June, 2010

Over at Groupthink, Spock notes that the Herald-Sun seems to be producing outrage from conjecture. And the Daily Telegraph appears to be at it as well (my emphasis added): Deposed Australian prime minister Kevin Rudd’s $600,000 a year pension Mr Rudd – at 52, a young ex-prime minister – could receive about $20 million worth [...]

News agencies provide a low cost way for media organisations to get up to date content from regions where they don’t have a presence of their own. While different organisations running the same copy means that no-one gets an exclusive it also means that no-one gets humiliated by completely missing a story. The down side [...]

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.

Apparently Caroline Overington (yes, that Caroline Overington) will now be heading up the Australian’s “Media Diary” section. Given the fairly personal nature of some of her past polemics (and the bizarre nature of some of her tweets), we’ll be watching with interest.

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 [...]

Let’s kick off the first weekend of the Gillard government with a fresh thread. This Sunday’s Insiders (with thanks to Mike Bowers) will have Barrie interviewing Tony Abbott, a panel made up of Misha Schubert, Brian Toohey and Piers Akerman, and Talking Pictures has photographer Andrew Meares. Farewell to newmatilda.com, which ceases publishing today. Thanks [...]

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 [...]

Janet Albrechtsen admires Margaret Thatcher’s balls. That seems to be the main argument of her latest column. With the British coalition government delivering its “emergency budget” overnight, Janet has gone all nostalgic over the economic ideal of a government living within its means. The problem is that Albrechtsen’s view of fiscal policy is driven by [...]