Tech boffins shouldn’t risk losing social licence to deal with Australia

When, on 18 February, Facebook stripped its Australian users – people who generate revenues for them, part of that breed of individual whose participation in the platform is the underpinning of all value inhering in it – of the ability to do something as natural and reasonable as sharing links to the news stories they rely on to survive, I was, along with many others, shocked. Here was a company that had called its primary vehicle for sharing – the “news feed” – banning news by blocking links to news websites.

I disabled the app on my iPhone and removed the browser tab from my PC’s start screen but on 23 February the company was back at the bargaining table ready to talk with Australian news producers – people who, in the final analysis, create so much of the value they rely on to keep consumers coming back. 

Juanita Philips does a cross on the ABC news, evening of 23 February.

I was doubly shocked seeing a range of different views in the public sphere – mainly on Twitter. Twitter came into its own for me over these dark days of privation as I’d previously there created a number of different accounts so could hold conversations with different people, but my views were not always echoed and I learned, to my shame, that many people blamed the media for the impasse. In most cases one name came up again and again. A bugbear for all occasions, someone so notorious as to be a byword for poor conduct. I won’t mention the name but I think that anyone who reads my article can imagine what it is. This bias was particularly evident among people on the left and, furthermore, from people living in the United States, where Fox News is, for many, a regretted participant in the public sphere.

But just to denigrate an entire business process on account of your personal revulsion due to one individual media player seemed to me to be counterproductive. There’s a meme on social media about the French philosopher who is said to have quipped something along the lines that holding certain views was regrettable but that the person speaking would defend to the death the right of anyone to have their views heard. The present case makes a mockery of such well-meaning and altruistic principles, and shows us up to be partial and narrow-minded. 

We need to defer to principles in the current debate which is – despite the misleading headlines of last Tuesday – not yet over. Not by a long shot. And we must ask ourselves what living without political speech would be like – for that is what Facebook’s ban means. A world where speech can only be legally conducted upon such subjects as birthdays, pets, and meals eaten in local restaurants. No talk of government policies, of laws that impact on our lives, of court cases, or of diplomatic visits by heads of state. A blanket of silence is discretely drawn across an entire ecosystem of ideas just because a few pampered nobodies in Silicon Valley won’t share. It reminds me of the CCP and their dogged unwillingness – to the point where they simply ban Facebook and Twitter and set up their own social media sites – to share power.

It’s this lack of generosity that is so striking in the case, a lack that says something revealing about ourselves. About the US media pundit who – generously placed on-screen by an eager national broadcaster – poo-poohs the government’s efforts. About the malicious troll who slanders a media baron because others will mindlessly reward their post with likes and shares. About the family member who echoes the same sentiments. About friends who grudgingly – grudgingly! – accept the need for regulation when pressed – when pressed! – but who revert to blaming the mainstream media for not having responded to the technological changes of the past generation with sufficient foresight. 

As if anyone could have done. We need the media more than ever before but it will never be perfect – and this is the tragedy. Because in one person’s eyes the media is flawed therefore the entire system must be overhauled. Because one person cannot stand listening to Sky News after dark a whole group of professionals must be starved of the means to make a living. Just because one person, moreover, likes to read stupid, badly-punctuated and barely literate hot takes by some random posting on an “indie” media site Channel Nine must be punished. 

Or 7 West Media. Or Network Ten. A thousand curses upon the heads of those who criticise the Morrison government for doing the right thing. A million thumbs down for Mark Zuckerberg and his faceless minions, penny-pinching like Scrooge and pretending that they are popular when it is the weird 55-year-old woman you met on Facebook who posts cracked-but-entertaining recaps of her youth who engages you. Or the old friend – over 80 years now but still full of ideas – who resorts to paraphrasing news stories the site has stopped him from sharing. Or the former colleague who puts up pictures of lizards he meets at the beach. Or the goofy right-winger, a friend of a friend, who celebrates Trump in the face of overwhelming pressure to capitulate. It is in these fragments, on the edges of debate, that the real action takes place.

The tech boffins shouldn’t risk losing their social license to deal with Australia. We are the world.

Working around Facebook’s ban

To begin with, here’s what people yesterday saw when they tried to post links taken from Australian news websites:

I saw this humorous take early this morning in my Twitter timeline:

Taking a lead from Chris’ approach – while the BBC home page early this morning (Sydney time) featured a story about the ban, the New York Times’ site did not – my post today contains an often light-hearted take on a first-world problem as the social media giant goes head-to-head with the Australian government. I take a term out of the playbook of one of my favourite TV shows – ‘Hard Quiz’ (Wednesday nights at 8pm on the Australian Broadcasting Corporation’s main channel) – keeping in mind Tom Gleeson’s Monty Python-esque suppressed grin – a self-conscious smirk – as he hams it up, poking fun at all those drama-filled moments we enjoy so much when we watch TV. “Will Diane win a weekend away at Noosa or will she go home with nothing?” 

The standard, gimcrack game-show spiel. 

We adore the dramatic moment – as long as nothing important’s at stake – but while the Facebook v. Morrison govt contest appears for most to rank low on the criticality stakes, it has affected others hard. 

But there could be an upside: we might start learning how to write. https://magnetformedia.blogspot.com/2021/02/facebook-news-ban-puts-australians-back.html So, to put theory into practice, today I cheekily put the following on Facebook:

Two articles abt Facebook’s ban today on the Sydney Morning Herald website. In one, the PM says he’ll take the issue to the G7 in June. Morrison has spoken abt the ban w Narendra Modi, the Indian president. In another article, Stephen Scheeler, a former chief executive of Facebook in Australia and New Zealand, says, “Lying at the heart of Facebook’s abrupt ban on all Australian news is a global strategic gamble that will have a huge bearing not just on Mark Zuckerberg’s behemoth, but on the dynamic between Big Tech and democracy.” He adds: “I suspect its bet is this: that by taking an aggressive hard line with a middle power, such as Australia, a tough message will be sent to the rest of the world to back off on regulation.”

To demonstrate just how irritated they were with the IT company, people were also doing other things. You can, for example, just copy and paste the news article’s entire text, as did this man:

Another person had the same idea, but only copying part of the target article:

Another way around the ban is to put up screen shots made from offending articles:

The same guy also used the “double-blind” method: screen shots of blog posts about news stories:

One more way around the ban is to use TinyURL:

This solution has the drawback that it crops out images and headlines and teasers, making it necessary to add some own text. Another approach – this time by a freelancer – is to direct people to an email subscription service that is run independent of Facebook. Stephanie Wood has done this, posting:

As I've discovered since taking a redundancy from Fairfax Media in 2017, life on the outside as a freelancer is incredibly tough. I'm not sure right now how I'm going to make a go of it. Facebook's action is a blow to freelancers like me who have tried to build communities and followings using the platform. (Never mind the blow it is to multiple other organisations and people who have used it to get important messages out into the world.)

You can go to her website at http://stephaniewood.com and subscribe:

Facebook’s decision to ban Oz news stories could turn out to be costly for the American company as – compelled by sovereign pride – any number of countries around the world may take a hard line, and move to rein in the behemoth. People who use the service might think, “This is just another case of the company meddling with my life.” Most don’t like to be thwarted. Having cornered part of the market for vanity and spite – the two sides of ego being shitposting and bragging – Facebook might find that it quickly loses all credibility as a trusted partner in the business of staying in touch with friends, acquaintances, and family. 

Complete strangers might well become friends – this has of course happened to me, as it has with pretty much everyone – but I like to feel as though I am in control of the process. Another thing that seems to be ubiquitous is that feeling that Facebook is listening to one’s conversations. This also detracts from the pleasure of the process. For example when you send an email to someone in which you mention a category of consumer product or service and then – all of a sudden – you see an ad for that same product or service on the social graph. As though Facebook had been listening to your chatter (as, indeed, it is).

Facebook knows what to do to counter such worries: it simply ignores them. But it doesn’t know what to do about the Australian government’s new media code – which is due to shortly pass through the Senate – so it is crushing opposition by blocking the posting of news articles. Such a heavy-handed response merely highlights the company’s frustration and dismay. Latika Bourke, the Sydney Morning Herald’s London correspondent, published a story this morning about how the UK government is viewing the Oz news ban: 

The chair of the British parliament’s committee for the media and tech says Facebook’s “irresponsible” decision to cut off news and official government feeds for Australian users constitutes “bullying” and will unite legislators from around the world into wanting to curb Big Tech’s abuse of its monopoly.

Facebook news ban puts Australians back in control of their messaging

Facebook has decided to do the unthinkable and stop Australians – and people overseas posting news from Down Under – sharing their favourite media stories. This move comes just a day after it was announced that Google and a few Australian news organisations had reached agreements on profit sharing.

This move by the tech giant pushes people over to Twitter, but it might have an unintended effect as people, driven by who they are – sharing embodies intrinsic parts of our personalities – start to write their own posts with perhaps the occasional quote from a news outlet. Or even with no quotes – Facebook might block such use of its interface – and, rather, paraphrased extracts of news stories.

We’ll have to see what happens. Twitter, meanwhile will take more territory from its competitor. The government hasn’t asked Twitter to share any profits from its use of news, so as far as things stand currently – the day this article you’re reading was posted – there’s no reason to fear that it’ll become completely impossible for people to engage with other around the news campfire.

Whatever happens, the Facebook shift will increase the importance of literacy. People now – eager to connect with friends and family, and denied a basic freedom by Facebook’s greed – will learn to craft sentences that have the same pith and rigour as your average news story. Short, sharp, to-the-point. 

News is where we live. We’re swimming in stories like fish in the sea. Without stories we die. Solitary confinement can be fatal as it changes the way our brains work, so being connected with others in a news environment is critical to the health of the polis. Without this outlet we feel frustration and will resort to other measures in order to release the pent-up emotions we harbour as a result of dealing with the fear and loathing of daily life. News liberates as it consoles. 

It can also terrify and anger. But whatever happens, with Facebook’s decision comes a moment when Australians – and, indeed, the world – must find other ways to message, to shine a light on the hill, to let fly the billows of signal smoke across the valleys of the oceans.

A little ruckus over the Sussexes’ second child

This article isn’t a swipe at the media but is, instead, a swipe at those who exploit it. I’ll start on 15 February when, at 7.30am Sydney time, America’s Associated Press tweeted that Duke and Duchess of Sussex were expecting their second child. What followed in my limited universe of hopes and aspirations was very small, the contretemps, and hardly worth mentioning but for the consistency of the replies to my adventure, which had been, as follows:

Odd! Considering the Sussex' difficult relationship w the media, why trumpet about Megan again being in the family way? I don't understand ..

Just to make it clear I was genuinely puzzled I put a small emoji in at the end of the post, a quizzical face with a half-frown and blank eyes. I thought the emoji might take any sting out of the post, render it bland and qualify it with the sort of humour – obvious and conventional – that you need to use on Twitter if you want to avoid difficult interactions with people who are more likely to express anger than to empathise with what you’re feeling.

I got anger. One person replied:

They confirmed the news to get it out of the way so paparazzi wouldn’t have an incentive to stalk them for a scoop. Are you new here?

This person was more reasonable:

Because think of all the media outlets commenting on how fat she's getting over the coming months? If they drip feed the news they want the media to have then fair play to them.

As was this (not entirely convincing) riposte:

Meghan is an American actress and celebrity. We would care if she wasn't married to Harry. We're just especially delighted because they are an incredible power couple who are deeply in love. I'm so glad he's away from that toxic family and living his best life.

Over on Facebook I also had grief, having posted this:

Associated Press just announced The Sussexes are expecting a new child. Find it hard to judge Megan but it seems odd to go to the media again after having just won a court case against the British tabloids. If you're going to critique the media -- and even take them to court -- surely you'd want to avoid using them entirely. It seems silly to me, but others will have different views, I'm aware ...

A person used Facebook to snippily correct my spelling of the duchess’ name (I’d put “Megan” – a capital crime in itself), and added:

The case was around the press printing a private letter between Meghan and her father.

The royal tradition of sharing the news of new arrivals is something quite different.

She went on to say that she saw a different standard being applied to Meghan compared to other members of the royal family, with a coda containing information to the effect that she wasn’t a fan of the royals in general – which I took to mean that she supports the idea of an Australian republic.

With one of my Twitter adversaries (almost readying himself for pistols at dawn) I had a further discussion. He said,

I don’t know how to tell you this, but when people get pregnant they often announce it.

To which I replied (considering his response to at least have been civil):

Sure mb to family, but not to the world. Megan and Harry have made a point of critiquing the media. Megan even won a court case recently. If William mentions it in passing to the media that's enough, surely.

To which he responded:

We announced ours on Twitter and Facebook. We don’t have a spokesperson. 

Don’t you have something better to clutch your pearls over?

Ouch! As a parting shot I replied:

I should get new pearls. My old string has been worn down to nubs from constant fretting.

He finally shut up, probably because I’d added another emoji to my humorous tweet, this time a face with eyes of different sizes, as though my avatar were demented, and with its tongue sticking out of its mouth. This emoji was more aggressive than the first one – the replies to my fairly innocuous tweet had been, some of them, unnecessarily nasty – but it still contained a sting, just to let my interlocutor know I wasn’t a complete pushover. Someone else said,

They quit being working royals. They didn't enter a monastery

*Sigh* 

It was all – the sarcasm, the threat of a flame war if I carried on (which I didn’t), the negative emotions being expressed rather than positive ones – all of it was pretty standard for Twitter. Here was all the evidence anyone could need of how fear and loathing has come to characterise public debate, and while reactions to my well-meaning comment were often humorous, I was, in all cases, the butt of the jokes. Not the media and certainly not Meghan who, as had happened so many times, was clearly a figure whose destiny provokes the strongest possible reactions in people.

The AP story that caused all the reactions had the title, “Duchess of Sussex expecting 2nd child, a sibling for Archie,” and was, therefore innocent enough. It also contained an image showing Harry and Meghan walking along together before a collection of stray individuals. The royal couple are holding an umbrella – or, at least, Harry is. Meghan in the photo has her hand gripping Harry’s right arm. In her right hand she holds a clutch and she is dressed – looking slim and terrific (absent baby bump) – in a light-blue gown. They are out for the evening perhaps, I thought to myself, at a concert. 

In fact it had been an awards night. (This article kindly lists all of Meghan’s fashionable clothing, just so the photo is not wasted.) Marie Claire had a story about the same event, which was in March last year.  

But – don’t look at me! (maintain a civil tongue, now) – three days before the AP story went up, the Sydney Morning Herald had a story headlined, “Meghan Markle wins privacy battle.” 

Meghan Markle has won her privacy battle against a British tabloid, with a court ruling the publication of a letter she sent her father was unlawful.

The video on the newspaper’s website started with a still image that was also taken at the 2020 Endeavour Awards, the only difference between the two images being that for the video the SMH photo had been taken from a different angle.

Back on Facebook someone I only know from using that platform for communication, said:

They want it both ways and all on their terms

Which I thought summed up the situation perfectly, and which had been – in my initiative sallie – the nub of the matter. The royals in question were milking an opportunity to raise their brand since – now that they’d split formally from Harry’s dysfunctional family – they would in future partly rely on money they could earn from their own enterprise in order to pay the bodyguards and the hotels and the first-class seats in international passenger jets (at least, once the vaccine had started to kick in and borders opened up again).

Bing lied to me. Harry and Meghan are no longer “senior” royals, and in a January 2020 story Time put up this:

In a statement shared on their official Instagram page on Jan. 8, the Duke and Duchess of Sussex said that, as they transition away from their role as “senior” royals, they plan to “work to become financially independent, while continuing to fully support Her Majesty The Queen.”

In the AP story there’s this:

A Buckingham Palace spokesman said: “Her Majesty, Duke of Edinburgh, Prince of Wales and the entire family are delighted and wish them well.”

Rancour abates on account of the happy occasion (blood is thicker than water) despite a tense separation of what were – once upon a time – shared interests. But being aspirational Harry and Meghan are not going to let a good opportunity pass by them. They do, indeed, want to have their cake – be unburdened by the exigencies of royal routine – and eat it, too – they’re not going to miss a chance to capitalise on the fever for royalty shared by most of the community.

It ensures an unlimited supply of lucrative offers from different parts of the global community. For these two are, without question, global superstars. The crème de la crème. Yet people still sympathise with them. With Meghan especially. As though they were people “just like us”.

Her problem is that relations with The Mail on Sunday (the British tabloid she sued in court) and its ilk – economic loss will be offset by publicity for the machinery of signification – are likelier to continue, in future, fraught if – as she’s done with her pregnancy announcement – she cravenly capitalises on the intersection of family and public sphere. 

Of course, we cannot know what the future holds. We can only hope that, unlike their grandfather, her children grow up content with their lot and able to lead fulfilling and productive lives. While, considering what happened to Harry’s mother, kicking up a fuss over the expected baby is probably not wise, retirement would lead to a fall in income.

Not all news is local: Coverage of farmer protests emphasises media myopia

To illustrate my point, just compare the coverage of the Indian farmer protests to that of the 6 January riots in the US Capitol. Even if you watch the evening news every night, and even if, when you do, one after the other you watch all the bulletins, you’d hardly be aware that, since the northern summer last year, thousands of Punjabi farmers have been taking to the streets to protest new laws introduced by the Modi government. Channel Nine and even the ABC have largely left the story alone and, as a result – outside of the Covid crisis – one of the biggest stories of the past 12 months is being ignored in my country. 

Not a bot …

Part of the problem with the Punjabi protests lies in the difficulty of finding out details. This can come down to as small a thing as the lack of language skills, and while many people are illiterate in the Punjab, the culture there is different from the rest of India. People have a firm understanding of who they are, and they are very compassionate and proud. 

“Punjabis are very big hearted,” says a friend I spoke with about the crisis. They have a strong ethnic identity, making the famous Bangla music, and have exported the equally famous tandoori food to any number of countries worldwide. This diaspora is also a source of strength because it means that Punjabis are closely involved with the global political order, especially that which obtains in the developed West. Punjabi farmers produce a lot of the grain consumed in India – I have been told 20 percent of the country’s wheat, for example – so farmers there know their own importance. They are physically large and strong – my friend also, casually, told me – and their character is equally generous and expansive. Supporting fellow Punjabis is important to them, and many would be prepared to take extreme action rather than give way.

Even within India there is, apparently, a lack of credible information, and now that the government is working to silence journalists, it is hard even for Indian people to find out the truth of the case on the ground in New Delhi.

The offensive laws are aimed at making it possible for farmers – many of whom are small operators – to enter into agreements with distributors that set prices according to the action of supply and demand, rather than (as currently happens) based on a government-controlled price. But how this is to exactly function, and even the nitty gritty of the legislation – very little of this has appeared in public and because illiteracy is widespread it is hard for the truth to find the means to be communicated. 

The BJP controls much of the media as well as having powerful friends in business, so its position is the dominant one.

The government thinks that, by silencing protest leaders – such as labour activist Nodeep Kaur – they can quell unrest and drag the country back to a state of calm. 

Despite ubiquitous connection – “The most remote villages have mobile phones,” says my friend – the Government of India has reportedly had at least one YouTube video pulled down and has reportedly threatened Twitter executives with detention if some tweets are not removed from the site. Many people however flounder in a sea of vagueness. A lack of focus makes it easier for bad actors to sway individuals to behave in a certain way, and makes it almost impossible for the general public – especially in the West – to form a reasoned understanding of the case. 

Embarrassment in the face of international criticism is a real threat. Most Indians – even if they are no longer poor – remember what it was like to be poor, so are wary of any trouble or discord, which they identify with a shameful state of vulnerability. And the Indian middle class is growing with, my friend says, most protagonists in Bollywood movies these days being rich. Gone are the days when, on the silver screen, a struggling poor man makes good.

Meanwhile, there are further developments that would hardly even enter into an Australian news story. Some people have been imprisoned by the government for speaking out in support of the protesters. There have been beatings and even torture. The government is attempting to silence its enemies by cutting their access to the internet and to electricity – though friends and family can still bring them food in order for them to survive.

Of course not everyone is singing from the same song sheet.

This individual looks legit (see below Twitter profile screen). Not, at any rate, a bot.

Despite so many Indians being farmers, the government can use nationalism – Punjab has attempted to attain independence before – and religion – Punjabis are largely Sikh, not Hindus – to divide and conquer.

It seems that there is still a way to negotiate.

So whatever happens we can only hope that it takes place in the public sphere. So far, coverage of this critical issue has been abysmal. Such coverage is important not just for Indian farmers – and not just for Indians. It’s important for all of us because the democracy project has to be seen to succeed, and not just succeed. Just as open justice demands the participation of the media in court trials, in the polis itself both sides need to be heard. 

We might even get a chance to have a bit of a laugh.

In his book ‘All News Is Local’ Richard Stanton discusses at length a phenomenon where events that might serve to illustrate global standards are usually ignored by the media in favour of the story with a local angle. If we want to find better accommodation of such ideas as international government – we already have many such organisations, such as the UN and the IMF – then we need to improve the level of coverage of issues such as the Indian farmers’ protests. 

On 19 October 2007 I attended a talk given by Stanton (see photos below) at the University of Sydney where I was enrolled and where Stanton taught. The talk was on account of the publication of his book.

Channel Nine gouges second slab out of airport peach

A great yarn. A story ripe for the picking. Once again, the publisher of Australia’s newspaper of record has allowed itself to indulge in a provocative bit of baiting of The Man, forging in the process a repeat of last weekend’s sidestep into regions near absurdity. Only difference between two relatively proximate sites of political speech being that now the actual dollar figures – landowner compensation gazetted by the government – are out there for value-sensitive, property-conscious Sydneysiders to contemplate. It’s $300 per square metre for land to be developed and $20 per square metre for land to be used for a “green” zone. This lady isn’t happy so you can guess what category her land is listed under.

Who’s she up against? Well, this guy for a start.

Maria lives in the area and Goliath works for the state government though Zucco looks like she weighs more than he does (the two chaps Channel Nine found to populate their week-earlier segment also being grossly overweight). Not short of a few bob, or else too frequently snacking on hot chips. Now might be a good time for the United Australia Party to field a candidate in Mulgoa. 

Though, maybe not. A staunch Liberal seat, which makes sense if you look slantwise at Channel Nine’s offering to viewers still dazzled by 6 January.

Time to beef up the attack on governments of all flavours. Isn’t the Liberal Party the party of small government? It’s almost as though Macquarie Street were in the process of putting pressure on the boffins inside the actual department who decide such things as compensation. 

Resolute, Channel Nine demands viewers watch a good 60 seconds of footage for a story that might’ve been adequately dealt with as a to-camera address by the TV anchor. Enough to just mention the previous story and add the dollar figures, which had been missing last time. Quite adequate in that guise without new talking heads to fill up half the screens in Sydney. 

Western Sydney Airport is a juicy fruit. Plenty of stories still to come, you can bet on that. And – for the TV station that brings you ‘The Block’ – what better angle to adopt as your very own than land values. Property as religion.

How much effort did it take to put together this Thursday night news segment? I think it could’ve been done just as effectively with far less.

More drama in headlines when there’s less in the story

I wrote about the manufacture of drama in a post that went up a year ago entitled “The media uses hyperbole to draw readers.” I’m returning to the theme today not because the trend has become sharper and not just because I’ve started this new blog and I wanted something interesting to write about – though that also is a factor in my calculation – but because I want to show both sides of the coin. 

Hyperbole is something that journalists, themselves, don’t often point to when they’re discussing things online, but it relates to a post that went up last week on the blog you’re reading. https://magnetformedia.blogspot.com/2021/02/journo-speak-and-disconnect.html In that post there were actually two different issues raised related to the erosion of confidence in journalists within the public sphere. 

I lumped them together and now I want to tease them apart. One is the tendency for journalists to downplay the seriousness of an infraction of standards of public discourse, of ethics, of party rules, or of some other set of agreed rules, such as the law itself. In the post linked to above it was the chastising of Craig Kelly by the prime minister over public statements the backbencher’d made regarding vaccines for Covid-19. Journalists had sought out and used euphemisms for what the prime minister had done to him. One journalist, Bernard Keane of Crikey, called his colleagues out in a humorous manner, gently poking fun at them online. 

The other side of the coin displayed in the blogpost linked to above is how journalists manufacture drama in order to draw readers to stories that are actually not very dramatic. This is a major problem that doesn’t look like one, since in fact it undermines the journalistic project because it disqualifies journalism from election to the ranks of everyday discourse. Journalists can therefore easily be “othered” and – subsequently, depending on the person doing the naming – demeaned and abused. 

But journalists contribute to their own enslavement. In fact, when an issue is manifestly serious there’s no need to manufacture drama. I call these cases, in what follows below, ones where the journalists are acting as if they were “sober”. The other cases – involving hyperbole – I label ones where the journalist is acting as if he or she were “drunk”; shouting-on-the-street, florid language. The intoxicating language of hyperbole, in my earlier post, involved the use of metaphors. I classified these at the time into eight categories:

1. Biblical metaphors
2. Boxing metaphors
3. Metaphors evoking madness
4. Metaphors evoking disaster due to fire
5. Metaphors evoking disaster due to cold
6. Nautical metaphors
7. Metaphors evoking the action of injustice
8. Metaphors evoking civil disturbance

In fact there are only seven, as numbers 4 and 5 can be lumped together under “metaphors evoking disaster due to extremes of temperature”: so cold it’s freezing or else so hot it’s burning. One or the other and people immediately feel uncomfortable. It’s this discomfort that the journalist or subeditor is seeking to impose upon the reader’s consciousness. To make them so uneasy that they immediately – without thinking too much about it, avoiding the exercise of their critical faculties – click on the proffered link. 

“Here’s a link you should click on. Excitement will follow if you do.” The problem being that the other thing that gets jettisoned when people suspend the action of their critical faculties is any feeling of shame or regret, so they can write what they want with impunity and without remorse. And because of social media, now, they can do so anonymously. So there’s usually no consequence stemming from poor conduct.

Of course you’re disappointed. No story can live up to the promise offered unless it’s really a flood or fight. (Weather and sport forming staples of the evening news.) When you click on one of those dramatic pieces of link text the package delivered is empty and doesn’t match the image on the outside. Now, you can turn around and convert that feeling of disappointment to rage and rancour, and launch it – it’s so easy, you just need to know the target’s Twitter handle – into cyberspace where it freezes in flight like Cupid’s arrow.

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I’ve labelled the type of language used for the shameless and enticing links “journo-speak” instead of the simpler “newsspeak”. We call them “journos” because, in the demotic register of our language – the one we use every day – we familiarise such people in order to better deal with the chaos that seems to surround us within the public sphere, a “journo” being easier to deal with than a “communications professional”. The more succinct epithet strips off glamour and offers a target at which we can shoot our fiercest barbs in the process of engaging with brethren online. It dehumanises so that we can further diminish the status of our adversaries. 

Here is what they get up to.

Sober

When: 7 February 

The Sydney Morning Herald put up a story on its website headlined “Payne deeply concerned after Australian adviser to Myanmar’s Suu Kyi detained.” The story referred to a man named Sean Turnell, who’d been advising the Myanmar politician Aung San Suu Kyi in a professional capacity and who, in the recent coup, had been detailed by the armed forces. 

When: 8 February

A story in the SMH was headlined, “NSW health alert after returned traveller tests positive for COVID-19 following hotel quarantine.” 

When: 9 February 

The SMH put up a story with the headline, “NSW records 23rd day of zero local cases, investigation into positive traveller continues.” 

When: 10 February 

The SMH website had a story with the following headline, “WHO releases report on COVID-19 origin after independent investigation in Wuhan.”

Drunk

When: the morning of 7 February at 5.10am 

Type of metaphor: boxing

I saw in my Twitter feed a post from ABC News’ account that said, “Morrison geared up for a party room fight over climate this week. There wasn't a peep.”  The story linked to had at its top a photo taken at the National Press Club gathering where Morrison, the PM, had announced a more expansive environment policy. He’d said that Australia would achieve net-zero with regard to CO2 emissions by 2050. It had been the first time the PM had made such a statement.

When: 8 February 

Type of metaphor: boxing

There was a story on the SMH website with the headline, “True crime as Stan Grant hits out at Peter FitzSimons.” It was about a verbal contretemps between the two media personalities over the issue of Captain Cook, the man who was the first European to discover the east coast of the continent. 

When: 7 February 

Type of metaphor: madness

Titled, “‘Traffic nightmare’: How a single boat can paralyse one of Sydney’s busiest roads.” This story was about the Spit Bridge, and how small craft that need to get through the channel where the bridge sits have to wait for the bridge to open to proceed.  The bridge is raised six times a day during the week, to let boats through. The numbers of waiting boats is smaller during the week than it is on the weekend.

When: 8 February 

Type of metaphor: boxing

On the SMH website there was a story with the headline, “The bushfire areas that took a $300 million hit but did not qualify for funding.” 

When: 9 February 

Type of metaphor: boxing

The SMH published a story on its website with the headline, “Paire slams Australian Open for ‘shameful’ quarantine treatment.” 

When: 10 February 

Type of metaphor: civil disturbance

The SMH website had a story with the headline, “Facebook bans vaccine conspiracies in COVID-19 misinformation crackdown.”  

--------------

That January 2020 blogpost wasn’t the only time I voiced arguments in favour of moderation. We see the deleterious effect of social media in all sorts of ways, not the least of which being the extremism of language used online. And journalists are taking note, copying what we offer ourselves in the course of the day. Instead of responding to the challenge by moderating their own discourse, they are falling into line. 

Some years back I talked in a blog post about the debasement of public discourse in the context of words used to describe political manoeuvering. The long tradition of removing sitting prime ministers that started with Julia Gillard’s ousting of Kevin Rudd had led to a spate of articles and even books.  On 19 November 2018 I expressed dismay at the tone used to talk about politics, as though it were a blood sport and not, as it is in fact, a gentleman’s game:

The inaccurate use of such words by journalists as they try to make sense of the world we now live in has a long tradition. In the case of Julia Gillard’s push to remove Kevin Rudd from the leadership of the Labor Party in 2010, the word “knifing” was parlayed about indiscriminately by journalists and everyone else in order to raise the temperature of debate and to make things seem more dramatic than they were in reality. The Australian Broadcasting Corporation made a documentary titillatingly titled ‘The Killing Season’ that covered the period occupied by the removal of Rudd from his position by Gillard and her faction of the Labor Party, which aired first in 2016. 

[Guardian journalist Katharine] Murphy told me in a tweet that the use of such words as “mutiny” and “coup” is “entirely accurate in the context in which they are deployed”. “This may be obvious the closer you are to events,” she went on, hopefully. But I’m not convinced. You don’t have to take much time to look at the word “knifing” to understand that it is a mere case of hyperbole that, because of the element of violence that it carries, can only be detrimental to the tone of debate. Likewise with “killing”.

As for “mutiny”, this is a word that has been optimistically borrowed by Speers from the vocabulary of the armed forces. It means to remove a captain from his or her command and to take over control of their ship. In the Australian Navy, command of a ship is given to a captain by the Navy hierarchy and the crew has no say over who their captain is. So there is no logical connection between the word “mutiny” and the removal of a party leader by ballot, which is something that is entirely licit and normal depending on the circumstances. The word “coup” comes from the language of politics; it is a shortening of the French term “coup d’etat” (etat” meaning “state” and “coup” meaning “strike” or “punch”). It is normally used to describe what happens when the armed forces takes over the government of a country by force regardless of the wishes of the broader community. The community had elected the government and now it has been taken away by the generals. Again, the applicability of this term to a case where a party leader is removed from his position by ballot is entirely spurious.

Until we wean ourselves off the juice – the high-toned language of the troll and the social-justice warrior – journalists are going to continue to see their reputations fall in the esteem of the public. We can control what we produce, since, apparently, not everyone can. And so we must.

Commentators up the wattage to cut through noise

What Tony Abbot in a state of deep chagrin called a “febrile” media culture has had another casualty, with commentators on the right seemingly dismayed by Anthony Albanese’s solid performance in the opinion polls, causing them to up the wattage on their pronouncements.

The above tweet appeared on or near 8 February and – unsurprisingly – garnered a lot of responses. The amount of online activity accompanying this little sally by Bolt was striking. It was almost as though this – the response – had been the aim all along. To counter that effect, the next day (or thereabouts) Alan Jones came out with his own attempt to provoke outrage among adherents of the Left.

You’ve got to applaud the quantity or quality of imaginative effort that such tweets entail in the formulation. Because putting them out there is – as everyone knows – a matter of moments. Coming up with an idea precisely aimed at sparking hatred however takes practice and a good deal of bravery. No-one can legitimately accuse Bolt and Jones of being a shrinking violet.

In fact being out there and building this kind of negative capacity is the whole plan. In order to remain current in that new media culture – a phenomenon engendered by the rise of social media, since about 2007 – commentators must up the wattage constantly just to remain visible. 

If they’re not visible they lose the only thing that they’ve got to sell: their popularity. And around this time it became urgent to cement their gains due to the appearance – in addition to Albanese’s good polling numbers – or Joe Biden as US president. There was also the festering scandal of New South Wales’ pork barrelling money for fire rejuvenation. The events that this show targeted had played out a year earlier, during the aftermath of the summer bushfires, but the long tail of shame had come to grips with the deputy leader of the Coalition in Sydney, John Barilaro, who sat up in front of a Parliamentary enquiry stumbling over his words in an effort to cope with the effects of cognitive dissonance. 

It was actually a superb performance, and if it had been an actor instead of a politician, he could’ve won an Oscar but it’s easy to make this sort of snide comment – I’m almost ashamed of myself – because that’s how so much of public discourse is carried out. As I noted a couple of years ago, the commentariat’s increased breadth has been accompanied by a narrowing of viewpoints available to sample. The negative comments people make when an unpopular politician pokes up his or her head school pundits in how to gain traction. 

We’re creating the new mode used by Bolt and Jones. 

Koalas versus the big end of town

Badgery’s Creek green zones are good for koalas but anger property owners.

I had a struggle when writing this story because initially I couldn’t locate the evening news segment where I learned of it. It took a bit of digging. I thought it might’ve been Channel Nine or Network Ten, but from my PC it was impossible to find the segment. The Daily Terror had a story on its website but – of course – it’s paywalled so no go there, and when I went back to the TV to log into the Nine and Ten OTT services it took me about an hour to find the relevant section of video.

It’s on the Nine site. What drove me to spend the time doing this – let’s face it – tedious work being to link koalas with the selfishness of property owners who think they might’ve gotten a better return for land they own if it were to be purchased by a developer, than by the state government for parks for wildlife. In doing so I also have cause to talk about the media’s obligation to analyse more when it reports news.

I think it’s fair to say that no-one wants the koala to become extinct in the wild. Do we agree on that point? 

Good, because you cannot have it both ways and I’m sure Nine has, in the past, reported ethically on the plight of the poor koala. I’m sure they will in future but surely their debt to such customers as BFC and Toyota – seller of camping goods and maker of four-wheel drives – would place a certain weight, in the balance of our collective esteem, on protection of the environment. 

It seems, though, that this is not the case. The majors are quite happy to step up to the plate and to bat for property developers – who are, of course, significant employers in the big cities, as well as users of the services of such companies as Nine – when it suits them. 

I can understand the Terror’s animus against anything remotely savouring of greeneity but – Nine? Surely the publisher of the august Sydney Morning Herald – Australia’s newspaper of record – must see how unfortunate it is to allow overweight Boomers (see image below) to invade our private spaces with their gripes surrounding council proposals, their belligerent canvassing of favour as property owners – we all own property, and want to own more – and the TV compere’s sneering appeal to our better natures on their behalf.

Georgie Gardner inviting viewers to sympathise with the men in their battle against government (and don’t we all hate government?). 

It’s difficult to ignore the station’s tin ear when the spokespeople for the big end of town are two unprepossessing battlers from out west. But then, to complete the circle of madness they’d started, the very next day on the SMH website a link was posted to a story titled “‘How good were koalas?’: A national treasure in peril” by journalist Stephanie Wood. This is a Good Weekend story, therefore one which involved a decent amount of work to put together. 

If you want, like Wood, to protect creatures who rely on our good offices for their very survival, then it might mean lowering your expectations when the time comes to calculate return on investment. That parcel of rural land your father bought back in the 1950s might thus not be worth tens of millions of dollars, but only millions. Or even less. 

Is it worth settling for less on account of the struggling koala? I think so, and the media has a part to play in this epic fight. 

Journo-speak and the disconnect

Bernard Keane -- who writes for Australian media outlet Crikey -- had something to say about the handling of the Craig Kelly affair this week. On 3 February at 5.23pm he tweeted:

My current count is 6 media outlets saying Kelly was "dressed down", 4 saying he'd been "hauled in" for it and the others that he'd been "called in". That's separate from all the "dressed down" tweets.

I'm sure it's due to journalists having a limited vocabulary and nothing else.

Craig Kelly had caused a public outcry with his views on Covid-19 treatment and vaccines, apparently (I didn’t see what he had been saying) opining that the latter were harmful to people. So the ruckus was amusing even as it was not trivial. Keane himself is often amusing, taking veiled swipes at one or another of his particular bugbears. In the present case the people he was swiping at were people like himself: journalists. The evasive language of the press gallery headline caught his eye and he let rip with both barrels.

Journalists are a class of individuals we reserve our fiercest opprobrium for, and the tendency is so widespread that Aldi – which uses the tagline “Good. Different” for its promotional material – even made an ad for TV with this as a central theme. The ad featured a helicopter (see image below) descending to hover near the ground close by a pedestrian in a suburban park. The woman holding the shopping bags – full of food, with green veges prominent in the shot – is unprepossessing, plain and slim.

The TV journalist in the helicopter asks the woman what she’s got in the bags. “Tell us what you’ve got there? Toilet paper?” “No,” says the woman in reply, “just dinner stuff.” The bags are raised a bit to indicate the truth of what she says. Yep, you think to yourself, she’s not hoarding toilet paper. “You must’ve paid an unprecedented price for that during these unprecedented times,” goes on the journalist, still hoping for something newsworthy. “No,” the woman says, “they’re from Aldi. Prices are always low.”

At this the journalist signals to the pilot to lift off and depart the park. She’s disappointed at the lack of material suitable for a scoop. The “gotcha” moment has fled and she’s away (see image below).

The ways that journalists talk on TV is under examination in this ad, which is, like the retailer’s other TV spots, funny and wry. We’re sharing a joke at the expense of journalists – the people retailers like Aldi rely on to keep the food supply system ethical and honest, and to keep prices for consumers at reasonable levels. We’re also asked to critique journalists’ tendency to manufacture news, and to reflect on the price that some people pay for their involvement in the news process.

But what about Keane’s criticism of the press gallery? How do the two things dovetail?

I think that we’ve got a problem with the press in that we don’t give it the same latitude we give ourselves. The cost of failure in their case is deemed to be catastrophic whereas we ask for accommodation and a bit of leeway for ourselves. A question put too insistently – or not insistently enough – causes people to bridle, as though they were a horse and they had reared up at a perceived obstruction or threat in the roadway as they went along.

Some people take one small point of inflection and magnify it to encompass all media acts, as though all journalists were the same and that the mistakes or lack of ethics of one person (or company) mean it is justifiable to denigrate a whole class of individuals described with the label “journalist”. Those people who are most likely to do this, furthermore, are the very same ones for whom it is a point of principle that minorities should be respected, and that language that discriminates against a small faction of the community is an abrogation of their human rights.

Keane is not wrong to say that journalists often use a language register that is divorced from common parlance. Often this is done for the sake of brevity, in order to fit the word-count of a headline or a strap. But sometimes it makes the action involved – as it does, I think, in the Craig Kelly case – seem less serious. To pull someone up is not to “criticise” them. To haul someone in is not to “discipline” them. 

Most people will use euphemisms in the course of their daily routine in order not to be seen as too rigid. It’s commonplace for this kind of sideways language to be used in companies and other organisations. It allows people to communicate effectively without making someone else lose face. We all do it, but journalists are not allowed to. And so they shouldn’t be allowed. 

The information viaduct and species behaviour

You don’t often find justifications for journalism with this kind of title, but as the length of this post indicates (approx. 2300 words) I’ve been thinking about this sort of thing for quite some time. The first traces of this line of enquiry I can find appeared on Happy Antipodean on 14 September 2015 in a post titled “Studying journalism is not just a vocational course” which was about training. A light piece in response to a Sydney Morning Herald story that’d just appeared, it contained this:

Storytelling is an essential human activity that shows no likelihood of disappearing. And all industry sectors can use storytellers to build their businesses. In fact they need them, in the same way a viable electorate needs journalists in order to make the critical decisions that national stability relies on. They don't call it the media – the layer in the middle, the information viaduct – for nothing.

On 2 July 2018 I expanded on this point in a post titled “The articulation of stories and the dynamics of progress”, which I include in its entirety below.

On 29 June at 6.49am an account on Twitter named ‘Stand For Something Even If You're Sitting Down’ tweeted the following:

[President Donald] Trump: The press is the enemy of the American people.

Milo [Yiannopoulos, a right-wing commentator]: The press should be killed.

Shooter [Jarrod Ramos, who killed journalists in Maryland in 2018]: Kills members of the press.

The Left: Trump and Milo are dangerous and culpable in this.

The Right: The Left needs to be civil.

We tell ourselves stories all the time as we strive to function as members of a community that sustains us. Such stories are essential to its proper functioning and to maintaining our ties to it. They cement us within its fabric as essential parts of it. They are the glue that binds each community together, and part of that process involves us articulating aspects of the stories that animate our social lives, to form coherent narratives. The above tweet is a symptom of this articulation, where each step in the process of meaning-creation stems from the one that comes before. We locate ourselves within this process of meaning-creation by helping to tell either the whole story from beginning to end, or just one part of it that can then be taken up by the next person in the chain.

That chain ties us to the earth, from which all wealth derives. The earth sustains us as the stories we tell each other sustain us in our various tribes. They work in two ways: to keep us together and to keep others out. While the first aim is important for our survival, the second can prevent us from learning new things. So while stories can teach people entering the tribe what it is important for them to know, so that they can help the whole function more effectively, they can also exclude ideas that might function to help the tribe survive and prosper.

In our communities, the tribes operate much like sporting teams that are competing for the scarce resource of victory. In this flawed scenario, which is a zero-sum game, only one team can win, and so each member of it works to the utmost extent of his or her capacities to destroy the effectiveness of the opposition. In this earnest game we strengthen the bonds that keep us together by helping to articulate the stories that sustain the tribe, but we might also lose sight of the ultimate goal, which is for both teams to prosper and to increase the amount of wealth the earth surrenders, for the same amount of energy expended. Sometimes we need to borrow from the playbook of the opposition, and use ideas that have been articulated and developed by that tribe, in order to strengthen the chain that binds us to the earth. This is called “progress”.

At the end of the month I was at it again as the bug had bitten and I was on a roll. This time the post was titled “Intolerance and incivility on social media”. The bit I want to include is this:

They say that there are "echo chambers" online where people just see views that conform to their own, because people only follow people with views that are similar to theirs. But especially with Twitter hashtags, you now get to see what people of all walks of life are thinking and saying. And often tweets from people you follow might be in the form of a retweet from an ideological enemy accompanied by additional commentary refuting what the original tweet had said, but you still get to see what had been written. I think there is actually more awareness now than ever before of what people on the other side of the fence think and do.

But what is true is that the conversations that happen across the divide are very low-quality. Flame wars erupt, sarcasm is used, and people just dig in, refusing to budge an inch from cherished positions. It’s not at all like a collegiate forum where robust academic debates take place in an ambience where the right of everyone to express themselves unobstructed is respected, but more like the schoolyard, where hurtful things are said casually to exclude, to wound, and to objectify without considering the consequences.

On 2 December 2018 I published a post titled “Ego, like tribal loyalty, cements people’s identity” which contained the following elucidation of my theory of narrative.

If you don’t have a healthy ego you’re probably suffering from a mental illness. It is what keeps us confident and “happy” (that indefinable feeling of rightness that characterises our waking life, even if we are not aware of it most of the time). You don’t want to be without an ego. In its absence your life would be hell.

But ego has a drawback even while it keeps everything ticking along smoothly: it keeps new ideas out of our consciousness. We privilege what we already know and cleave to ideas that are central to our identity. This aspect of ego makes it a liability in some circumstances. We won’t listen. We reject things outright unless they’re wrapped correctly. We say “No” when we perhaps should think twice.

For groups of people, the function of ego is carried out by tribal loyalty. We might all be individuals, with own tastes and preferences, but we cannot survive alone, without a community to support us. The group has its own language, its common referents, its beliefs even. It has its icons and its leaders and its spokespeople. It has traditions and lore and ways for members to use to conduct themselves so that everyone gets along well. Pledging loyalty to the tribe, however, has, like ego for the individual, the downside risk that it serves to quarantine the group from valuable input from outside. People who are identified as outsiders are distrusted or even mocked and scorned. Their ideas are diminished by sarcasm and other rhetorical methods used to create community, or ignored.

So, good ideas can have trouble getting in. Bad ideas can be perpetuated regardless of their merit simply through common usage. If someone you trust says something that is factually incorrect, you are likely to believe that it is true. This happens all the time in the public sphere, where most people outsource their critical faculties to political parties. Individual tastes only go so far; mostly our preferences are predictable, and our likes and dislikes can be accurately mapped just by learning which group we belong to.

In August I examined a flame war that Australian journalist Peter van Onselen had been caught up in. For a while he quit Twitter, but made an exception for a colleague. As I reported in a post titled “Extreme views get all the attention”:

At 9.06am on 17 August, van Onselen tweeted to Fairfax journalist Jacqueline Maley: “Yours is the only tweet I’m responding to, I said I’m no longer using twitter [sic] for more than posts [because] the vile abuse I’ve received has stunned me. The left right spectrum is more of a curved U leaving extreme left & right with much in common. That’s all I was saying. Signing off.”

I went on, later:

The sensible centre is being hollowed out as people take sides and reward the outlets that buttress their personal biases with their cash. But partisanship is not good for democracy. What we need are outlets that look at individual policies and judge them based on their merits, not on the basis of whether we support the political party that espouses them.

“Social media is bad for journalism” ran the headline on a post I put up on Happy Antipodean on 5 April 2019:

Social media is great for sharing links but the quality of material being produced in recent years is not encouraging. BuzzFeed for a start, with its quizzes and text-poor stories and endless sequences of quoted tweets, is a bad sign.

Then you have the newspapers that pimp their stories to get subscribers. The quality doesn't matter to people as long as the bias conforms with their own. Some, like the Guardian, ask for donations and run campaigns to fund stories on specific topics. But with the groupthink evident on social media begging for ideologically-bent material in preference to objective stories written by ethical journalists, it's hard to see how we can be well served by such organisations.

You also have "indie" media which is run on a shoestring and which runs complete nonsense that people applaud and retweet endlessly, as though the vomit they are promoting were some rare souffle offered up by the kitchen of a Michelin-starred chef.

The kinds of extremism that thrives in social media, on sites like Twitter and Facebook, is precisely the wrong kind of influence you want to have operating on journalism. In the old days, university graduates used to complain about the hysterical headlines produced by the major urban tabloids. Words with the same kind of rhetorical audacity as statements that are made by politicians intent on demolishing the arguments of their opponents. But with social media this same kind of rhetoric is ubiquitous.

On 27 February 2019 I wrote a post titled “Group behaviour and popular narratives” that contained the following further elucidation of my ideas, particularly as they related to groups.

People actually don't want to be made to think, they want to be made to feel comfortable with their existing biases. This is what makes them adhere to groups in the first place. It’s quite natural. You see this clearly with both politics and with the arts. In the latter case, people gravitate to the familiar and the routine, the thing that most closely resembles what they have already consumed at one time or another. This is because they remember the feeling it gave them last time and they want to feel the same way again. It’s about pleasure, and we are nothing if not pleasure-seeking animals. But it’s also about safety (we feel good when we feel safe).

With politics, what you find is that people will unthinkingly endorse views that conform to their political party's policy platform. People don't want anything "challenging" (although that is a normal way for critics to compliment a work of art, such as a movie or a novel that they like). People want what they had before, except better and cheaper.

With public policy, problems usually arise where you find regressive thinking that derives from people’s tendency to operate in mobs. Demagogues are a problem sometimes but once you have rule by the demos the problem actually derives in most cases from the ways that groups behave.

We actually shouldn't be following party platforms. What we should be doing is choosing the policies that are going to achieve the best results, regardless of which party endorses them. Unfortunately, people are unthinking creatures who like to stick close to the group. So we will continue to swing wildly from one side to the other even while the big problems such as climate change and wealth inequality, both of which are complex and worsening in their impacts, and which require concerted action, resist the solutions we throw up from time to time in a haphazard fashion.

In a post put up on 23 September of the same year titled “Social media and the cultural elites” I wrote:

[T]he cultural elites are enthusiastic proponents of social media and use it as aggressively as your average (left-wing or right-wing) troll in order to promote their favourite views regardless how narrow these might be. They are not babes in the wood, nor are they merely subject to unwarranted censure by an ignorant rabble. They are participating with eyes wide open in a system of communication that encourages verbal abuse at worst and at least an ugly contempt for opponents.

Now that we’re all paddling in the water, how does it feel? Do you feel comfortable? How should you react if your feelings are not respected? What about your own conduct? Are you entirely blameless if some people flame you or denigrate your words? If they disrespect you? Do you respect others? Is being “nice” important or is good policy the only worthy goal? What kind of policy is created according to reprehensible behaviour? Does it matter? Does good policy even matter? 

Who says it’s good?!

You do. Or s/he does. Or else you all say it’s bad. Either way, you’re complicit. It’s actually your policy. The polls tell us so. This brings me back to another 2015 post, this one titled “A ‘febrile’ media culture or radical transparency?” It was in response to just-deposed PM Tony Abbott’s parting slash at the commentariat. I talked about how the public sphere had changed since a large proportion of the community was using Twitter.

[T]he thing is that the whole relationship between the public and politicians has changed due to the ever-on nature of the public sphere, enabled through social media. There is nowhere to hide any more once the soundbite has been launched into the ether. If there is any dissimulation, or plain treachery, or just day-to-day spin, you will be found out. That then will cause a wave of opinion to start in cyberspace and this will lead journalists to find ways to satisfy the appetite thus kindled.

Scott Morrison is more used to working in this new type of space, as his recent policy shift in favour of greentech indicates. So even though a lot of what happens on social media is reprehensible at least, and damaging at worst, at least we see the message getting through.

Blog launch

Welcome to Media Magnet. I began to use this as a place to put posts I'd already written elsewhere but that I thought deserved another run on the track. You can't let an old dog just lie in the sun, you've got to throw them a bone on occasion and take them out to the beach for a frolic in the shallows.

When I look back on those old posts I'm reminded of how the internet has changed in the intervening years. How much more polarised it is since every man (and woman) and his dog has come to the park. On 3 January 2016 I wrote in a post about social media:

One possible downside is that people might just edit events to fit an overarching positive narrative, but that takes a lot of effort and work. It's much easier - if you want to increase your followers - to just become more positive and collected yourself, and the benefits will just follow. In a real sense social media is changing the way we live because we have to actually make our lives fit that overarching positive narrative. It's not just a matter of continuously masking the reality by putting a positive spin on things that might actually have been relatively less satisfying or rewarding. We are starting to behave in ways that would anyway receive a welcome from our friends and acquaintances.

How wrong I was! This post is remarkable however for  the fact that -- like the post you're reading now -- it appeared first at the beginning of the year. Five years back. On 29 April 2013 I wrote in another blogpost:

The big question for people who are looking at the future of the media is revenue, but I think that even more important issues are how to drive the public agenda and how to form trust in the media within the public, trust that has been eroded over time.

In that post I thought aloud about different funding models for journalism, and this brought me into contact with a man who started a new website, but I fell out of the loop with them as I felt that my contributions weren't being properly credited. I did write however:

For the Big Two [Fairfax and News Corp], the tempo stays the same - there are just as many stories as ever - as they move toward raising revenue via paywalls, but overall the quantum of effort in the media environment is shifting to well-funded public relations at the expense of in-depth public-interest journalism. Public confidence in the media is eroded, but the Big Two can't slow down or else they'll lose clicks, so they just keep on doing what they've always done.

You could envision a pyramid structure with part of the content for a story available free-of-charge - this can be shared online - and more in-depth items available for a fee. And you could move beyond the flat story, too. For example, you might offer a podcast video free at the top of the pyramid, with a story readable for a fee and then, lower down the pyramid, transcripts of the source material that can be read by people willing to pay more for more context. Interview transcripts can run to thousands of words and you might have three or four interviews for one 1000-word story. Would people be willing to pay for that? I'd like to find out.

The Guardian took up a different tack from the Big Two, and has given people a means to provide funds independent of a subscription. People do this because they like the website, not in order to read the stories, which remain free (though you have to register now to read).

So there are many models. Disappointing however is how people have taken the disarray of the media -- especially since Google has threatened to take its search engine out of Australia -- and turned it into attacks on the media. So, if you dislike Murdoch papers you then lump all media into the same basket  and crow about their malaise.

What happens is still up ion the air, but keep your fingers crossed Google starts to change its approach. I will be crossing my fingers and toes in anticipation of a win for news over tech giants.