Quick request for The Australian and other News Ltd publications: in your enthusiastic ongoing campaign against the new ABC News 24 channel – could you guys please include an acknowledgment at the each such one-sided diatribe acknowledging that you work for an organisation with a strong stake in the competition? You know, just for the sake of disclosure, openness, and to give those of your readers who haven’t clicked about the conflict of interest an understanding of where you’re coming from.

Cheers. Read more »

Here’s a fresh thread for non-campaign discussion. I’m finding Mad Mondays in The Australian are a bit disrupted these days — instead of running weekly, Glenn Milne and David Burchell seem to have been alternating in recent weeks, while Milne is even popping up over at The Drum these days. But Burchell doesn’t disappoint today — and kudos to Larvatus Prodeo for declaring him the winner of the culture wars:

Judges were impressed with his ability to entirely ignore the irony of indulging in a bit of elite bashing while simultaneously displaying his great erudition and comprehensive knowledge of the plays of Aristophanes.

I can only add that it seems a touch ironic when one’s regularly-published opinion column in The Australian is the vehicle for an attack on: Read more »

So we have a new publicly-funded 24 hour News channel. New opinionists, new journo combinations, new leaks bashing Kevin Rudd. (WHY. WON’T. THAT. MAN. STAY. DOWN. NO. MATTER. WHAT. WE. DO!)

How are you finding it? What you expected? Strengths/weaknesses compared with what you’re used to? I’m just glad to see they’ve finally found them some desks.

PS To those who were wondering, it appears that #abcnews24 has beaten #abc24 as the Twitter tag of choice, even though it’s 4 characters longer and stupid.

This has already had some coverage in another thread, but I want to make note of it. Andrew Bolt seems to assume the gender gap in the polls exists because women are foolish enough to vote for a woman, purely based on her gender:

Women vote for the skirt, and not the bumbling politician in it

This election will be decided by women voting for a woman, regardless of how good she’ll actually be Read more »

I’m not going to get into a big debate about the incredibly hypocritical hysteria over the ALP/Green preference deal (save to point out that it’s going to be highly amusing throwing Abbott’s lines back in his face in a few weeks when the Libs and every other party announce their preference deals) – but I did want to use this morning’s coverage as a retort to the fatuous idea that the Greens get an “easy” ride from the national media. Read more »

This site owes its existence to the sheer amount of flimsy reasoning and evidence-deprived political arguments that clog up our media — especially, but not limited to, the opinion pages of the major newspapers and their online blogs. Now that an election has been called, we can expect that amount to increase by an order of magnitude — and it’s more important than ever that we call attention to the flawed work, wherever we can.

That’s the aim of the Punditocracy threads. Just as the regular open threads are a place to link to, highlight and pick apart anything you find in our media, these threads are for discussing as much of the poor punditry as we can manage. If it hasn’t already been covered in a post by me, Dave or Jeremy (or a guest author), then share it here — link to it, tell us what’s wrong with it, and discuss what others have posted.

I’ll make a start with some commentary on Fran Kelly’s interviewing style over the fold.

Read more »

It’s time to kick off the weekend, with speculation all over the place that tomorrow Julia Gillard will call the election for August 28. If she doesn’t, then we should get a respite for the next week, with the Governor-General set to the country over the weekend. Read more »

How important are details? Do a few little errors here and there make a difference to a story or should we be more interested in ‘the vibe’ of the thing? Is there a scale of inaccuracy that can be used to judge a story based on whether the mistake is central or incidental?

What set me thinking about this were two simple errors in a Daily Telegraph story about the Liberal Party’s new candidate for the western Sydney seat of Lindsay.

John Howard took Labor’s heartland of western Sydney in 1996 with a string of “battler candidates” such as working Penrith mum Jackie Kelly.

She lost the seat in the 2007 election following a scandal involving racist Liberal party campaign material. Read more »

Much like last week it seems that we’ll be hearing plenty about asylum seekers in the national media this week. For those of you interested in some of the facts surrounding this issue I’d suggest that the Parliamentary Library’s Background Note on Asylum Seekers is worth taking the time to read.

Have at it.

Andrew Bolt is grabbing at whatever snippets of information he can to try to downplay the evidence of global warming: Read more »

It seems like it was only yesterday that New South Wales’ poor imitation of the NT News, the Daily Telegraph, was campaigning to have the NSW Labor government unconstitutionally sacked by the Governor. But things have moved on in Sin City, Kristina Keneally has risen to a level of popularity that has amazed everyone who can see the toxic mess that she leads, and the Terrorgraph needs something new to whip its readers into a frenzy. With Kevin Rudd out of the picture where can the little paper turn? To the tabloid favourite of course, crime.

Read more »

Whilst I’m sure the Greens greatly appreciate the boost to their credibility granted by the implacable hostility of Andrew Bolt, and far be it for me to discourage his efforts to drive progressive voters to them through reverse psychology – but do his attacks have to be quite so stupid?

ENOUGH’S enough. If you’re really this keen to vote Green in the state election, why not prove you’re serious?

Why not live the life you apparently want the Greens to inflict on the rest of us?

Go turn off your own lights first. Kill your fridge. Cook your roast over a solar-powered candle.

Then go to work and turn off the machines. Junk the computer. Tell your hospital to switch off the machines that go “bing”. And harness some donkeys to pull our trains…

Fine, if that’s what you want for yourself. But, please, before you vote to inflict this on the rest of us, first try living as the Greens prescribe and see if it truly suits even high-minded you. Read more »

Let’s kick off another weekend — a pretty cold and miserable one around these parts. I hope some of you are getting some sunshine.

The weekend political shows can be expected to discuss the rejigged mining tax, as well as more generally looking at how Prime Minister Gillard’s first full week has gone. Of course, there’s always a chance we’ll know the election date before the weekend is done — if not, I’d imagine we’ll continue to hear plenty about possible election timing.

This Sunday’s Insiders line-up has Barrie interviewing Martin “Marn” Ferguson; the panel is Andrew Bolt, Malcolm Farr and Phil Coorey; and Talking Pictures will have a special tribute to SMH political journalist Peter Bowers (Mike’s father), who passed away this week.

We’ll add other line-ups as they come to hand.

Oh, good grief.

Tony Abbott makes an announcement about mental health funding, trying to capitalise on the fact that the government has (deservedly, in my opinion) come under heavy criticism for failing to develop mental health policies and allocate more funds to the area.

The Punch runs an article from Dr Rosanna Capolingua, former president of the Australian Medical Association, commending Abbott and calling for a response from the government.

Problems:

Read more »

I’ve noted before that Andrew Bolt launches attacks on the “balance” of Q&A based on his claims about the panel’s ideologies and not based on the diversity of views that shows up if you, you know, actually watch the show. The last two weeks provide an interesting contrast.

Read more »

Let’s launch another week with a fresh open thread. As always, links to the latest threads can be found in the sidebar, and you’re free to use the open thread to discuss anything not being covered in our other posts.

To start your week with a chuckle, I’ll recommend that you read David Burchell’s latest column. Unfortunately Glenn Milne was bumped from The Australian’s regular Mad Monday lineup, but Burchell doesn’t disappoint, wowing the reader with clever turns of phrase like this:

One of most curious aspects of the past three years has been the yawning and ever-growing gulf between the universe of the political enthusiast — the blogging savants, the convulsive Facebook oracles, the haiku poets of the Twitterverse and their motley followers and hangers-on — and the reality of those who have to grind their lives away in the dreary vicinities of power.

Burchell’s argument appears to be that: Read more »

Things move fast. Right around 7pm the first reports came that there were moves to replace Kevin Rudd as Prime Minister. Those who were on Twitter followed hashtags like #spill, #spill2 and #ruddroll to get a mix of press reports, speculation and jokes about the leadership speculation. Within a few hours the story that seemed to be emerging was that Julia Gillard had the backing of the Right factions and that Kevin Rudd would step out of the way.

Kevin Rudd announced a press conference a little after 10pm and I quickly dropped a message in our weekly thread. But rather than standing down, Rudd has announced that he will contest a leadership ballot, set to take place at 9am tomorrow. His press conference included some pointed digs at the factions that are looking to oust him, suggesting that they have wanted him to move “further to the right” on asylum seekers and to abandon any notion of a timetable on the CPRS. Read more »

The agreement announced between Telstra and the Federal Government regarding the National Broadband Network have bought this infrastructure project back into the headlines. While the agreement is non-binding, and there are other hurdles like shareholders and the ACCC to deal with, it seems to strike a good balance for both parties, so you’d think everyone would be happy with it wouldn’t you? Not bloody likely.

Let’s see what News Limited’s financial guru has to say about the deal.

The net result of yesterday’s deal is that we will go back to a mid-20th century future: a government monopoly of our basic telecommunications. Read more »

You might have noticed some talk around the place about a “housing affordability crisis” affecting the country: the fact that house prices in the major cities have rocketed up over the past decade to the point where first home buyers are now pretty much unable to afford a home, and are increasingly stuck renting indefinitely. Although neither major party is even close to tackling it seriously, both have realised that it’s a serious problem that needs to be addressed.

Well, it appears that Robert Gottliebsen hasn’t.

Gottliebsen has spent the last month or so writing very bitter attacks against the RSPT wherever he can – one sided, shameless pieces advocating for the interests of the Big Three mining companies against everyone else. Fear campaigns designed to hit confused voters from every angle.

Well, he found a doozy of a scare line this week: an attack on the RSPT on the basis that it could (gasp) reduce house prices. Read more »

I presume there’s a limit to what the Herald Sun will publish. I choose to believe that they’d reject some racist rant submitted by a white power group, or a vicious diatribe declaring that people of a particular religious background make inadequate parents.

So why on Earth did they print this nasty and bigoted screed by Catherine Sheehan?

I could not help feeling sad when I watched the TV scenario of the baby girl adopted by the gay couple on the TV show Modern Family.

The little girl represents many who will never know the joy of being snuggled in their mothers’ arms. Sure, she will have two dads who can perform many of the functions that a mother can, but even 20 loving and caring dads could never make up for not having a mum… Read more »

Let’s kick off the short week with a fresh open thread. As I think I’ve heard and read about three million times already today, this could be the last sitting fortnight for Parliament before the election is called. The media also keeps telling us that Kevin Rudd is going to be in for a rough week, with Glenn Milne’s anonymous “senior sources” helping him to stoke claims that even Julia Gillard has been cut out of some decision-making processes.

Of course, it’s all a bit of a self-fulfilling prophecy at this point – given that the entire press gallery focus is on Rudd’s leadership, there’s no question that everything he does and says, and everything anyone else says about him, will be news. But will anything actually happen in terms of a split in the government? Let’s wait and see. Meanwhile, use this thread to discuss anything you’d like.

Dave, Tobias, I said, yesterday. Some conservatives in the US have conducted a survey in which they asked a bunch of Americans whether they agreed or disagreed with various economic statements, defined the “right” or “enlightened” answer as the conservative perspective on those questions, and then, when conservative Americans agreed with the “right” answers so defined, and liberals didn’t, had published in the right-wing Wall St Journal a fatuous piece of editorial drivel asserting that it proves that “the left flunks Econ 101″. Read more »

We need to issue a correction. In last week’s post titled “Good news for Pacific islands becomes bad news for global warming”, I quoted Andrew Bolt who in turn quoted this statement from The Telegraph:

More than 75 million people living on Pacific islands will have to relocate by 2050 because of the effects of climate change, Oxfam has warned.

In fact, this is what Oxfam said (my emphasis added):

People are already leaving their homes because of climate change, with projections that 75 million people in the Asia-Pacific region will be forced to relocate by 2050 if climate change continues unabated. Read more »

It’s a new week and it gets underway with more bad news for Kevin Rudd, with the latest Nielsen results a shocker for Labor – even worse than last week’s Newspoll. Expect the political debate to continue on our TV screens tonight. Four Corners will be looking at the mining tax, and Q&A has Chris Bowen and Scott Morrison, as well as Kevin Sheedy, Heath Ducker and Samah Hadid.

After the fold, I’m going to present a couple of comments from Matthew of Canberra. He posted them in the weekend thread but they deserve wider attention, because Matthew has done some great work in establishing just how many misrepresentations Andrew Bolt can cram into a single post.

UPDATE: One more bit of TV programming – Tony Blair on Lateline tonight (Monday), ABC1 at 10:35.

Matthew of Canberra writes (re-posted from the weekend talk thread): Read more »

Let’s kick off another weekend. We’ll update you with TV line-ups as they come to hand – I’d expect the focus to be on the resources sector and the RSPT. And as always, you can use this thread to discuss anything else you like.

Meanwhile, the 2010 campaign season is ramping up in the United States, with the parties’ primaries underway ahead of the midterm elections in November. A couple of updates on races that were commented on here in Australia:

1. Dude makes “the political ad of the year”:

   Click here to view the embedded video.

   Dude comes last:

   Agriculture Commissioner GOP – Primary

   2,826 of 2,843 precincts – 99 percent

   r-John McMillan 150,437 – 37 percent

   r-Dorman Grace 144,747- 35 percent

   Dale Peterson 116,541 – 28 percent Read more »