Reflections on the Miracle of Democracy at Work in the Greatest Nation on Earth
Media watch
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168 Asanque: ” Latham was an idealist, but unfortunately there is no room for idealism in Australian politics and we are all worse off for it.”
Asanque, Latham carried serious physical and psychological issues which he’s now made public knowledge. That’s the reason I can forgive him for his blunders which gifted Howard not only the larger House 2PP buffer in marginal seats that could still prove too big for Rudd to overcome, but the Senate majority which resulted in Workchoices and other rubbish.
As for Mark’s latest contribution, Rudd being attacked by Latham will do as little damage as being Rudd being attacked by a Joe McDonald-type union heavy.
BV at 114, I caught the Fran Kelly-Kroger-Milne-Grattan discussion this morning as well and, like you, was gobsmacked at Kelly’s apparent partisanship. You could be excused for thinking she was a government spin merchant.
But the reality is that the Liberals have been in power so long now and the ABC board and management has been so stacked with Liberal-appointed heavies that the more careerist public broadcasters (like Kelly and Trioli) have simply realised which side their bread is buttered on.
On-air displays of bias in favour of the government will set the switchboards alight. And the record of those complaints will make it to the managing director and the board, who will be pleased at Ms Kelly’s ‘even-handedness’ and reward her appropriately.
Aside from Kelly herself, how can any discussion on the week in politics be balanced with a partisan host, a Liberal Party appartachik, a journalist who campaigns for Costello and dear old Michelle, who hardly ever says anything interesting these days?
This ACN Baby boomer stuff. Have they not got their years a bit wrong? They are saying people born between ‘53 and ‘67 are baby boomers? Not sure about people born from ‘63 on?
There was a young girl named Tabby,
Whos blogs were apaulingly shabby,
But one day she did see,
That such liberal repartee,
Was just purely moronic and crappy.
2mins 25sec
VoterBoy – I’m opting for ‘Oh dennis how do you sleep at night’
This might sound sex*st, but Liberal voting women are unattractive. I’m sorry, but it’s true. My girlfriend asked me last night if I would be going out with her if she was a Liberal. After vomiting violently in the middle of the lounge room, I composed myself and politely said, “no, absolutely not”.
I’m off to bed. May today bring more misery and confusion to the Satan and his Hellish Instruments, and I’ll log on again in a few hours to see whether that despicable and outrageous (copyright, Dolly Downer) gay headline had anything to do with Miss Toni Abbott’s Nancy Cap.
http://www.smh.com.au/news/national/hats-off-as-tony-dons-a-hairnet/2007/11/09/1194329453879.html
Mr Denmore, I for one am simply appalled by the instances of bias. I will be writing some very detailed letters to whomever is Communications Minister after 24 November 2007.
And CL – you got it in one. You clever clever boy.
Mr Denmore, very true. The reality for these people though (Kelly, Trioli, et al) is that they will be marginalised when Labor comes into power. For them to change in the dying minutes of the Howard Gov (even to start appearing a little more balanced) would be too obvious. So they give it the “old college try” and hope Labor doesn’t win. As Mr Burns says on the Simpsons: “I could crush him like an ant. But it would be too easy. No, revenge is a dish best served cold. I’ll bide my time until … Oh, what the hell. I’ll just crush him like an ant.”
Trioli’s got morning sickness!
So she’s heading off to TV land and wants to keep doing Lateline. Maybe she reckons she’ll get the gig when Tony moves on, and then a few years later she’ll retire and run for the seat of Bennelong.
Oh yeah, but Maxine will keep her seat.
Latham is right. This is a Seifield election. Why? well if Rudd is really gay it is a well known Seinfield catchcry that there is nothing wrong with that!
But really. I have two theories about this. One is that if we have to choose between a conspiracu and a stuff up, I’d go for the stuff up.
The other one is that after the good people at the Tele got wind of the ‘Rudd smear on Friday story’ and its associated frenzy in the blogosphere they probably decided to have a bit of a joke at us by placing these oblique headlines.
Regarding Radio National Breakfast I used to get angry but now I take it as a joke almost the same way as when I see Ackerman or Bolt on ‘The Insiders’.
Not only they had ‘The Panel’ which as someone else already suggested has one Liberal ex-President (and still influential Liberal operator), and one Costello loving journalist.
They also had before a journalist who followed John Howard’s campaign (so her views were very slanted towards him) and of course just after that Gerald Henderson!
Need I say more.
Tony at 203, that’s just what I thought on reading the Herald article on generational support for either party. According to their analysis, the “boomers” are all backing Rudd, while the over-55s are predominately in Howard’s court.
People aged 55-60 were born between 1947 and 1952, which makes them boomers in my book (post world war 2 babies).
The Herald says the 40-54 year-olds are predominately in the Rudd camp. But I thought generation ‘X’ began in 1962, which would make half that sample Xers and half late baby boomers.
I think they’re stretching things.
I am confused by Tioli’s political past – a few years ago Liberals were acusing her of being left-biased (when she was in Melbourne). But in Sydney she has adopted a consistently conservative line. What happened? Did she see the changing faces on the ABC Board and took a punt on the Right?
Ave it 07, as a Pom Tory you must be in despair over the fortunes of the former ruling party, reduced to a total rump in 97, and not recovering very much at the last two elections. I’m hoping that’s what happens here to the Libs.
The good news, however, is that none of the partisanism of certain ABC presenters appears to be having the slightest effect. Fran and various others are very annoying but remember only people with something like an opinion listen to RN, watch Lateline, or indeed hang on every word spoken on PM or AM. So it’s a sort of victimless crime, n’est ce pas? The only thing they’re doing is insuring ehmselves in the event of a Howard victory. They are also largely psephologically illiterate so haven’t quite worked out that the rodent is gone. Once they do (next week sometime, I suggest) watch them switch. The appropriate metaphor involves rats and drainpipes.
VoterBoy – excellent! May you dream of drowning rats!
John Faine has some clown on this morning – I think its John Roskam – doing the Coalition spruiking du jour. A caller tried to pull him up on interest rates and unemployment under Hawke-Keating; regarding the achievements they made in reducing unemployment etc. Roskam tried for about ten seconds to argue him point by point, then suddenly completely abandoned that line and talked about ‘looking at the overall 11 years of Howard-Costello vs Hawke-Keating’ and saying something to the effect that you can’t deny that the numbers are lower now. Which more or less means that the argument holds as long as you don’t look at it in any detail at all.
Faine just let him get away with that. He even said that Roskam would be happy with callers like that one, because it gives him a chance to compare the figures and bring out the 17% argument. That’s as far as he let the level of that debate go.
The trouble for Howard is that we heard this 17% mantra all through the last election, and now it’s been clouded by the 22% figure that Rudd brought up in the first debate. I’m not sure it’s cutting through. And if it isn’t, they can’t go much further into the figures without exposing their own hypocrisy on the issue. We saw that with the ‘tables’ they stuck into their latest ads.
My feeling is that you can pull this shtick if you’re well-placed electorally, as they were in the last election. But it isn’t going to do you any good if you don’t have the good will of the electorate already.
Denmore and others,
re ABC bias: Please use the ABC complaints link on the ABC website http://www.abc.net.au/contact/contactabc.htm
to register your complaint about bias. In this particular instance you might complain about the obvious bias in the selection of the ‘panel’ and also use salient points from the transcript of the show when it appears. I have succeeded in having a complaint about a particularly blatant piece of Uhlmann rubbish escalated to a very high level. Just keep pushing and don’t take no for an answer. Publish their replies on blogs like this, to demonstrate to the public at large what garbage they come up with as justification.
cheers,
Alan H
Just had to respond to the comments above about the Fran Kelly continuing to speak about the need for ALP to “get the momentum back”. What a twit she is. Always running the same line, on RN and Insiders.
Watching that woman rise from political correspondent to full-fledged host has made me almost go crazy. Has no-one — not a single manager, producer –noticed how completely freaking FATUOUS she is? I don’t know that she’s ever had a single incisive thought about Federal politics in her life. And she’s ONE OF THE MOST SENIOR and IMPORTANT pundits around.
She has all the worldly wisdom of a girl on a Year 11 private girls school debating team. By which I mean — she can express herself, she knows how to write a cute english essay to score a good mark, she can fill a vacuum with words, but she has absolutely no sense of the world around her.
She’s just a fat version of Naomi Robson.
BV at 214 – as a Melbourne 774 listener I am also surprised.
Trioli was not pro-Labor by any means, but she was quite ’socially progressive’
Also remember that she was the one that nailed Reith over the doctored ‘children overboard’ photographs for which she won a Walkley Award.
Fran Kelly sounds the perfect person for Trioli’s gig, at least as far as the ABC is concerned.
Or maybe they’ll get some twit like Jennifer Byrne. Virginia assured a concerned listener that her replacement would definitely be female.
It’s an eerily slow old day in the world of Oz politics.
We need another rumour, or a scandal, or an opinion poll (a real one – not a Morgan) to liven things up.
Nicotine addiction? Sheeesh! That’s nothing!
I need another poll, and I need it now!
Quick, do me some numbers and analysis now, my brain is starting to hurt.
# 198 Ave it 07 Says: November 9th, 2007 at 10:21 am
William, has this guy contributed a single post worth reading yet? Mindless posting like this doesn’t help debate for either side.
sorry…wrong transcript. I will link it if I find it.
216
CL de Footscray Says:
November 9th, 2007 at 10:32 am
Exactly – not a single swinging voter watches lateline or listens to RN. Not one.
I don’t see it as an issue.
Latham is correct in stating that both parties are pandering to middle class greed, the election is like a ‘Seinfield election’ and Labor is ‘conservative’. Welcome to Howard’s Australia Mark! But the only way you can change it is by being in government, and unfortunately, the only way Labor can be in government, is by not being wedged by Howard and pander to Howard’s Australia. Sad, but true.
Ville, yes it’s John Roskam (from the Institute of Public Affairs). http://ipa.org.au/people/bio.asp?peopleid=68 Don’t get me started on this guy, but I am not being flipant when I say I wouldn’t p*ss on him if he was on fire. A real dirt bag. People from this organisation make disgraceful comment on many social issues and are extremely right wing.
I wrote to Crike about these idiots a while back:
“I think it’s time we (the Australian Public) express some opinions about this “Institute of Public Affairs” (whatever the heck their name means!) which keeps getting an airing in Crikey (and elsewhere) – just like ACCI and Peter Hendy, who are now so obviously up the Liberal Party’s proverbial date, the Institute of Public Affairs is little more than a gang of right-wing scare-mongers, who believe in some alchemical model of the universe, a direct antithesis of everything scientific and universally obvious. Whether it’s “comments” on global warming (no, it’s not called climate change), the stolen generation (no it’s not called the displaced or saved generation) or “Union Bosses” (no they aren’t under your bed – just go and check!), their “research” (cough, cough) is laughable, purposely ignorant and downright dangerous. I challenge any of their “experts” to provide even one article they have had published in an internationally acknowledged, peer reviewed journal.”
I emailed Jon Fayne ages ago to get this moron off his Friday Wrap, and he wrote back saying they can’t find any right-of-center balanced commentators to come on.
Fran K is fairly lightweight – but really, how many of the Canberra gallery are much better at the moment? One of the things that Howard’s tight control has done is to tun the gallery into lapdogs – if you offend us, you lose access. If you lose access, you’re reduced to recycling rumours (which is effectively what Crikey has institutionalised and turned into a ‘business’, although how long it will last is another question). Howard’s mania for control has produced this the good news is that rudd seems to understand this, and his remarks about FOI, and reform of the PS, bode well for de-lapdogging the media. Of course, they’ll end up biting him, but the lapdogs will probably go, their access all dried up.
PS – silly me, i subscribed to Crikey for their election ‘coverage’. Talk about lightweight! PB is thirty times more informative and has abetter class of rumour (not to mention paranoia).
Nr denmore.
oops sorry i take that back.
on other matters… is it just me or is Virginia Trioli a bit hot?
middle man – i suspect it’s just you …
232, it is definitely just you.
The rat was the head of the nation
The greedy thought him a sensation
But then with a thud
Came a fellow called Rudd
And with him came lib decimation
tdt. nice work.
“I wish to pass the motion that as the GG has become the abbreviation for that newspaper, that we rename the ABC the APC (Australian puppetry commission) I am apalled at their biased reporting!”
I second that Centaur.
Man, Im getting overexcited by these rumoured polls. I ddint even notice the August date on that link and was sending emails. Doh!
Must. Chill. Out.
Betamax at 220, I think Fran Kelly is just one of those journalists who never really made the transition from reporter to commentator. She was actually pretty good as a straight-down-the-middle gofer. But when she got promoted from straight reporting to the presenter’s chair in current affairs, it was discovered that she really had nothing really interesting to say on her own account.
I think she realises she is perceived as a lightweight (her little girl, breathy voice does not help her on that account), so she over-compensates by making sweeping statements full of kitset political rhetoric (eg: Labor has “lost the momentum”, the election “could go down to the wire”, and best of all, “the marginals at the end of the day will decide this thing”).
middle man: “on other matters… is it just me or is Virginia Trioli a bit hot?”
Great, now this morning’s breakfast is on the floor and I have to get down on all fours and clean it up. Thanks middle man… oh, and , NO, it’s just YOU!
My favourite was when she said something like ‘the party that gets the most seats will win’.
It was pretty early in the morning …
Middle Man at 232, it isn’t just you. She definitely has something.
Tabitha cheered for the rich
Alas, they’re about to be ditched
So let me just jab
That the only good tab
Appeared in the show called Bewitched
wow, i didn’t think it was that crazy a notion!
My complaint lodged with the ABC:
I have witnessed with increasing dismay and alarm that Fran Kelly’s Breakfast show on Radio National exhibits a pro-Government bias in a number of areas.
Kelly herself regularly adopts the various “spin” lines being pushed by the Government, be it in relation to interest rates, job figures, climate change or “global financial tsunamis”.
Kelly regularly allows (caretaker) Ministers to simply speak from their prepared lines while Opposition members are confronted with a series of interruptions and spoken over (her divergent treatment of Costello and Swan yesterday was replete with examples).
Today’s show was an almost unceasing endorsement of the Government line, from her repeated statements of Howard being “on message!” and “confident” in her discussion with Lyndal Curtis, to her interchanges with the “Friday Panel” in which Kelly commented that “Labor hasn’t had the momentum”.
Further, the composition of the “Friday Panel”, made up of the former head of the Victorian Liberal Party (Kroger), the known pro-Costello Milne and the straight down the line Grattan could hardly be called “balanced”. Especially with Kelly’s own contributions and the fact that it was preceded by an interview with self-described conservative Gerard Henderson.
I look forward with receding hope to some semblance of balance within the final 2 weeks of the election campaign!
tdt 235 “applause”
To Tabitcha, Ave and to glen
And all of you right leaning men
Please glance at the polls
You short-sighted trolls
It’s “good night” “bad luck” and “amen”!
the one great advance from this campaign is the rise of the blog. This site is truly the best, for quality information, over the horizon inside info and plain old gossip. It is my source of electoral info. Don’t watch TV, read papers or listen to the wireless unless pointed to by this site bloggers. Really works being in Qld and being an hour behind no more wasted RN Breakfasts, 7.30s or Latelines.
I suspect that MSM and the patehtic excuse for a press corp are going to be suffering from Gareth’s deprivation syndrome soon.
thanks for the support Mr Densmore. although Jana on Rove last week was a delight. Why a TV channel wont just let here do whatever the hell she wants is beyond me…. I’d watch her host any old cr*p, even ACA! oh yeah she’s done that…… oops.
BV, excellent
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