Details of Assange case are starting to disappear

I was reminded of Julian Assange last night when another segment came on the nightly news detailing the progress of the extradition case currently being heard in the UK. Assange is still in prison and his future remains up in the air. I wonder how he is faring and I remember again the first time I saw Julian, in 2009, when I was at my computer and I saw a video of a young man enthusiastically making an announcement at a podium. Assange quickly became a global phenomenon and the waters soon became muddy.

I’ve long been a supporter of Julian though I don’t think he’s ever been a journalist. Because he was publishing documents it’s possible to confuse categories but his relationship with the media has always been contradictory and rebarbative. The number of journalists this publisher has pissed off is very long and I have no doubt he’ll continue to try to use the media for his own purposes as time passes.

‘Don’t extradite Assange’ read this sign (see above). ‘Don’t extradite our rights,’ it goes on, conflating the destiny of the sign’s subject and that of the person holding it. I can feel the anger and I share a part of it myself. I just don’t know what the US has against Assange, and hope that, at the very least, that part of justice that is the public airing of positions can be allowed, with the help of the appropriate authorities, to take effect. 

The above photo shows the beginning of the forgetting. It was necessary for the Australian Broadcasting Corporation to put up a shot showing a newspaper headline in order to orient viewers. Perhaps without such an establishing shot many would be puzzled over the identity of this person with the strange name.

Assange will continue to polarise and to unite. The following photo shows a few of the people who were outside on the street in London for the protest against the UK authorities. People are angry that Julian is still locked up and in a way they have a right to be angry. I sometimes feel puzzled by the state of affairs but I want to know more. 

'China Tonight' hits the spot

I hadn’t watched this program before, feeling some measure of resentment on account of Stan Grant’s constant shifting within the Australian Broadcasting Corporation (ABC). It seemed as though every time I looked at the primary digital channel he was hosting a different show. ‘Matter of Fact’, another late-night show, was cancelled after 10 months and then Grant moved to Doha to work with Al Jazeera (which I have problems with). 

Now he’s back though it remains to be seen how long the China program will last for. I wonder why Grant is such a butterfly? Is the problem with him or with the ABC? To make ‘China Tonight’ he teams up with Yvonne Yong, who started working at the national broadcaster in 2016 and has also worked with Sky News in London.

Grant worked in China for many years and Yong speaks Mandarin so the two hosts have a good pedigree and what I saw is promising. This type of program is especially important due to the lack of news coming out of China on account of the Communist Party’s iron-like grip on the flow of information. This has gone so far as to spawn new social media platforms for Chinese people, which are rigorous in their obedience to the Party. There is no such thing as a free media in China so Grant and Yong provide an unusual window onto its public sphere. As I’ve written in the past, much of what passes for public debate happens on social media, which can become quite boisterous despite the Party’s hunger for total control.

In the show of 18 October I saw some evidence of a peculiarly Chinese form of cancel culture. Whereas in the West when someone is cancelled it’s at the instigation of random actors who build momentum for action, in China it’s the Party that orders and carries out the cancellation, even leading to actors in movies having their names removed from credits. It’s Orwellian, and I’ve got Grant and Yong to thank for supplying light in a space characterised by darkness.

The Age selectively turns off replies to tweets

Having posted yesterday on a tweet involving Gina Reinhart that had replies turned off I’ve scouted out some tweets from the same source with the reply function still on. This seems to be the default position.

The following tweets had replies enabled. First, one about supermarkets and the competition offered by retailer Aldi.

Next is a tweet about a local Australian Netflix employee.

Next is a women’s health story. Another noncontentious one.

Finally there’s one about vaccines for Covid – potentially contentious but still getting the liberal treatment.

It seems that consumer affairs, health, and industrial relations are less contentious than climate change. The newspaper's editors are obviously concerned about the High Court decision that makes media companies liable for comments on posts they put up. That case resulted from comments left on a Facebook post.

The Age has turned off comments for Twitter posts

I discovered this on the morning of 7 October when I wanted to reply to a post editors had put up about Gina Reinhart saying that humans weren’t affecting the climate. See image below.

This is fairly alarming though I saw the same morning (it was about 8.30am) that the Guardian and the New York Times hadn’t followed suit. It’s alarming for the same reason that it’s alarming when politicians block people on Twitter. This is because dialogue is the raison d’etre of social media and, for a journalist or politician, obstructing it must be viewed with a feeling of disquiet.

Though you can understand why some might take this step. When a journalist or a politician criticises social media on account of the tone of debate social media responds by doubling down, so you see two sides ranked like opposing football teams, each one eager to prove itself in the contest. Some people keep away. Others keep silent and watch from the sidelines.

Eleven o’clock pressers provide distraction

Many people are truly suffering because they’re doing the right thing. For me, lockdown hasn’t changed much as I mostly sit on the couch reading books – which is what I did before the restrictions were put in place, and it’s what I’ll be doing after they’re relaxed – so not seeing people isn’t much of a hardship. But for many it is very difficult. I can understand that people need company to make them feel whole, to take their thoughts away from unpleasant resorts, or to distance them from other urgent things like paying bills that pile up even as income is cut off. 

No wonder the daily eleven o’clock press conferences the state premiers hold are so welcome for people sitting at home with little to do. One friend put up an image of the TV tuned to the news and commented as though it were, for him, an occasion to break out the popcorn. It’s the signal event that marks the weekly rhythm, the bass note that gives the day its form, the place people go to in order to feel, for a few minutes, that they’re in control of their lives, and not some bizarre new illness come out of Wuhan like a new horseman of the Apocalypse.

“Poor Johnny lacklustre lock down,” commented one friend, “no play dates, just the existential crisis of corona virus and media saturation, here is hoping this chapter of our lives can end soon.” This shows that some people have come to resent the eleven o’clock presser. The federal government has been the main loser from the notoriety of the presser, its approval rating sliding alarmingly even as people stock up on intellectual comfort food while seated on the couch. My friend John will no doubt be applauding the opinion poll result, but I can’t help but feel sorry for the government, its stars hung so high until recently, and nothing that the Opposition did seemed able to lay a finger on it. Now, it lies like a Coke can crumpled in the gutter, ready for binning. For all of its sinning.

Nikki Savva to write a column for Nine Newspapers

In 2016 Savva published a book about Tony Abbott and the small coterie of insiders who helped him to govern. In it, she talks about Abbott’s problems. I wrote at the time:

One of the main ones was that all decisions seemed to emanate from a small group of select people in the leader's office, including his chief-of-staff. The type of collegial consultation that members of Parliament are apparently used to in a Westminster democracy were thrown out the door. A tiny clique was doing everything to control the message, but when the leader's popularity failed to turn around people outside that group turned on the leader and replaced him just like that.

That chief-of-staff, Peta Credlin, now writes a column for The Australian, where Savva used to run her words. Savva also used to work for Nine Chairman Peter Costello, so the current move is as cosy as Abbott’s counsellors were.

Savva is best known to the general population for her appearances on the ABC’s Sunday chat show, ‘Insiders’, which gets talked about at length on social media. One thing Savva didn’t talk about in her book was the one-term government we’ve seen so much of in recent years in Australia. As I wrote at the time of her book’s appearance:

But this phenomenon of one-term governments is something that the commentariat will have to one day really take a close, hard look at. So far noone has really made the attempt. I think it has something to do with the new public sphere in the age of social media. But a lot of people would despise me for even suggesting something like this.

It'd be very interesting if Savva could turn her attention to such things as these because so far the quantity of discussion about the shiftiness of politics in this country hasn’t percolated through the community to any significant degree. People are aware that something’s changed, but they are not all saying the same thing. Awareness is limited to responses to journalists and politicians who castigate the broader community when debate turns ugly. The common people revel in the icy sobriquets thrown out by the wounded.

YouTube and the problem of veracity in the news

Just this morning I finished a conversation that had started the day before. It was about an allegation that children in the Democratic Republic of Congo were being used for mining cobalt, a metal used in the manufacture of batteries. Obviously such a resource would these days be worth a lot of money, and with some evidence – from one video that had been loaded to YouTube – that Chinese companies were involved, I took interest. 

The statistic that had been bandied about by one person was 40,000. In other words there were – allegedly, mind you – 40,000 children according to UNICEF (the United Nations Children’s Emergency Fund) in an unsourced clip that started to infect the conversation I was having with two people overseas who might be expected – living as they do in developed countries – to be outraged by a fact of this nature. If it were established unquestionably to be true it would be a human rights violation of the first order. 

So why had no-one declared it publicly to the world? One “documentary” which had ostensibly been put up by Sky News (one man was confused about nomenclature because he’s unused to the media industry – with YouTube you get an odd assortment of real and unreal, or reliable and bogus, but the platform doesn’t tell you which is which) contained inconclusive evidence. The footage just didn’t seem accurate. A 4-year-old girl being used to sort through rocks? In other parts of this and other clips the soil was just being loaded into sandbags. The Sky News clip also showed a mine shaft with holes dug into the sides to allow people to descend into the bowels of the earth. Evocative footage – but was it real? – in other videos mining was done in open-cut fashion, a hole in the earth being occupied by workers putting ore into containers. And in the Sky News clip the children sounded like they were speaking Portuguese – instead of French.

All suspicious, but the two men who’d decided that I was a good candidate for well-intentioned indoctrination had by this time turned to sarcasm, a favoured method people use when they are unable to get other types of persuasion to convince you of whatever cackhanded idea they’ve got in their heads. I told one of the men who’d suggested – being a journalist – I should make my own story:

I'll buy a ticket to DRC tomorrow and pay $20000 to make a story in a dangerous country where there's no rule of law and where the virus is doing how much damage? Anyway too old for that sort of thing. I'll wait until someone younger and better resourced makes a credible story.

A credible story would be one that would get the global news industry motivated to fix a problem that – being so outrageous and manifestly unjust (40,000 children?) – engaged the world. If the Guardian or the New York Times were able to get a team of reporters and a photographer to Africa and make one story that verified that even 100 children were being used to mine cobalt. If the Sydney Morning Herald were to syndicate such a story on its website for subscribers such as myself to read. If a hashtag were to start up that promoted this single, reliable story instead of a few random mouth-breathers rigid with indignation at me – not the exploiters of said alleged child miners – for daring to disbelieve what they were privileged and – hear the heavenly choirs! – chosen to share with their grateful followers.

But no, not one story. Just a United Nations allegation and a random number (40,000!) picked out of the air by some functionary in order to shock the comfortable Western middle class into feeling guilty about using a mobile phone to message family and friends. You can see how potentially irresistible such a story would be to millions of social media users. Everyone in the world who uses a mobile phone – billions of people – could collectively suck in a mouthful of air, immediately killing all wildlife. The combined exhalation of human-produced CO2 – not produced by those wretched child miners, mind you! – could fuel the growth a trillion righteous saplings. 

The tweets of course didn’t stop even after I’d stopped talking on Twitter, with a Canadian with an Indian name triumphantly posting a link to a story from the UN’s website detailing the hideous crime. 

It was time to stop. Time to put this baby to bed. The misinformation industry is legion. Even politics is infected by the disease. What the above shows is not a crime being perpetrated against children in Africa. We’re dealing with a Wild West of global proportions, where any bad actor or any fool can use completely fabricated and false information to achieve diverse ends. We saw it in the 2016 US presidential election where thousands of dedicated Russian trolls manufactured stories designed to bring about a planned result. The media is not just under attack from thieves who purloin stories and repurpose them, publishing the rewritten article on a new web page alongside their own chosen ads. It’s being eroded by the internet itself. What people once thought of as a liberating influence is turning out to be a prison for the gullible.