Journalists often over-estimate how much they know, and exaggerate their own importance.

But they’re not alone in having those shortcomings.

Where you sit is where you stand.

And people in different sectors of our complex democracy are quick to identify and lampoon the failings of everyone else.

Journalists ridicule academics for being long-winded (and dull), academics ridicule the superficialities of journalistic analysis.

Public servants sometimes think everyone in business is a spiv of one sort or another, while in the private sector bureaucrats are seen as rule-loving tossers.

These warring groups are not always wide of the mark in their depictions of each other.

More recently, we have had another cleavage thrust upon us: bloggers versus journalists.

I was cheered by Stilgherrian’s first few paragraphs in his paper to the media 140 conference. And this sentence, in particular:

This is why I think the whole bloggers versus journalists debate was and still is so incredibly stupid.

But what follows, unfortunately, is a jaunty run through the whole ’social media good, journalism bad’ story that has long since become a cliche.

A few more pars into this tour through the well-worn world of blogger resentment, we get this stunner of a summation:

Up the other end we’ve got big institutions like the Church, Science and The Media constructing narratives they call, respectively, Belief, Knowledge and News. All of them, when threatened, refer to their narratives as “The Truth”.

Oh dear.

Now I know Stig is trying to be entertaining and provocative so a certain amount of latitude is warranted.

But this sort of glibness doesn’t do anyone any good.

On the other hand, reading further I realised that this ‘critique of western civilisation in a nutshell’ really is the key to understanding the perspective of Stig and countless other social media romantics.

Folks, there is not such thing as truth. That was all a pre-digital idea. Now utterly redundant.

Once you get over silly obsessions like trying to work out what the truth is then you are free in Stig’s grand vision for our future to convey gossip along ant-like trails.

I’m not making this up.

At the end, in his paper’s coup de grace against the pretensions of journalists, Stig draws on a recent weather event to portray the redundancy of journalism:

Like ants mapping out food trails, people did this by passing signals to each other — interesting photos and factoids and emotional responses — without central control. And because they knew the people they passed them to, these messages had plenty of personal resonance.

When the industrial media factories creaked into action, maybe only minutes or an hour later, what were they adding to that process? Were they just packaging that collective narrative for the folks who aren’t yet connected to the live global hive mind?

Well there you go. No need for investigation, fact-checking, objective standards of accuracy, background, context. Not to mention a trained editorial hand to bring you the best writing and pictures.

I think we need more journalists.

I think more bloggers (and god forbid twitterers) should be embracing the skills of journalism.

I vote for excellence.

And truth.

I don’t want the ‘global mind hive’.

It sounds ugly and dystopian to me.

This is important in a country where very few large organisations do.

So full marks for effort.

No doubt, Telstra’s re-entry into the fledgling field of corporate social media will be generally applauded within the small band of people who care passionately about this stuff.

But looking at Telstra’s new blog, called, in best marketing speak, Telstra exchange, I can’t help feel a little sad and a little more convinced that big corporates and social media don’t really mix – well, maybe a little bit, maybe as a little superficial gloss on the dull, besuited hearts of the corporate world.

Edgy, it’s not.

I guess this new approach is consistent (or ‘aligned’ in suit-speak) with Telstra’s new more co-operative approach to government and media relations.

Getting along with people is generally the best strategic approach, but it often makes for less interesting copy.

And the new blog was launched on a day when Telstra had to backflip on a PR disaster – a fee to pay your bill.

The media release on the backflip contained this wonderful example of the PR genre:

“I have listened to the community debate and believe that the way we introduced the fee did not align with our commitment to put customers back at the heart of our business,” Mr Thodey said.

“It is now clear to me that introducing this fee across our existing plans was the wrong way to encourage customers to move to electronic payments.

“We designed the fee in a way that exempted more than a million elderly, pensioners and disadvantaged people but it was still unacceptable to many of our customers.

Well, I guess that’s better than just saying ‘we got it wrong’ or ‘it was the wrong thing to do’.

Earlier today I linked to some musings by Steve Rubel about the blending of media and social media to the point that they are now the one and the same thing.

I think this is true, or will soon be true, of corporate communications.

Your social media effort will only be as good as your overall comms approach.

There’s not much point trying to get a social media fig leaf to cover up an unchanged culture where nothing is ever wrong, it just doesn’t ‘align’ sometimes.

Still, Telstra are having a go and that puts them ahead of just about every other big organisation in Australia.

And, it’s unfair to be too critical. I just wish..

Five years ago there was media and social media and the two were distinct. You know what was what. It was like there elephants and zebras. You knew the difference.

Today all media is social, all social is media. It’s impossible to separate the two.

The media all actively use social technologies to innovate, converse and collaborate with their audiences. Meanwhile, social content from friends – be it tweets or status updates or videos – all should be considered media. Yes, the elephants and the zebras have cross-mated.

Scott may not ‘attend’ any particular church but he is on the Board of Management and Honorary Treasurer of Wesley Mission. His photo is in the foyer in PItt Street.

According to its website:

Wesley is a growing Christian Church and a Parish Mission of the Uniting Church in Australia, serving the community wherever the need exists.

According to Wesley, Scott is playing a critical role in shaping the organisation’s future. Wesley’s CEO noted in his annual review:

I was delighted to welcome Mark Scott, Managing Director of the ABC. Mark Scott and David Greatorex work closely with me in setting the course for the future.

There seems to be no particular reason why Scott, or the SMH, would overlook this pretty significant involvement in a religious organisation.

Given that the Wesley Mission turns over a $100 million a year, Scott no doubt takes more than a passing or casual interest in its affairs.

Perhaps, Scott considers his involvement a matter of business or philanthropy rather than personal religious faith.

Promise was that I
Should Israel from Philistian yoke deliver;
Ask for this great deliverer now, and find him
Eyeless in Gaza at the Mill with slaves …

– John Milton, Samson Agonistes

In a speech this week, ABC Managing Director, Mark Scott, strangely compared the media revolution (currently ongoing) to the fall of the Roman Empire. His speech includes large slabs of Auden and references to Gibbon, hence, I felt emboldened to start this response with a little slab of poetry myself.

Scott likes the analogy because of its schoolboy and hollywood images of the great and powerful laid low.

Fair enough, nice and dramatic. Perhaps it was a lowbrow audience.

While the analogy might speak of the impact of the barbarians on ancient Rome, it hardly fills us with confidence about the consequences of the media revolution.

After all, the ‘fall’ was followed by what we call, or used to call, the Dark Ages and then the Middle Ages before Western civilisation was transformed by the Renaissance, so called because it was based on a return to the ideas and values of Rome and Athens. That’s why, for instance, we have a Senate in a bicameral system rather than some barbarian tribal council. If ideas matter, and they surely matter much more than events, than the Roman world is with us still.

We might also reflect on the role of the Roman Catholic Church. Is the Roman empire really dead while this powerful political and social, as well as religious, organisation continues to be a major force in Western Europe. Of course, it has been in decline as a political organisation for a few centuries now but for more than a thousand years after the ‘fall’ it carried many of the elements of Roman civilisation. The church used Latin, and kept the Roman language the key means of official communication in Europe until relatively recently. The jurisdiction and administration of the Church followed that established by Rome, with the addition of one or two outposts, notably Ireland.

The efficient organisation of the Roman Empire became the template for the organisation of the church in the fourth century, particularly after the Edict of Milan. As the church moved from the shadows of privacy into the public forum it acquired land for churches, burials and clergy. In 391, Theodosius I decreed that any land that had been confiscated from the church by Roman authorities be returned.

The most usual term for the geographic area of a bishop’s authority and ministry, the diocese, began as part of the structure of the Roman Empire under Diocletian. As Roman authority began to fail in the western portion of the empire, the church took over much of the civil administration. This can be clearly seen in the ministry of two popes: Pope Leo I in the fifth century, and Pope Gregory I in the sixth century. Both of these men were statesmen and public administrators in addition to their role as Christian pastors, teachers and leaders. In the Eastern churches, latifundia entailed to a bishop’s see were much less common, the state power did not collapse the way it did in the West, and thus the tendency of bishops acquiring secular power was much weaker than in the West. However, the role of Western bishops as civil authorities, often called prince bishops, continued throughout much of the Middle Ages.

So what can a closer examination of the Roman analogy tell us about the fate of the media revolution?

First, a total ransacking of the old media – the ‘fall’ – looks spectacular, and is no doubt deeply satisfying to disaffected outsiders (aka barbarians or the ‘audience’) but it might leave us worse off; locked in a media ‘dark ages’ until the spirit that produced much of what was best in ‘old’ media and journalism is revived in a later renaissance.

Second, the ‘fall’ takes a lot longer than the word implies, just like the Roman world, ‘old’ media is likely to persist in some form for much longer than any of us can imagine from this vantage point.

Third, the ‘fall’ is largely an illusion unless the old media ideas are replaced by a more compelling set of ideas. The hordes that ransacked Rome failed to displace the cultural and political ideas that underpinned Roman civilisation which remain with us still in a modern form, long after the barbarians war cries have all but been forgotten.

Scott himself gives us a pointer to the validity of this last lesson when he talks about the continuing, even expanding, importance of a key old media idea, editing:

Yet it’s only by maintaining a strong editorial role that we’ll reinforce, not undermine, the ABC brand. Even Wikipedia’s Jimmy Wales acknowledges that the secret is in the edit – which might explain why an aggregating site which has acquired such a huge community of users – The Huffington Post – lists 62 editors and just 4 reporters. We’d shoot for a slightly different ratio ourselves!

In other areas too we may come to see the world of the ‘empowered audience’ as deficient. Comment and opinion are everywhere on media sites these days, but there has been no similar expansion in facts, ideas and analysis, Scott’s much-heralded partnerships with the audience, like the barbarians attacking Rome, may be more suited to producing noise and colour than anything more enduring.

Fourth, it’s likely that the new media will be absorbed into the old media:

As the Western Roman Empire crumbled, the new Germanic rulers who conquered the provinces upheld many Roman laws and traditions. Many of the invading Germanic tribes were already Christianised, though most were followers of Arianism. They quickly converted to Catholicism, gaining more loyalty from the local Roman populations, as well as the recognition and support of the powerful Catholic Church. Although they initially continued to recognise indigenous tribal laws, they were more influenced by Roman Law and gradually incorporated it as well.

The ABC will still be the ABC with just a little more commentary from the audience. Not so much deliverance from the strictures of old media as an opportunity to join the slaves at the Mill.

Claiming to be a “true story”, it is a travesty of omissions. In eight of sixteen drafts of his screenplay, David Williamson, the distinguished Australian playwright, graphically depicted the chain of true events that began with the original radio intercepts by Australian intelligence and went all the way to prime minister Gough Whitlam, who believed East Timor should be “integrated” into Indonesia. This is reduced in the film to a fleeting image of Whitlam and Suharto in a newspaper wrapped around fish and chips. Williamson’s original script described the effect of the cover up on the families of the murdered journalists and their anger and frustration at being denied information and despair at Canberra’s scandalous decision to have the journalists’ ashes buried in Jakarta with ambassador Woolcott, the arch apologist, reading the oration. What the government feared if the ashes came home was public outrage directed at the West’s client in Jakarta. All this was cut.

The “true story” is largely fictitious. Finely dramatised, acted and located, the film is reminiscent of the genre of Vietnam movies, such as The Deer Hunter, which artistically airbrushed the truth of that atrocious war from popular history. Not surprisingly, it has been lauded in the Australian media, which took minimal interest in East Timor’s suffering during the long years of Indonesian occupation. So enamoured of General Suharto was the country’s only national daily, The Australian, owned by Rupert Murdoch, that its editor-in-chief, Paul Kelly, led Australia’s principal newspaper editors to Jakarta to shake the tyrant’s hand. There is a photograph of one of them bowing.

I asked Balibo’s director, Robert Connolly, why he had cut the original Williamson script and omitted all government complicity. He replied that the film had “generated huge discussion in the media and the Australian government” and in that way “Australia would be best held accountable”. Milan Kundera’s truism comes to mind: “The struggle of people against power is the struggle of memory against forgetting.”

Well, as long as it’s a good movie, right?

The authors, Joshua Gans and Andrew Leigh, got some solid media coverage with their finding that the ABC is slanted rightwards. In fact, the study claims that ABC TV is more favourable to the coalition then talk radio stations 2UE and 2GB. Do you believe it?

Others have already pointed out how dumb the methodology is in this study. Basically, the authors locate public intellectuals on a left-right scale based on whether they get more positive or neutral mentions from Labor or Coalition federal politicians. Media outlets are then ranked as slanted depending on whether they mention right and left wing intellectuals. It sounds dubious and it is.

Gerard Henderson’s rating is only one of many anomalies. Gerard got many more favourable mentions by Coalition than ALP MPs. Consequently, when he is cited by a media outlet it is counted as a plus for the ALP when the slant ranking is being worked out.

Sounds silly and it is. You don’t have to know too much about parliamentary, or political, debate to know why the ALP might mention Gerard so positively so often.

The reason is that being able to quote someone generally felt to be supportive of your opponents is a much more powerful debating point than quoting people who might be described as the usual suspects.

Postscript: Phil Gomes points out to me that he made this point last week in the comment stream on Larvatus Prodeo.

LIVE by the sword, die by the sword, as Hamlet used to say. On the other hand, truth is beauty, beauty truth and that’s all you need to know.

The first bit, of course, comes from the Book of Matthew (26: 52) “Then said Jesus unto him, Put up again thy sword into his place: for all they that take the sword shall perish with the sword.” I don’t know whether Hamlet ‘used to say’ this, but if he did he was certainly quoting the Bible.

The second unattributed quote is a truncated version of the last two lines from Keats’ Ode to a Grecian Urn:

Beauty is truth, truth beauty,—that is all
Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know.

These are two of the best known lines in English poetry, but what they actually mean, and whether they add or detract from the rest of the poem, are matters of enduring controversy. T S Eliot famously argued that they don’t mean anything much and that they spoil an otherwise good poem. But, hey, Eliot didn’t like Hamlet, the play, either.

Moreover, it is doubtful that the Biblical injunction against violence (or even judgement) sits in any sort of counterpoint (’on the other hand’) to Keats’ well-known but unclear aphorism.

Nevertheless, the grandiosity of Butler’s muddled literary allusions may well be appropriate in relation to Sandilands’ self-perceptions.

(Moran) says Schofield worked a dinner service at Aria and he remains convinced she’s “extremely talented”.  But he is reluctant to give her a full-time job. “I’d hate something to happen and be the person to sack Australia’s golden girl”.

Something to happen? Does he suggest that the Masterchef contestants aren’t up to the grade? Has their “talent” been just the slightest bit over-hyped? Or does he not want to be the spoilsport to point out the obvious fact that a few months on a TV show does not provide a shortcut past the years of training and hard slog it requires to be a chef? Or worse that the hype makes it very hard to employ them?