B Sides

HTFU

The new boss of News Ltd gets off to a bad start:

Incoming News Limited CEO Kim Williams says Australian politicians need to toughen up and get over their glass jaws.

...Federal ministers and the Greens have accused News Limited papers of bias and being a "threat to democracy", but Mr Williams says the papers are just being "robust".

"A free and independent media must always examine government and oppositions, and do so confidently and independently," he said.

"I think we have a kind of national glass jaw syndrome in a lot of political life at the moment, and that is to be regretted."

Yes, because clearly newspapers themselves are completely blameless.  They never get anything wrong and never overstep the mark.  Anyone who complains about the way they do their jobs is obviously a wimp who just can't take a bit of robust criticism.  It is simply impossible that, on occassion, their criticism might be valid.  

Sigh.

Williams is entitled to defend his organisation, but to do it in these terms is to deploy that strange mixture of childishness and arrogance that constantly undermines News Ltd position as a serious news organisation.  That the new boss chose this as his opening gambit is beyond depressing.

When the person on one side of an argument tells the other side to harden up, or that they've got a glass jaw, chances are we have reached the end of rational debate.  It is a way of shutting down discussion, not engaging with it, and declaring, "I'm right, you are wrong, and nothing you can say will make me think otherwise."

So the paradox is outstanding: By rejecting all criticism as nothing more than the whining of wimps, Kim Williams is, in effect, withdrawing from discussion of his company's shortcomings.

The politicians, on the other hand, by going public with their complaints, not only risk the sort of insulting, dismissive comments that Mr Williams has now deployed, they take the substantial risk of copping even more "robust examination" by the media organisation they are chastising.

In that scenario, who exactly is it that has the glass jaw?

Qantas dispute

David Penberthy spells out the reality of what's happening at Qantas and why Alan Joyce's pay rise should not be an issue:

There are a couple of unpleasant realities about modern business which, if ignored, mean that businesses will not succeed. The first is that in an open market place big businesses have to pay the going rate for chief executives.

Absolutely correct.  They just have to.  And when the same globalised market which Mr Joyce wants to integrate Qantas with demands that workers are paid less and that they shouldn't be allowed to unionise or defend their conditions of employment, that's just another one of those unpleasant realities of modern business we can't ignore.

So leave Alan Joyce alone.  The market just had to grant him that 71% pay rise, that $3m per annum.  Can't you see how unpleasant all this is for him?  

None of this is management's fault.  It's the fault of the unions and the workers demanding for themselves what the market very kindly provides for Mr Joyce all by itself.

What sort of trouble-maker would want to interfere with such a perfect system?  

Elizabeth Warren brings it....

If you're a fan of US Senate candidate Elizabeth Warren's recent comments about taxation, you'll probably enjoy this.  If you're not, you might enjoy it anyway.

Manne o Manne

At the risk of being sucked into the vortex of responding to responses of my own responses and eventually disappearing up my own bum, I wanted to say a quick word about this piece by Robert Manne.

In it, Manne compiles a list of responses to his Quarterly Essay, Bad News, and his point is to note the frenzied, over-the-top response his essay has received from The Australian.

His point is well-taken and his conclusion is correct: 

...no other serious newspaper in the English-speaking world that would have responded in the mad, obsessive way the Australian has responded to the publication of “Bad News”. It is as if the paper has been determined to prove my thesis true, namely that it is not only the principal enforcer in this country of the core values of the Murdoch empire – market fundamentalism and American global hegemony – but also that it is now so boastful and bullying in character that it cannot rest until it feels that those who have dared to criticise it have been crushed. In addition, the response has confirmed another hypothesis of the essay: the paper’s cult-like character. The manic response of the Australian to “Bad News” makes it clear that even its most senior journalists cannot bring themselves to tell its editor-in-chief that his behaviour is not only doing harm to his personal reputation but is helping to destroy the credibility of their paper in the eyes of the observing, discerning public. 

But in making his case, he takes a side-swipe and some of the non-Australian responses to the essay, and what he chooses to say about my piece in The Drum is weird:

September 10. The silence (sort of) breaks. ‘Cut & Paste’ is devoted to the essay. Clive Hamilton in Crikey is quoted on the Australian’s “eerie silence”; Adam Brereton in New Matilda on my dull prose and foolish thesis; Tim Dunlop in the Drum on my “hopelessly inadequate” conclusion about replacing Mitchell and Murdoch (which was in fact tongue in cheek);

This is a misleading summary of what I said and is the the sort of selective quoting that Manne himself, quite rightly, chastises The Australian for doing.  By allowing that to stand as the representative quote from my piece, a casual reader could be forgiven for thinking I was nothing but critical of essay, which is simply wrong.

But the other odd thing is that comment in brackets, that his comments about replacing Murdoch and Mitchell were meant as tongue in cheek.

Seriously?

Look, I accept his word that he was joking, but I'd be surprised if many people thought he was. He wrote, for example, that

“...the Australian employs many of the best journalists in the country. I will not name them for fear of doing them harm. It only requires a different editor-in-chief and owner for it to become a truly outstanding newspaper.”

I must admit that I missed that he was commenting tongue in cheek.  Even now I struggle to see that that is what he was doing, and I do genuinely wonder what the point of such a tongue in cheek comment was.

But I stand corrected.  Confused, but corrected.

One other small point: if in an online piece you are going to mention articles that are also freely available online -- especially if you are going to selectively quote from them -- it is good form to provide a link so people can click through and check your claims.

Ignoring success in order to reverse engineer a crisis

@Pollytics just asked on Twitter what's been happening over the last few days.  

Basically this: all of those who have steadfastly refused to give the Labor Government credit for having successfully managed the economy through the Great Recession/GFC, and who have, in the process, managed to discredit and demonise every useful thing the government has done (stimulus, BER etc), and who have, in the process helped talk confidence down and create a sense of crisis at odds with our actual performance, are now watching the worsening economic conditions in the rest of the world -- which will almost inevitably make their way to Australia -- and are preparing to pounce on the first signs of a downturn here and scream I-told-you-so and announce that, however retrospectively, they were right along.

Any other questions?

'Non-media' folk despair

This is really depressing.  Jonathan Holmes has written a piece in which he says it has just occured to him that just maybe there might be something in all these calls to make the media a bit more accountable: 

I've been absent from The Drum for a couple of weeks, but the last column I wrote toed the standard media line on the idea that more regulation of the media - especially the print media - could possibly be a good idea.

What surely we don't need - not at least until it's forced on us by conduct which so far as we know has not and is not occurring in Australia - is a state-appointed regulator to enforce good behaviour on the press.

Since then, a few bits of information have come my way that have led me, if not to a fundamental change of mind, at least to an appreciation of the frustration that the press's complacency and self-importance can engender in non-media folk.

Why depressing?  If it takes a switched-on guy like Holmes, who deals daily with the rubbish reporting of our illustrious media, to only now realise that 'non-media folk' might have a point, what chance that any other journo is paying the slightest bit of attention?

There's nothing Holmes says in this piece that hasn't already been said a million times by plenty of 'non-media folk'.  Maybe if they started taking their customers seriously, things would actually start to improve.

I mean, the newspaper industry is barely solvent, their reputation is in the gutter, they are shedding readers like a dog shaking off water, and Holmes is only just now getting 'an appreciation of the frustration that the press's complacency and self-importance can engender in non-media folk'?

Look, this is really nothing against Jonathan Holmes.  He's great.  But seriously, how many times do we non-media folk have to say it?

The state of debate in Australia highlighted

John Quiggin and I go back a long way, at least in social media terms, in that we both started blogging at around the same time (c.2002).  He used to have a bit of a running gag going that we were 'blog twins', in that we often would often check each other's blogs only to find that we had written that day about the same thing and often in similar terms.

Of course, the comparison -- the twins gag -- flatters me much more than it does John, but it is a measure of the guy's basic modesty that he made the comparison in the first place.  I've always tried to do my bit, to contribute to public debate, but the fact is I'm not remotely in the category or class of PrQ.

This morning The Australian ran a hit piece on John Quiggin, and you know what?  Bite me.

Apart from his professional achievements -- which the The Australian only acknowledged in order to rationalise their subsequent attack on him -- John Quiggin is the very model of the citizen/expert that democracies are meant to produce.  His willingness to engage in public debate on any number of topics, and bring to bear his expertise on various debates about important policy issues -- and to do it in a way that is engaging and accessible to we amateurs in the audience -- is enough to raise him to the standard of a national treasure.

The fact that The Australian, and journalist Michael Stutchbury, chose the moment of John being honoured as a distinguished fellow of the Economic Society of Australia as a moment to attack him in the most half-baked partisan terms imaginable says more about their over-weening pettiness than it does about Quiggin's achievements or standing.

But it tells us more than that (as their over-weening pettiness was almost a given).

It tells us that political debate in this country -- at least so far as it is carried out and led by our only national newspaper -- is a debased and pathetic thing. If it is beyond the conservative intelligentsia represented by The Australian to rise above childish invective, is it any wonder that so many people despair about our politics?

That the paper could write John off as "far left" is just another measure of their ignorance, or of allowing ideology to get in the way of their ability to deal with facts.

As economist Joshua Gans said this morning:

The argument that "Quiggin is fine when he does his academic stuff but throws it all away when it comes to public discourse" is complete and utter crap. John is the most ruthlessly neoclassical economist I have ever met. He uses the tools of modern economics religiously in ALL of this work. And his point is that those tools can support government intervention as much as they are often used in naive, textbook form to support deregulation and market-based agendas. That is why he is so powerful in public debates. He argues on the terms of those who exploit economics as an ideology.

This exposes the frustration that many on the right have with Quiggin. He is smarter and better at this than they are.

Once again, The Australian's self-obsession, their complete inability to engage in debate and instead resort to ad hominem, all-guns-blazing personal attack has seen them score a spectacular own goal.

Unfortunately, they diminish us all with this sort of nonsense, poisoning the well of public debate and lowering serious discussion of matters of public importance to their own grubby level.  And everybody knows it except them.

Still, given the current state of their parent company it wouldn't surprise me if The Oz stopped publishing a long time before Quiggin's blog does.

In the meantime, for the sake of everyone, The Oz really needs to take a good, hard look at itself.

He said he said

UPDATE AND CORRECTION:  I got this wrong.  The first article is by Brad Norington, not Greg Sheridan.  My mistake.  Not sure how I made such stupid error, but I think I was fooled by a cursory glance at the newspaper in the milk bar this morning which has both stories side by side with a picture of GS.  Still, stupid of me.  At least there was an explantion for the contradictory views!

Who to believe?  Greg Sheridan, who said this about the debt-ceiling deal just hatched in the United States:

BARACK Obama has proved yet again that he is a political high-wire artist who can pull off a deal at the last minute when his presidency is on the line.

...But the Democrat President was dealing with restive Republican Party opponents in congress willing to use a normally routine increase in the government debt level to exact huge long-term cuts to entitlement programs for the sake of lowering budget deficits in the long-term. 

Mr Obama responded by playing a political game of chicken: he wagered, correctly, that congress leaders would back away from allowing a default when they stood at the precipice.

But he gambled further: if Republicans demanded budget cuts in return for increasing debt, he was determined not to accede to their push for a short-term fix of a small debt increase that would bring a repeat crisis in a matter of months - during next year's presidential election campaign. He played and won agreement for a long-term increase that would maintain the temperature until early in his second term - if he is re-elected.

Weeks of acrimonious debate came to a head just 24 hours before a debt level deadline tomorrow that would have left Washington unable to pay its bills. The White House and congress leaders on both sides agreed to authorise Mr Obama to increase the debt level by a further $US2.1 trillion.

Or do we believe Greg Sheridan, who said this about the debt-ceiling deal just hatched in the United States:

This negotiation has been an astonishing victory for congressional Republicans.

They have won the intellectual and political argument. President Barack Obama, the biggest-spending president in a generation of US politics, has abandoned plans for new taxes, effectively abandoned plans for any significant new government programs and accepted - in principle and in practice - that there must be deep, structural cuts to US government spending.

This is taking he said/she said journalism to the next level!  In one newspaper, on one morning, a single journalist runs two articles, one of which paints the debt-ceiling deal as a victory for President Obama and the other as a victory for his opponents.

Who says The Australian isn't balanced?

Monckton the Musical: Fiddler with the Truth

Too much talk about News of the World?

I'm responding to this tweet by one of my favourite Tweeters:

Have to disagree.  For a start, I don't think the crimes are minor.  The sheer scale of the hacking etc puts it beyond that description.  And at this stage, who knows the extent or type of crimes committed?

But let's say the crimes were minor. The real point of all of this is the massive betrayal of trust that this behaviour represents.  And it went on for years.  And it became normalised.  And it also seems to have corrupted parts of the police force and the parliament.  Surely this warrants a long, hard look?

As to the point about it becoming a News Ltd bashing excercise?  Sure, there's a element of that, but again that misses the point.  In fact, it risks corrupting the whole public discussion.  Once News Ltd gets to dismiss the whole thing as a vendetta aimed at them, the chance of anything useful arising from the incidents diminishes greatly.  We shouldn't let ourselves be sucked in by that sort of deflection.

Besides, if this inspires News to stick their noses into what other media groups are doing and it uncovers similar practices amongst them, all the better.  Let's see everyone's dirty laundry.

The media is an incredibly powerful force in democracies and they largely escape scrutiny.  They have very little trouble ignoring criticism, and when it comes, their tendency is to attack the messenger or hide behind glib assertions of that type that say, if I'm getting criticised I must be doing my job properly.  The News of the World scandal is a rare opportunity to actually have a proper public debate about how journalists do their jobs.  And no, I don't mean a government led inquiry.  I mean a serious, ongoing discussion amongst we the people.  If we turn our back on that opportunity, get a bit bored by the debate, we reduce ourselves to irrelevance and license continued sub-standard behviour.  We'd be mugs to do that.