  Others are just blatant shock jockeying. Recent articles on climate change, the NBN, the Fair Work Act, Julian Assange and refugee policy have been such claptrap that they are embarrassing.  The Republicans in the US have just lost the unlosable election due to this same contempt for the electorate.  Isn’t it time for an authentic, intelligent and genuine conservative voice to be heard?  I am sure that all sides of politics would welcome that.  Instead we get this hateful incendiary pseudo-debate, pseudo-science, pseudo-economics.  The national dialogue is reduced, corrupted by this Limited News.

This would probably not be a worry if it was not our only national broadsheet.  But it is and it is a curse on the nation.

And so to the article by Niki Savva on Nov 8, 2012.  

I talked about the bias and slant and partisan writing that permeates The Australian.  The other shock jock practise is to twist almost any issue or event into an attack on Julia Gillard.  The paper often has several headlines with associated cartoons that attack the Prime Minister and put her in a bad light.  And the cartoons are simply disgusting, portraying her as monstrous, ugly, and zombie like.  This is the evil News Limited, the same one we saw in London, the same one we see in America, the one we see here.  The deranged hand of the long long reign of the psychopath, Rupert Murdoch, is all but apparent.  The long reign that has had the time to corrupt this large part of the Forth Estate, root and branch.

So Niki Savva tries, ridiculously and improbably, to turn the victory of Barak Obama into a criticism of Julia Gillard.  It’s absurd, but counts as journalism at The Australian.

Suffice to say that it is a silly, infantile piece.  The 1,000 word article is written so that, and this is her brilliant  “thesis”, she can call the Prime Minister a whiner because she complained about Tony Abbott’s misogyny.  Hooly Dooly

Unwelcome Opinion

Chris Kenny's opinion piece in today's Weekend Australian (Inquirer p.22) can be summed up as, "I don't want a Labor government, I want a Liberal one".  Ok Chris, good to know.

Of course, to say that in about 1,000 words you have to either go on a rant or just talk meaningless rubbish.  He appears to have opted for some of each.

The headline is, "Early Poll is Labor's Best Chance of Saving the Brand".  Gosh, like all shock jockery every line is pregnant with assumptions stated as given truth.  It might be convenient for Chris Kenny to talk about political parties as brands, but this is a bad idea and contributes to the disembodiment of the body politic.  It's funny though, I have never heard of the Liberal party being referred to as a brand.  Is it Mr Kenny's assumption that the Liberal party is an unquestioned superior presence, born to rule, not to be reduced to a brand?  It now occurs to me that the real target here is not so much the body politic as the Labor Party.  Chris Kenny seeks to reduce that great party to a brand, to belittle it.

But now that he has it as a mere brand he can talk in corporatist terms and discuss its success, like Bega cheese.  Next, the assumption is that the "brand" needs saving, so implicit in the headline is an assumed truth that there is something wrong with Labor.  We are still on the headline and we have a completely biased piece of work.  Nothing wrong with being a conservative writer, even a polemicist, but we deserve intelligent political economic arguments, not cant and spin.  But what can we expect when he raises the corporatist language of "brand" but an advertising agents subtle persuasions.

The problem here is that by reducing important institutions to a "brand" he loses his own credibility, he hurts his own "brand".  He already works for a company, News Ltd, whose actual brand has nosedived into the dirt.  Now he sullies his own "brand" as a political journalist.  Consequently, I don't reach for the paper to read Chris Kenny's intelligent commentary.  I know, like MacDonald's, that I will get the same burger every time.

The sub-heading on his piece is "The only losers in an election would be those MP's grimly hanging on".  In view of the fact that later in the article he says that he expects the Coalition to win, the MP's "grimly" hanging on would obviously be Labor MP's.  So Labor members of parliament "grimly" hang on to their seats?  They aren't respected members of parliament elected to represent their constituents, they are reduced to desperado's who grimly hang on.  I suppose they grimly wake up in the morning, and grimly have breakfast, kissing their wives and husbands grimly goodbye too?  This type of dialogue is such execrable nonsense, actually meaningless, and doesn't deserve to be printed in a national broadsheet.   

Mr Kenny's desire for an early election is simply him wanting a Coalition government.  He is simply saying that he wants an election.  He writes an article full of hollow arguments why he thinks that it would be great.  Good for him.  But it is not for him to argue that our political system should be rearranged to make him happy.  The next election is in 2013.  We already think that a three year political term maybe too short.  And now Kenny wants a two year term, because he is unhappy with the last democratic vote.   How is that the subject of a newspaper article, unless it is ruse to attack the Gillard Government.  And what follows confirms exactly that.

Paragraph 5: "A pre-budget poll might...capture what sense of momentum Labor has been able to muster".  Why would this not be written as follows: "A pre-budget poll might be an option now that the Labor party has risen in the polls".  I find again and again in the Australian that not a sentence is left without a negative slant on it, either subtle or blatant.  I have detailed hundreds of instances in this blog alone.  It is without doubt a heavily biased newspaper, a newspaper whose staff and editors obviously work hard to skew the message against Labour at nearly every turn.   It is difficult for the casual critic to demonstrate this as many instances, on their own, seem needless to complain about.  But when you document the thousands of instances of the slanting and skewing, across sentences, headlines, subheadings, paragraphs, and whole articles, the bias is patently obvious.  So a resurgence in the polls becomes "able to muster".  And this in the context where there is a disapproval vote for Tony Abbott of a massive 60%.  He is barely "able to muster" a citizen who likes him.  But, of course, in News Ltd articles it is Labor who has to muster,  Uggghh, to muster, to struggle.  They are good at this finding the right words for the subliminal bias.  Very good at it, like they have special classes and a lot of practice.  Then this: "Polls suggest the ALP primary vote has been lifted from the carpet".  Why is this not:  "Polls have put the ALP in a position where they could begin to think about winning the next election".  Or, "Polls have the ALP back in contention".  Or, "Polls have shown that the ALP is now closing on the Coalition in support". 

It's like he wants to have the ALP literally on the carpet.  He misses them being on the carpet.  He will not let a sentence pass that doesn't have a negative slant, a phrase or word associated with Labor that suggests negativity.  So their poll numbers don't rise (positive, which is the fact being mentioned), they lift "from the carpet" (bloodied?, tattered? in bad shape?).  The subliminal messages are piled on, one after the other until the reader feels the disgust rising in them towards Labor.  A discussion for another place but it has been well proven that there is a substantial proportion of the population who are heavily influenced by the press they read.   This stuff works, which is why Rupert Murdoch continues to own these unprofitable papers.  They don't earn him money, they earn him power, which he then uses to influence policy to support his profit making businesses.  This is not conspiracy, it is the business model talked about by many media commentators.

This disgust built up by the Murdoch press then gives licence to the Coalition to talk, incredibly, about an "illegitimate government" which is, in a democratic system, a contradiction in terms, and a very irresponsible thing to say. In fact, you would actually have to be a fascist to say that, but say it they do.  When you call a democratically elected government illegitimate you are holding the electorate in contempt.



 

The Australian attacks industry colleagues - again

Oxford Dictionary: Misogynist: a person who hates, dislikes, or is prejudiced against women.
Macquarie Dictionary: Misogynist: [the definition includes] a person who has an entrenched prejudice against women.

Tony Abbott:

1.  “I think it would be folly to expect that women will ever dominate or even approach equal representation in a large number of areas simply because their aptitudes, abilities and interests are different for physiological reasons".

2. "But what if men are by philosophy or temperament more adapted to exercise authority or to issue command?"

Even if he was right then that would be a statement that was needless to say.  Therefore, if stated, it is more a belief.  What he is saying is that this is the role that women should have.  If it is his belief then, right or wrong, he intends to bring it about via his public policies.  From that perspective it could easily be seen as a prejudice against women.  On that criteria he is a misogynist.  Or, he has pre-judged that woman are not suited to executive function.  Is that not a general prejudice against women in at least one important area?

In my experience there are many men who are not suited to leadership or executive roles.  Could it be possibly true that both men and women are suited to positions of authority in about the same proportions?  Has Tony contemplated this, or is he just prejudiced against woman taking leadership positions?

I don't think there is any evidence that he hates woman, he just loves them in their place.  Although he may have come to hate the most powerful woman in the land, especially as she took the Prime Ministership from him by bettering him in the game of power, authority and command.  And he has been happy to let the sanctioned militia's of shock jockery do his misogynistic work.

Christian Kerr's article in this weekend's Australian is so biased and obviously so that he should be embarrassed to have written it.  He attempts to beat up a scoop type of narrative around a freelance journalist who did the "hard investigative work" that proved that Tony Abbott was not a misogynist.

The great discovery by this freelancer, Derek Parker, was that Tony Abbott does charity work for a women's refuge.  On this basis he accuses the rest of the press gallery of being lazy.  Does Mr Kerr think that we are all children, or simpletons?  The fact that Mr Abbott does charity work for a women's refuge does not at all prove that he is not a misogynist.  We all know that many of the super wealthy avoid $100mil in tax, then give $10mil to charity and are hailed as great philanthropists.  This works a treat as it is very hard to argue that the new wing of the children's hospital shouldn't have been built, except that if the great philanthropist was not one of the biggest thieves in the land 10 hospitals would have a new wing.

Charity is often used as a PR exercise by those who give.  Notice that most large companies negotiate PR benefits if not outright advertising when they give to charities.  It used to be that true charity could only be considered genuine if it was anonymous.

Political operators are famous for double speak and duplicitous titles; consider titles like National Socialists in Germany in the 30's and 40's and "Peoples Parties" in totalitarian regimes.  Politicians also like to wrap themselves in symbols of moral goodness, like Franco and his 40 year dictatorship's close relationship with the Catholic Church - also the religion of Abbott interestingly.

Narcissists are known for being masters of manipulation.  It is very common for them to claim a greater moral goodness than others, often "proved" by ostensible good works in the community - and narcissists are more highly represented in business and politics than in the rest of the population. I am not accusing Mr Abbott of being a narcissist, just making the point that charitable work in the community, whilst welcome in itself, often does not necessarily shed light on the character or the giver.

The press gallery had more than enough evidence from Mr Abbott's own history and comments, that he had particular views about woman.  It is conservatives like Mr Abbott, more than anyone, that make much of old sayings like, "You are judged by the company you keep", and nobody has any doubt that his good friend Alan Jones has serious questions to answer about his particularly vicious attacks on this our first female Prime Minister.  The press gallery are not lazy on this issue Mr Kerr, its just that they have heard enough.

It may be that Tony Abbott supports and visits a women's refuge because it sits comfortably with his patriarchal view of the world, it may be that it does not threaten his view of women as weak and abused and needy, it is a situation where he can be the masculine hero, and ride in and save them.  It may be the perfect cover, politically, for an entrenched prejudice against woman.  His real prejudice may not be against woman who know their place but against woman who venture further than the traditional roles.    

Kerr quotes Parker as saying that "it is impossible to reconcile Abbott's involvement with [charity] with Labor's claims that he is some sort of misogynist".  Not impossible at all.

The Weekend Australian 8/9/12

On page 4 of this Weekend Australian there is an article that is blatantly biased and factually wrong; in fact what the article says happened, didn't happen.  The article makes up a untrue version of the events in order to facilitate the reporting of it in a biased way.

The headline is "IR shield removed for union officials".  It is referring to a High Court ruling.  The ruling did not alter the law, it simple ruled on the facts of the case, but the article implies ("IR shield") that the High Court has changed the Fair Work Act.  It hasn't.

The first sentence of the article continues to develop the journalist's fabricated version of the story: "Union officials will no longer be an untouchable class in the workplace, after the High Court overturned a ruling that had given them special legal protections under Labor's industrial relations regime".

To begin with, the partisanship, unprofessionalism and blatant bias is not hidden with this phrase, "an untouchable class".  If you are reporting a front section news story as a professional journalist you do not write the story as if you were a member of a right wing think-tank.

Now this is is our only national newspaper being factually untrue on page 4 of the high selling weekend edition.  It reports that the High Court overturned a ruling that had given union members "special legal protections".  But the Federal Court's ruling had not given union members "special legal protections".  The Australian Newspaper, its editor and journalist is knowingly obfuscating this point with half truths and omissions.

The Federal Court ruled on the facts in a particular case, it did not "give" unionists "special legal protections".  The Fair Work Act that gives them legal protections from being discriminated against because of their union activities has not been changed.  The court took the view that Dr Harvey, the employer, had breached the Fair Work Act. What can be said is that the Federal Court took a broader view of the particular clause in the Act, and the High Court took a narrower view. The relevant law, part of the Fair Work Act, prevents employers from mistreating employees because they are union members.  The High Court has simply ruled that the employer in this case did not do that.  In another case it may rule differently, the Act has not changed.

The article goes on with its obvious bias by quoting a member of an employer group but not a member of a union. Extraordinary.  It also quotes Eric Abetz from the coalition calling unionists an "untouchable class", the same phrase used by the journalist at the beginning of the article, written as reportage, as if a formal and objective way to describe union members.  This only helps to confirm the view that The Australian operates as a defacto arm of the coalition's media unit.

I will finish with a quote from Rebecca Brooks, former Chief Editor of a News Limited paper in the UK, taken from text messages sent to David Cameron, the leader of the conservatives in Brittan: "I'm so rooting for you tomorrow", and, "...professionally we're definitely in this together".  This is the same news Limited that owns The Australian.  Why does anyone think it's any different here?

The Weekend Australia 25-8-12

Ok, what have we got today?  Surprise, there are several rabid anti-government “get Gillard” right wing attack pieces.  Let’s have a look.

The Inquirer, page 14, on the AWU Workplace Reform Association.

A long puff piece by a certain Hedley Thomas ostensibly about the media being tamed and silenced by Julia Gillard.  No really.  Also that the media has self-censored over just this particular issue.  Yeah, seriously.

There’s a whole lot of heavy language in the piece but there does not appear to be a story.  The headline is “Media’s shameful silence”, and the sub-heading is “The response to new information about Julia Gillard was a disgrace” (I think he means that the Prime Ministers  magnificent 1.3 hour smack down of Headley and his type on Friday was too much for him to bear).

He is factually false in this piece.  He does know better but a lawyer who is instructed to prepare documents to establish an entity is not the promoter or “creator” of that entity.  The then lawyer, Julia Gillard, did not “create” the entity in question.  Mentioning that the promoter or creator was her then boyfriend is proper journalism, but that fact of course does not make her guilty of anything, especially as his union was a client of her firm and he an office holder of the union.  Taking instructions from him to do legal work, therefore, would not appear to be unreasonable.  

Being a “Labor law firm” undertaking legal work for many unions, of whom the ALP is the political arm, there is as everybody knows less of a separation between the firm, its union clients and the ALP than would exist in normal circumstances between a law firm and its clients, except with the “Liberal/business law firms” on the other side of politics.  So she can hardly be crucified for knowing that these entities were typically set up as re-election funds.  

But she cannot be associated with any subsequent wrongdoing by others who were in control of the entity in question without evidence, of which there does not appear to be any, and none has been unearthed during the 17 years that many have been trying.

Hedley actually goes on in the article criticising all journalists who have not joined him and The Australian is his howling daily hate campaign against Julia Gillard.  He is angry about this so calls it “shameful silence” and “a disgrace”.  Maybe all the other senior journalists in Australia are just more professional and don’t see themselves as a branch of the Liberal Party’s media unit.

Headley’s whole excitable investigative hunt on this one has seemed to have fizzled.  I get the feeling that Headley has fizzled before, a long time ago, and that he has found security of tenure in shock jockery at News Limited, a known refuge for many of the lesser lights of journalism.

We also have a front page piece by David Crowe that is really quite strange.  The whole article is just a rehash of the soap operatic script being run by The Australian.

It starts with an odd and contradictory, indeed confusing, series of sentences:  “Julian Gillard didn’t need Artem Naumov’s help on Thursday but it certainly came in handy”.  What?  This guy had nothing to do with anything, he just wandered in past security.

But look at the internal dynamics of the sentence: Julia Gillard didn’t  need the help of a random nobody.  Well no, but Crowe is presumably saying this because she didn’t need his (the intruder’s) help.  Yeah, no, the prime Minister didn’t need the help of a stray guy who wandered in.  Hmmm.  “…but it certainly came in handy”.  Hmmm, yeah.  No.

Paragraph 2: “If Labor loyalists are lucky, the affair might one day be remembered only for the odd intruder…”.  If I was a lucky Labor Loyalist I would rather remember that the Prime Minister put to rest the campaign against her by The Australian on this matter.  But hey!

Then this in the next paragraph, “…the security breach became an unexpected bonus for a Labor team…”.  Jesus!  For fucks sake!  This is the front page of our only national newspaper.   The Australian runs an attack campaign against the Prime Minister and she is forced to give a press conference at which she brilliantly smacks down these hateful bastards, and the front page is written by a nutter who insists on talking about a guy who walked in past security. But worse: he is projecting that others have this as their main concern as well!!  He is telling the public what the “Labor team” and “Labor loyalists” are thinking!  What is he claire voyant?  This newspaper is a pathetic.

Another article, on page 18 of The Inquirer, by Brendon O’Neill, about Julian Assange.

This article is just plain stupid.

“…it is not the war on WikiLeaks that is damaging the free exchange of ideas and the health of our societies; it is wikiLeaks itself”.  Really?

WikiLeaks and its supporters “need to grow up”.  Gosh.  It is a myth that WikiLeaks exposed the “dirty laundry” of the powerful.  By “dirty laundry” I guess he means the war crime of purposefully murdering a whole bunch of innocent journalists and others from a helicopter gunship?  Glad he’s downgraded it to dirty laundry.

O’Neill talks about “…the bizarre ideals of transparency…”.   He then actually says this: “WikiLeaks is…the [result] of officialdoms own inability to keep a lid on info…”.  Ok, ok….no, I don’t know what to say about that.

Later in the piece: “…WikiLeaks makes a virtue of modern institutional decay…glorifying it as “whistleblowing” [his italics]”.  No Brendon, they don’t have any policies on the promotion of “institutional decay”, they do say that they want to strengthen institutions by exposing them when they abuse their power.  It is you who thinks whistleblowing causes what you call institutional decay.  The actual fact is that societies that lack transparency are more likely to be corrupt, and suffer from “institutional decay”, if you like.   So it’s that exact oppose of what you say.

He conflates whistleblowing with leaking.  He argues that whistleblowing makes politicians “less honest”.  He says that “transparency begets suspicion”.  He says that, “Even the Vatican…is being rocked by a leaking scandal…”.  Shock horror!

I don’t know if the editor of The Australian really had the time to look at this one but it sounds like fascist rantings.  But perhaps he did?

Then we got another climate denier article.  Yep, they’re still at it.

Joanne Nova, Inquirer, page 15.  The whole article is rubbish.  Here’s a good bit:

“Sure, the opinion of a climate scientist is worth more than the opinion of a physicist, but is each climate scientist worth more than 420 other scientist’s ?  Who knows?  The answer to that is that it’s a stupid question”.   What can I say,  I agree!

Now to the EDITORIAL.  Yes, the opinion of the editors of our only national newspaper.

On the weeks Julia Gillard issue.  The editor first castigates other journalists for not doing their job and preaches to them about how they are letting down democracy.  I just coughed up my lozenge.

The editorial then describes a series of innocuous events: “…she had established a union…fund” [correction, she did not “establish anything, she was the lawyer who did the paperwork], “…she resigned…”, etc, but then says that, “This is all particularly controversial because…” other people did bad things.  But you see, it’s an article about Julia Gillard and the word “controversial” has been used close to her name.  Get it?

Then this: “We do not know what other action she took, if any, to alert authorities”.  Why was this sentence written?  We do not know what other action…anything about anything.  We do not know.  Not we know do.  Know not we do.  Why?  What?  Again, a subtle slur.  What is she hiding?

The editorial ends with another call to arms to other journalists to get on board the hate train.  It castigates again those who it sees as tardy and even names them, as does Headley Thomas in his piece.  Barry Cassidy: bad, Michelle Grattan: bad, etc. 

What News Limited is got going here is both a business model and a partisan political campaign.  Putting some balanced and left wing articles in the paper does not justify incendiary rubbish in the majority attack articles.  The small number of balanced articles are obviously put there to create deniability, a defence in the face of exposure of abject bias.

News Limited is abusing the privilege of having a licence to publish newspapers.  It has a very important position in our political system and in society.  It is playing cynically, selfishly and loose with the Forth Estate.  They just love the rotten stuff that they produce, belittling the national conversation for financial and political gain.   

Headley Thomas boo hooed the description of News as the evil empire.  But it is actually an evil empire, it really is.  It is a colossal criminal corporation who trashed all decency in their practices in the UK and has destroyed decent journalism in the US.  It has contributed to the decline of civil society in the US.  Thank God the British system was able to rise to the challenge and bring it to account, at least for the time being.   It is also dragging down decent debate and dialogue in Australia.  

The "Australian" 13-8-12 Article Two

There are still 4 odd hours left in Monday August 13, 2012 and it will not close without a critique of another article published today in The Australian newspaper.  For a critique on a front page article see post below.

Now to the two articles in today's Australian on last weeks announcement of changes to the NBN budget.  The first one in the news reporting section, on page 3, starts with the headline, "Change to NBN rollout a $1.5bn hit".  Again, why is it a "hit"?  The change is $1.5bn in extra capital costs to extend connections to all houses rather than just those who have opted for a connection.  This is a business decision and is expected to lead to an increase in sign-ups and returns.

Articles on the NBN are under a running sub-heading called "NBN Watch, how your billions are being spent".  "Watch" is a loaded term, and is known more in situations like "Cult Watch", and "Neighbourhood Watch" and suggests that what is being watched is bad.  Why do all of these suspect associations put me in mind of the phrase, subliminal message? An objective report would read more like, "NBN Observed, the pros and cons of the largest infrastructure project in Australian history".

To write, "How your billions are being spent" is loaded.  "How your money is being spent" would be more balanced.  "Billions" is small minded, obvious and biased.  You know as well as I know that the hidden meaning is, "Billions are being wasted", when in fact it matters not how large the budget is, what matters is, is it a fair and reasonable amount to build an NBN, and, how high is the return.  But News Limited is biased and only wants to focus on cost, to put the NBN in a negative light.  It is not an objective observer, it is not fulfilling its role as a member of the forth estate, but is partisan on a global basis, from Fox News in the US, to Phone taping in the UK.  We are supposed to automatically accept that billions must mean waste, and feel like a dill if we say that it might just be a large national infrastructure project that costs a lot, like the railways or the electricity network or the water system or the sewage or the roads (all the recent tunnels alone cost about $40bn), or the schools or the hospitals or the mining projects or skyscrapers (the Crown Casino on its own cost $2bn to build).

Note these two consecutive sentence paragraphs: "...Mr Quigley (NBN Co chief) said the cost of that change was not 'billions, but it's not a few hundred million either'".  Then this: "But speaking...yesterday, the NBN chief...confirmed that the change could cost as much as $1.5bn".  Am I missing something here?  $1.5bn sits quite happily between "Not billions but...not a few hundred million...".  So why the "But" and the "confirmed", and the "as much as"?  The piece leaves the impression that somehow he has been caught out miss-quoting the amount.  This is subtle, spurious, confected and wrong.  It leaves you feeling petty to point out such small irregularities, but The Australian publishes many articles that consist of a series of skewed impressions that add up to outright bias, that's how they are getting away with it, so these small irregularities have to be pointed out, one after the other.

In this and in another article in the past couple of days The Australian has used the terminology, "opt out" to describe the new NBN policy. It has given the impression that a householder is somehow being pushed into signing up, that they have to take action to stop the connection.  There is no opting out.  The new "drop build" policy is simply that all houses will be connected to the NBN.  Like electricity a householder would have to choose to connect and contacts the company to do so.  The only difference is that now, if a householder does choose to connect, the process will be faster and simpler as the fibre optics are already running to the house.  They do not have to "opt out" of anything and for The Australian to say that they do is dishonest.

Another thing The Australian does is obfuscates the good news.  It is very good at this.  Whether positioning it at the end of the article because they know that a lot of the readers do not get to the end of the article, or wedging it in between bad news, or diluting it in a complex sentence.  For example, in this article we get this in paragraph number eight: "While NBN Co expects the new build method to increase the number of people who connect to the NBN, the more expensive practice has been cited as one of the key reasons for a $1.4bn increase in the capital costs of the 10-year infrastructure project, to $37.4bn".

What we have in that sentencing is the swamping of the good news with verbiage, a change in terminology, and a long and a hard to understand sentence.  The only time that the positive in this story is stated is in this sentence, that the NBN expects that by changing the build method a lot more customers will sign up, thereby increasing the return on investment to taxpayers.  But that message is dissolved in this confusing sentence, and is immediately followed by more of the bad, the cost.  And the terminology changes: all of a sudden we have  the "build drop" becoming "more expensive practice".  How is it now a "practice".  This seems strange, and is confusing.

The second article on this issue occurs in the commentary section of the paper, on page 12, and is written by Henry Ergas.  This is where The Australian, who cannot be decent in the news section, goes all out and just becomes the opposition.  The headline is, "PM IN ANOTHER FINE GOLD-PLATED MESS", and the subtitle is, "Senator Conroy and his leader are tangled up in cable, poles and wires".  The article then begins by comparing them to Laurel and Hardy.  This guy cannot restrain himself.  Seriously, three negative, clichéd analogies before he has even got started, and a large unflattering cartoon of the Prime Minister and the Senator accompanying the article to illustrate the Laurel and Hardy theme.  The rest of the article purports to be a rebuff to the Senator saying that if Malcolm Turnbull were to have built the Sydney harbour Bridge it would only have two lanes.  But he goes on a long discourse into the history of the planning and construction of the bridge and does not rebuff anything.  He then just ends the article by stating that the NBN is expensive.  Again, just mentioning the costs seems to be all that it takes to call it a contribution to the debate.

I have not done any research on it and I don't know if anyone could predict it but what will the benefits be of an NBN?  I reckon, off the top of my head that it would be like building a national railway network.  You know that it is going to assist several industries a lot, and many a bit, and some not at all.  You know that by having much of the population using high speed internet it will affect the high-tech culture of the country.  You know that there will be many interlinked effects and economic multiplier effects, but nobody can really estimate with certainty the full effects of the National System.  It may be a very good national investment.  $40bn may actually be a reasonable spend.  The Australian does not know any better, so why the constant denigrating of the proposal?