Intellectual dishonesty is pure poison – A Crikey weblog

Category Archives: Journalism

A little bit of inaccuracy

July 14, 2010 – 10:07 am

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 [...]

By Dave Gaukroger | Comments (16)

Wingnut Bingo

March 31, 2010 – 8:13 pm

In the comments of an earlier post was this request from Ross Sharp. I’d like to think that we at Pure Poison are nothing, if not receptive to the needs of our readers, as such I’d like to present for you, Pure Poison’s Wingnut Bingo.

By Dave Gaukroger | Also posted in Andrew Bolt, Catherine Deveny, Daily Telegraph, First Dog Onthemoon, General media, Glenn Milne, Janet Albrechtsen, Miranda Devine, Piers Akerman, Tim Blair | Comments (39)

Paywall hypothetical: Which content would you pay for?

September 2, 2009 – 6:16 am

The idea for this post comes from Tim Dunlop (now blogging about music here at Crikey), who asked much the same questions on Twitter. There’s a lot of talk about how news outlets will survive online; both of the major newspaper publishers in Australia have flagged that content cannot remain free. But is paywalling viable? [...]

By Tobias Ziegler | Tagged | Comments (31)

What is journalism?

August 25, 2009 – 9:51 am

Okay, let’s have a go at something here. I’m interested to see if we can have a discussion about what we think journalism is — I’m talking about the big picture definition of the practice, not micro details. That means no fingers pointed at who you might think is not a journalist, or veiled references [...]

By Scott Bridges | Comments (25)

Patriotism, mourning and the media

August 18, 2009 – 7:31 am

Last Tuesday during Question Time, Foreign Minister Stephen Smith solemnly informed the House of Representatives that an aircraft had disappeared in Papua New Guinea en route to Kokoda airport. Given the destination, he said, it was likely that Australians were among the thirteen people feared dead. By Thursday it was confirmed that nine Australians had [...]

By Scott Bridges | Comments (10)

Newspapers do things that bloggers can’t: Exhibit A

July 10, 2009 – 7:53 am

As noted in yesterday’s open thread, the British News Ltd tabloid News of the World is reported to have arranged the hacking of thousands of phones, including those belonging to politicians. I’m not sure if that’s what John Hartigan, the Australian, and Christian Kerr had i mind when they talked about how journalists break stories [...]

By Tobias Ziegler | Also posted in News of the World | Tagged | Comments (14)

Myths and distortions

July 9, 2009 – 10:52 am

While our own commenters discuss the origins of the hapless “brass monkey”, it seems appropriate to drop in a plug for – and invite discussion of – last week’s episode of “On the Media” on NPR. They aired a series of stories – many of them having been aired previously – around the theme of [...]

By Tobias Ziegler | Tagged | Comments (19)

Not an either/or proposition

July 6, 2009 – 12:04 am

This ran in the Crikey email last Thursday but may provoke a bit of conversation here at Pure Poison. ______________________ It must be pretty humbling to feel your power slipping away. And not just slipping away to an equally powerful competitor, but slipping away to — gasp! — ordinary people. Let’s just say you’re the [...]

By Scott Bridges | Comments (18)

You say tomato, I say torture

July 1, 2009 – 11:33 am

Here’s something a little different from our usual topics, but which relates to the issue of intellectually honest reporting. The On the Media program on (US) National Public Radio had an interesting segment last week about the linguistic choices journalists must make. The segment explored the NPR Ombudsman’s justification of using the term “enhanced [or [...]

By Tobias Ziegler | Also posted in National Public Radio | Tagged , , , | Comments (11)

The Gordon Ramsay media circus

June 12, 2009 – 7:50 am

This photograph to me sums up the whole Gordon Ramsay/ Tracy Grimshaw “controversy”: Ramsay and the media all running around pretending to chase each other, everyone having a good time. More than one commentator has suggested that the whole thing smacks of confected outrage in a cynical attempt to promote Ramsay and his programs on [...]

By Scott Bridges | Also posted in Channel Nine | Comments (32)