July, 2010

It’s an outrage that the “vicious children” running the ALP campaign would do this: But this? The Liberals go in hard, with a reworked Kevin O’Lemon Does Tony Abbott approve of chopping people in half with a cleaver?

I could have dropped this in the weekend thread but it deserves more publicity than that. Read this post from Grog. It’s excellent, in the sense that it’s a cogent indictment of the poor media coverage that’s contributing to the overall medicority of this election campaign.

Here’s a fresh thread for non-campaign talk over the weekend. This Sunday’s Insiders (thanks to Mike Bowers) has Barrie interviewing Wayne Swan, the panel is Lenore Taylor, David Marr and Piers Akerman — no word on Talking Pictures. Tonight’s Lateline has Michael Kroger and Paul Howes — kickoff is at 10:30.

Some top-notch climate change nonsense at The Drum yesterday, with Tom Switzer telling us the solution is adaptation. But it’s never entirely clear what position Switzer is arguing from — despite claiming that his focus is on political issues and how they constrain policy options, he seems remarkably keen to focus on misrepresenting the scientific [...]

You remember “Climategate”? That the “sceptics” like Bolt, Devine, Akerman declared exposed “the rotten heart of the propaganda machine that has driven the world to the brink of insanity” and that so undermined the campaign for action that Labor offered less than a token and the Libs dumped their leader? Yeah, well, the final of [...]

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 beginning or end of each such one-sided diatribe acknowledging that you work for an organisation with a strong stake in the competition? You [...]

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 [...]

Here’s a fresh thread for discussing any media commentary about the election campaign. With a Narrowing[TM] in the Newspoll and with the closest thing to a media consensus on the debate appearing to be “Abbott didn’t do as badly as expected and therefore won”, we seem set to start the second week with a narrative [...]

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 [...]