politicalowl

The learned professor must have tired of scrapping with Peta Credlin so desperately needed a new subject for that weekly column. Well, not a new subject really. Rather a variation on that mainstream media standard the leadership challenge. Give the sub enough to justify the catchy headline  Speculate on how "even small indicators can have profound impacts on otherwise long term trends." Then gild the lily with the thought that the latest Newspoll may turn out to be such a moment in time before adding: To be sure, the odds are that it won’t. More likely this government’s goose is cooked and the size of the defeat is the only contested point worth debating between now and the next election. But if Labor loses momentum it won’t take long for Bill Shorten to come under substantial pressure. So for the sake of trying to make a comment column different to the mass of irrelevant others on the significance of Newspoll, let's forget about that size of the Coalition def...

I'm not sure which is more annoying: attempts to analyse opinion polls showing markedly different results or pontifications about the future impact of policies that will never pass through the Senate. The Saturday papers are full of both of them. I'll settle once again for quoting Paul Kelly. He gives this common sense advice in The Australian  this morning: As the campaign advances, it becomes doubtful whether Turnbull, if he wins, will be able to legislate in the form he has proposed the corporate tax cuts that are the centrepiece of his election and the heart of his pitch for growth and jobs. Labor, unsurprisingly, refuses to concede any policy mandate for a Turnbull victory. Nor do the Greens, the Nick Xenophon Team or most of the independents. The mandate theory, once applying to an elected government’s program, has been corrupted to mean every party and independent has a mandate against the government. This year’s policy contest may prove a charade, with politicians an...

Life must be frustrating for the intelligent person who writes editorials for The Canberra Times. In this new media world without sub-editors the practice is to cut from the bottom when the words are too many for the available space. The result is to leave newspaper readers hanging without the editorial's relevant conclusion. The example from today's edition compared to the full version as published on the paper's website: As printed The website version with the missing conclusion A classic example of what happens when you get rid of sub editors who actually read things before cutting them to fit the available space. The Canberra Times editorial this morning just left off the conclusion thus making the whole thing irrelevant. Here's another example I posted on my Facebook site earlier this month:

Just something to think about before you get your knickers in a knot about headlines in the Murdoch tabloids. Newspapers are getting less and less influential. News and information about the contentious 2016 presidential election is permeating the American public, according to a new survey of 3,760 U.S. adults by Pew Research Center. About nine-in-ten U.S. adults (91%) learned about the election in the past week from at least one of 11 types of sources asked about, ranging from television to digital to radio to print. This high level of learning about the 2016 presidential candidates and campaigns is consistent with recent research that has shown strong interest in this election , even more so than at the same point in the previous two presidential elections. 1 Americans are divided, though, in the type of sources they find most helpful for that news and information. When asked if they got news and information about the election from 11 different source types, and then asked whi...

Will the Fairfax papers follow suit?

Not much fun for a 73 year old reading the Daily Telegraph this morning with a stern faced traffic policeman staring out with a warning to stop driving the car. Just when I have managed to rejoin the workforce, NSW Police head of traffic John Hartley wants to force me to stop. I'm 2½ times as likely to be killed in an accident apparently - a statistic that sent me searching the NSW Centre for Road Safety's database. Here's what I found: True it is that we over-70s are more likely to kill ourselves than the average of all drivers (See the column Driver deaths per 100,000 licence holders) but less so than than those 20 and under. When it comes to all road deaths - drivers, passengers, those in other vehicles, pedestrians and so on - (the last column) my lot do worse than the youngsters. Then again we do substantially better than all but the 40 to 69 age groups when you count all accidents with injuries (Casualties per 100,000 licence holders). These figures were f...

Plenty of sanitising in this morning's newspapers. The Australian  is a representative example with the 'mad witch' in its page one headline. Not nearly as offensive a description of ministerial language as 'mad fucking witch". Those not offended by Peter Dutton's texting might appreciate this story from the United States: Carson: ‘Political correctness will destroy us if we don’t wake up’

If the things you are doing in an attempt to win the hearts and minds of voters don't work perhaps it's time to try something completely different. Day after day we are subjected on the television news to corny pictures of Tony Abbott and Bill Shorten with the duo repeating the same fatuous statements playing "I'll catch you out - No you won't". The only surprise is that the journalists keep reporting the nonsense. Surely in their hearts they know that politicians saying the same thing over and over is not actually news. I'm sure the public has reached that conclusion with a result being the record unpopularity of the two major party leaders. And the space newspapers give to interpreting the non-news perhaps accounts for a large proportion of their circulation declines.

This morning's email message from Sydney's  Daily Telegraph: And the real message is - we have taken another step down the Photoshop path to becoming a comic book. As our front page this morning shows, we are in the world of make believe rather than the news business.

A wonderful addition from this morning’s Sydney’s  Daily Telegraph  to my “ Journalists talking about each other ” section. The regular Tuesday purveyor of the paper’s vitriol column – Sarrah Le Marquand – has reached heights of which her peers Piers Akerman, Miranda Devine and Andrew Bolt surely would be proud. Ms Le Marquand spent a couple of hundred words putting the boot into Mark Latham for his “I hate-youse*-all bile dressed up as an opinion column” that appears in the  Australian Financial Review. Nothing wrong with that. If you hand it out like Latham you must expect to get it back, and as the Le Marquand writes, that “is the very result he so craves.” Rather it is the “do as I say rather than what I do” hypocrisy that follows that puts this column onto the Tele’s top shelf. Latham has proven beyond a doubt he has nothing of substance or merit to impart. His columns are little more than the attention-seeking tantrums of a self-entitled toddler, so why ...

Contrasting front pages – then and now. (Click to enlarge) My thanks to James Carleton for drawing this change in attitude to my attention.

Quite a performance by the Sydney Terror this last month. The fear creating headlines began before the Martin Place siege. And they are still going – perhaps more stridently than ever. December 3 December 10 December 16 December 17 December 18 December 19 December 20 December 23 December 24 December 30 2 January 3 January

“We’re for Sydney” the page one banner declares. To which, if today’s  Daily Telegraph  is any guide, we could add “But self interest comes first.” Hence the Tele’s big issue of the day. Newsagents might lose their monopoly right to sell lottery tickets, it told us on page one. And what a terrible thing that would be for these brave and battling small business people. NEWSAGENTS in NSW have warned they face annihilation if lottery ticket sales are opened up to big players such as Coles and Woolworths. As a condition of privatising NSW Lotteries in 2010, the then Labor government agreed to a five-year moratorium with new owners Tatts that prevented supermarkets and other big retailers from selling lotto tickets and scratchies. But the arrangement is due to end on March 31 — the week after the state election. … Lottery sales provide between 25 and 90 per cent of newsagent income and the Newsagents Association of NSW and ACT (NANA) said allowing big retailers into t...

From the media section of  The Australian  this morning:

Another gem this morning to add to my “Views of Miranda Devine” collection. This time our intrepid Sydney Sunday Terror columnist has found a granny to hide her views of Julia Gillard behind. Emilia Pastuszka, a “stay at home mum” from Wahroonga, has a remarkably similar life story, that propelled her into the public gallery on Wednesday. Her father was part of Poland’s anti-communist Solidarity movement. “He was in prison a few times. I lived through it. You had to accept corruption or shut hut up … social socialism is supposed d to be about equality but who’s ever in power is the new bourgeoisie,” Pastuszka said. In a moment of candour last week, Gillard lamented the lack of a time machine. “If one got to do the whole thing again you would do things differently.” She’s not the only one. “Things would have been different if this evidence had come out 20 years ago,” Emilia says. “Julia Gillard would not have come to government.”

Tuesday’s paper: But where has that sovereign risk gone? Today’s front page:

The columnist is dead so long live the columnist. John Birmingham filled the Mike Carlton space in the Sydney Morning Herald  this morning and the opposition tabloid gave him a welcome. Noted the  Daily Telegraph  on its editorial page: Veteran Sydney Morning Herald columnist Mike Carlton resigned this week rather than face suspension for his abusive and obscene online comments. The SMH is reportedly considering replacing Carlton with John Birmingham (pictured), who lives in the remote northern Sydney suburb of Brisbane, Queensland. But is Birmingham any less abusive or obscene? Let’s see how Carlton’s possible replacement conducts himself online: “F… off.” “(The Prime Minister) is such a c….” “ASIO arse softc..ks.” “Poor fellow my f…… country indeed.” “I’d wager a blowjob from a toothless crackwhore hurts more.” “F… the CIA.” “F… you is more than a policy.” “Australia’s most f…witted sportscasters.” “Soft ricotta cheese c..k.” “F… that old prize s...

The Sydney based duo of Murdoch dailies are having a great time highlighting reports of readers cancelling subscriptions to  The Sydney Morning Herald.  Believe this morning’s editorial and you might think that old granny has hardly a reader left. Now I am very much in the camp of those who found the Glen le Lievre cartoon offensive and  made that clear  soon after it was published. And I was surprised that my old colleague Mike Carlton (he once was a star on a Mike Willesee current affairs program where I was an abject failure) did not add a note to his last column expressing his regret at the illustration accompanying his words the previous week rather than leaving it to the  Herald’  editor to do it yesterday. But be that as it may, I have no doubt that if people buy newspapers on the basis of the views they contain that the Herald  will be winning the circulation battle over the  Tele.  Public opinion, as I see and hear it in, ...

It is one of those stories that you feel guilty about giggling at as you read it. But righteous indignation from a Murdoch paper about journalists hacking computers to get information really does have a humorous aspect. And there it is on page one of  The Australian  this morning: NSW police are close to completing a criminal investigation into computer hacking that led to confidential student records about a $60,000 scholarship granted to Tony Abbott’s daughter being leaked to the left-leaning, online magazine New Matilda. Wendy Bacon, the prominent journalism teacher and contributing editor of New Matilda, has claimed the leaked information — which also involved a hacker allegedly gaining illegal access to the files of more than 500 other students — was justified in the public interest. Leaving aside the pot-calling-the-kettle-black aspect, it is an interesting examination by the Oz of the way journalists may gain information and the legal and ethical implicatio...

From my former Crikey colleague Christian Kerr in the Oz’s  Strewth!  column this morning comes this observation: SATURDAY’S Sydney Morning Herald featured a nuanced — not — column on current events in the Middle East by Mike Carlton, accompanied by an equally subtle cartoon of a nasty Israeli with little round pebble glasses and a big nose. Just like, as eagle-eyed spotters at Quadrant noticed, this cartoon from Der Sturmer from 1934. How very tasteful.