Gresham’s Second Law

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by Media, politics • Tags: , , , ,

Rupert Murdoch’s dominance of the Australian media is usually spoken of in terms of the 70% share his newspapers have in the Australian market. That is almost three-quarters of the Australian public are exposed (often with no alternative) to the Gospel according to Rupert every day. Every day exposed to his neoconservative ideology and his absolute determination to destroy those left of centre parties Labor and The Greens.

But the problem is much worse than mere market share. Mr Murdoch, no fool whatever his other failings, realised very early on that, just like a large share holding in a company leads to control of the company, 70% media saturation can be turned into 100% control of political discourse.

Works like this. Murdoch or his editors (but I repeat myself) decide on the format for the latest government attack. Doesn’t matter what it is, some fabricated and dishonest attack on the PM’s integrity, or a policy proposal, some poll result, some disagreement between Labor Party members, some union “scandal”, the latest fake leadership challenge. Whatever. The very act of launching the attack, in 70% of Australia’s newspapers, makes the attack itself “news”. The truthfulness, accuracy, of the attack is irrelevant (Rupert understood), its mere existence becomes news and is consequently repeated by other media outlets. Not to repeat it (notably in the case of Fairfax and the ABC, there is no question of not repeating it in the other media) would be evidence of pro-government bias. And that failure to repeat would itself feed into the next News Ltd media cycle, and so on.

Conversely, and this is just as important, when 70% of the country’s newspapers decide simultaneously, by pure coincidence, to NOT cover an event that might impact badly on the political Right, then the rest of the media will ignore it too. Covering it, when News Ltd is not, would be another clear indication of bias of course. So it is left alone. If a Right Wing scandal falls in the forest and is not covered by Murdoch’s minions does it really fall? No, of course it doesn’t, are you not paying attention? Consequently while Labor and the PM (and her staff) were massively attacked for months throughout the media, following News Ltd’s lead, on AWU, Slipper, Thomson, Australia Day “Riot”, and so on, subsequent stories on Abbott’s history, Ashby, the HSU, Abbott’s staffers, etc, quickly became non-stories, barely mentioned, if at all, then dropped within hours.

Accentuating this power has been the recent cross-fertilisation of different media. Suddenly radio shock jocks began featuring in regular segments on tv breakfast shows. Suddenly News Ltd columnists began appearing regularly on tv current affairs shows. Suddenly tv breakfast shows began “reviewing” the morning newspapers, which meant reading out headlines from the News Ltd papers and the others who had copied them. Suddenly “Our Political Correspondent” became a regular part of news bulletins, again repeating (because it was of course now “news”) whatever hares the Murdoch Hunt Masters had set running that day.

To complete the cycle, Right Wing politicians, gratefully accepting the Murdoch talking points each day about the “bad government”, began doing press conferences in which they merely repeated them, thus strengthening the perception that they were actually “news”, and keeping them running through each news cycle.

Once upon a time our national broadcaster, the ABC, would have kept outside this Murdochian Circle. Had reporters who created news themselves, not just parroted the news agenda of News Ltd. Had programs that set the political agenda not copied someone else’s. Conducted interviews with questions they had researched, not simply repeating political spin from the Right. So it provided a circuit breaker, an alternative.

Now, not only does it not provide an alternative but it has been locked into the Murdoch circle, behaving in exactly the same way as other media outlets. But it is even worse than that. The ABC, retaining the air of authority, of credibility, of objectivity, built up carefully over decades by good people, is providing legitimacy in turn to News Ltd. The procession of News Ltd journalists, columnists, the reviewing of the papers, the breathless presentation of Murdoch Memes, all replace the original good journalism of the ABC with propaganda.

And similar processes seem to have happened in America and Britain. Everywhere Murdoch thrives, bad journalism drives out good.

Like snowflake crystal

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by Climate Change, Environment, Media, politics • Tags: , , , , ,

When I was, many years ago, a youngish archaeozoologist (or zooarchaeologist, the difference in name being a matter of taste), one of the skills I needed, and had, was a combination of pattern recognition and pattern memory. I would be faced with dozens, hundreds perhaps, of pieces of bone in various sizes, shapes, colours, textures. The challenge was to look at them one at a time and remember that you had seen, somewhere else on the table, perhaps in another bag or box, another piece that was similar, very similar, in colour, texture, and that had a broken end that matched this broken end. I could reach out for where I knew it was and, hey presto, join together two parts of a broken bone.

Then I could begin constructing narratives about how the bones had been broken, whether they were burnt, how far they had moved, what species were present (two halves of a jaw reassembled being easier to identify than the two separate halves), and so on. A narrative that helped make sense of the lives of the people who had once lived in that place.

I don’t do that work any more, haven’t for a long time. But now I work in social media and similar skills are once again in play. Firstly because of the way I work I suppose. Once I used to hastily jot down ideas while stopped at traffic lights on the car, jot them on any rubbish I could find like supermarket receipts, car park vouchers, paper bags, and then try to put fragments, bulging out of my pockets, together into a narrative when I got home.

One narrative I was trying to construct was my own family history/autobiography one (see under tab marked “Dream”) for publication on this blog. Lives are fragmentary, both as they are lived and more so in recollection. We take a childhood memory here, an object there, a photograph of a friend, and shape it together to form a coherent fragment of a life. Or at least a narrative of a fragment, because memoirs are nothing if not unreliable, to lesser and greater extents. But as an autobiographer you get to construct your own narrative, before your biographer comes along later and reconstructs it with his or her own narrative of your life.

These days fragments of ideas, internet links, quotes, photos, headings, half written posts, are jotted down on computer documents, and bulge out of computer folders cunningly labelled things like “Blog Ideas”. Every so often I go through them, remembering an idea from here, a link from there, a quote from someone, and suddenly realise that a narrative can be constructed.

And the material from which these fragments are derived is itself fragmented. Every day stories come pouring in from all over the world, important, frivolous, happy, sad, serious, trivial, fact, fiction. Long, short, stark, expanded, checked, unchecked, information, disinformation. All grist to the social media mill. Problem is though that it all comes through the filter of the mainstream media and is converted into their narratives before it reaches us. We’d like the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth, and decide the narrative, having seen patterns, put two and two together, for ourselves.

So we need to deconstruct what we get. If I was looking at a table full of bones that someone else had stuck together, using their own criteria for best fit, and their own filter for narrative construction, I wouldn’t accept it. Instead I would dissolve the glue, separate the bones back to their original state, and start again from scratch. Much the same with the media narratives. We need to see what they are made from, and how and why they have been constructed. Then deconstruct them and make up our own minds.

The environment we all live in is often seen as fragments. Sometimes in a positive way “one might begin to write a book about a hedgerow when a boy and find it incomplete in old age” (from my lovely Ricard Jefferies). A realisation of the enormous complexity of the world we evolved in. Sometimes in a negative way, when politicians, developers, farmers, fishermen, think that destroying one fragment of woodland, driving one species to extinction, polluting one waterway, won’t matter because it is just a small thing.

But just as in our own lives, and in the social and political worlds, the environmental fragments are all inter-connected, and we need to reassemble those fragments to understand all of the narratives.

Have we got the skills?

A matter of taste

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by Media, politics • Tags: , ,

For thousands of years it was essential for kings and emperors and dictators to employ “tasters” (a profession difficult to write a job advertisement for, you would think), whose job it was of course, brave soul, to have a bit of every item of food or drink to be consumed by his ruler in case someone was trying to poison him. The taster would roll over dead after consuming the morsel of larks tongues or sip of Dom Perignon, thus allowing the king or emperor to pause before consuming the lethal item in question and arrange for all the kitchen and serving staff to be boiled in oil.

An essential safeguard for people who were generally hated by the 99% of the population who weren’t benefiting from their rule, and who were unable to see sophisticated poisons arriving at their dinner table in the way that they would observe an assassin equipped with sword, knife or spear. Pretty successful survival technique.

It’s a profession that went out of fashion for some reason, but it could do with a revival. Oh, not for emperors and kings and dictators, but, for, well me. I think I’d like someone who could check out the rubbish food from take-away outlets, see if it was safe for me to eat. Same with supermarket food. I mean I’m guessing there must be items of actual unharmful food in both places, but I’d rather not damage myself trying to find them. Perhaps Morgan Spurlock (of “Super Size Me” fame) would like the job. But it would go well beyond Big Macs or apples sprayed with pesticides.

I’d like my taster (employed from “Tasters ‘R’ Us”) to walk ahead of me in shopping centres, sampling the air before I breathe it, drink from water taps before I slake my thirst, oh and test the decibel level of muzak and store announcements and their IQ (irritation quotient) before I even enter the front door.

Speaking of announcements there’s another service I’d like performed, perhaps by a different branch of “Tasters ‘R’ Us” called “Listeners ‘R’ Us”. This would involve some brave soul checking out any news/current affairs media I was likely to come into contact with – radio shock jocks, News Ltd newspaper columnists, IPA staff seminars on the ABC, blogs by right wing nut jobs, tweets from conservative tweetbots, speeches by neocon politicians, books by former Labor politicians determined to bite the hand that once preselected them, the whole horrible mix of colourless, odourless, and certainly tasteless but audible poisons spewing out into the world every minute of every hour of every day. Poisons not of the body but of the mind, the job of the taster to preserve not my life but my sanity, at the cost of his own. When he rolled over screaming and kicking, throwing bricks at tv, pulling radio out of socket, burning newspapers in the backyard, I would know that his mind had been poisoned beyond endurance and I should stay clear of the responsible media. And call for a new taster. These days it would be a much shorter job occupancy than the taster for a Roman Emperor.

But, like the Emperor, it would give me peace of mind. Anyone else want to give “Listeners ‘R’ Us” a call? I might buy shares in their company. Oh and “Tasters ‘R’ Us” of course, bet you’d like them to walk in front of you too.

Nudge, Nudge

by Uncategorized •

Welcome to a lot of new blog subscribers, and a lot of new twitter followers, very encouraging. This post from a month ago introduces the sections of the blog, shows you around, makes you feel at home. Oh and begs you very subtly to vote for me on Best Blogs 2013 (see icon at right to click) because voting closes before the 30 April, hurry hurry.

If you are a blog subscriber (ie receiving this by email or RSS) you will probably find it easier to go direct to vote here – on page 5 under “T” for THE Watermelon Blog.

Much appreciated.

Will add a new chapter to the autobiography this weekend, take the story up to date over the last year. Hope you enjoy (now done, see “Topic of Cancer” last chapter in “Dream”, tab above)
Cheers.

Winter Holiday

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by Cancer • Tags: ,

Latest instalment in lymphoma’s two-year battle with me yesterday. A passing out parade with my Commanding Officer Oncologist. Apparently I am passed fit to return to the real world, not to see her again for three months, a winter holiday from hospitals and doctors. And, nice as she is, that suits me!

So there we are. The two extra serves of nastier chemical rations have done their thing. Physical examination confirms my last PET scan – nothing going on in my lymph system as far as it is humanly possible to tell (always remembering that you are never cured, just in remission). My blood and body however do reflect the ravages of chemotherapy, and it’s going to take some time to feel relatively normal again.

But good news, no doubt, been lucky when so many are not. Means I can stop thinking of myself as a cancer patient, and go back to thinking of myself as someone who happens to have cancer.

As you were – stand at ease.

Bread and circuses

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by Uncategorized • Tags:

Had to go to the supermarket for bread and stuff the other day. Suddenly, as if a mirage, there was a circus big top, occupying the normally empty grass area next to the car park.

I’m not a circus fan, don’t think I’ve ever been to one (odd how memory plays tricks, just a faint thought that maybe I have once, but I can’t distinguish that from all of the circus images of film and literature), but a circus arrival in a town is still a big event I guess.

A big Big Top, and occupying the area behind it dozens of vehicles. But contrary to the popular image (“like a circus” said of some disorganised, chaotic event) this is a carefully organised army-style camp of new trucks and fancy caravan trailers, all shiny clean and modern, parked carefully in an ordered square. Has to be of course to move all the people and equipment around Australia, but still a little surprising given memories of childhood reading about circuses.

Also pleasantly surprising, in a grass area neatly fenced with portable fencing, was the small group of Shetland ponies, quietly grazing but no doubt looking forward to their next exciting stint in the ring. Exotic animals long ago banned from circuses here thankfully, and seeing the ponies reminded me pleasantly that there were no lions and tigers in tiny cages, no elephants tethered by the leg with chains. Just ponies, and, no doubt, preparing in their caravans, clowns, acrobats, jugglers, trapeze artists and all the rest.

So, pretty good stuff, Moscow Circus, I hope you succeed, and from the lines of people buying tickets it looked like you might be. But look, just a tip, the sign on the side road entrance saying “Disabled Drop-Off”? You might want to consider rewording that!

Anyway. Parked, went to supermarket, got bread and stuff. And there, as I came out, was another sign, hand-written in biro on a torn out piece of paper, taped to the wall next to the panel of supermarket light switches:

clown

I read it once. I read it again. I looked around. No clown. I read it again, peeped around corner in case I had missed something. No clown.

No, I don’t know the answer. Perhaps visiting clowns from the Circus had caused a ruckus the previous night. Perhaps I had missed seeing a giant mechanical clown somewhere in the refrigerated section juggling eggs.

Perhaps it was something I only imagined. Or perhaps I misread it, and it was really an instruction to blog readers:

“Please remember to turn clown off after reading the blog”

Click.

Look at that big hand

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by Cancer, Media • Tags: ,

The last time I watched “High Noon” was 60 years ago. And that’s a sentence that seems odd to write. But a dear friend kept telling me I should watch it again, that it had (unlike some other once popular films we discussed) stood up well to the passing of the years.

Not easy to get hold of, but I suddenly spotted it the other day on one of those cheap remainders tables in the DVD store and so here we are.

And indeed it has stood up well. But I don’t really want to discuss the craft that makes it, or should make it, somewhere up among the all time film classics. When I saw it 60 years ago I would have watched it as I did any other cowboy movie. Thought it a bit slow-moving perhaps, long time to get to the gunfight showdown which was the set piece of any cowboy movie. But then, bang, bang, bang, and bang, and it was the baddies who would be, of course, occupying the newly made coffins.

But now, a sadder man and wiser, with a lot more miles in the saddle, the gunfight is incidental, a necessary chore to get through, while the rest of the film is, astonishingly for a cowboy movie made in 1952, an extended metaphor worthy of, say, Bergman.

And a metaphor, what’s more, about life and death, something that I as a child knew nothing about, but now, with an almost near death experience or two under my gunbelt, can identify with instinctively.

Gary Cooper is everyman. Fate is coming for him down that ominous rail line stretching into the future. Something wicked that way comes, inexorably. Is it on time, yes it’s on time, is it on time, yes it’s on time. Oh, yes, it’s a cowboy movie, so the wicked thing is a gunslinger in real life, but imagine that it is cancer, say, or a diseased heart. The clock is ticking, this is the deadline, no escape.

Should everyman run from his fate? Well, he could, but he can’t hide, it will catch up with him (like an appointment in Samarra), all he can do is face it and either survive or not. Bravely facing your worst fear may be suicidal, but the alternative is worse. But wait, not to worry, he won’t be alone, he can face this with his own strength of character, all the character resources he has built up, his reserves of mental health and strength..

But then everything is stripped away from him, bit by bit, one by one. He is on his own, or, as Mrs Soprano said, “in the end we all die in our own arms alone”. And all the time the clock is ticking, the deadline fixed. Death is in the air and the coffins are being made, the hammering of coffin nails matching the ticking clock.

Finally the clock will strike twelve (though oddly it doesn’t audibly), and everyman is out on the street, alone. That long dusty street, the final stage of life’s journey heading towards the wickedness which has now arrived by rail and is covering the last little distance, potentially the last moment of life.

Finally the battle is on for his life. Face your demons, fight hard, bravely, win through against the odds, survive. Live to fight another day.

Or maybe that interpretation is biased by my own recent demons. What do you think? But if you haven’t seen it, or not since you were a child, take another look, this lean, pared down gem of a movie is a real classic. My friend was right.

Field of dreams

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by Education, politics • Tags: , , , , , , ,

Odd moment during the recent announcement and garbled discussion of education reforms in Australia. Chief Minister of the ACT, Katy Gallagher, was asked by parochial reporters, essentially, “what’s in it for Canberra?”

She said, perhaps bemused by the stupid question, that because most if not all Canberra students were already receiving support above what was being proposed, there actually wasn’t anything “in it” for the ACT.

In hunter-gatherer societies all children are educated equally – it would be suicidal for the society to do anything else. Same with the early agricultural societies. In both cases gifted individuals may specialise in particular areas of expertise later, but all will be educated.

We lost this equality of opportunity as the accumulation of wealth by a few created a situation where better education could be purchased, and that has remained the case, and been strengthened, ever since.

Indeed in Australia the Right, themselves, one and all, the products of the best education money could buy, decided they could do better as old boys (or girls) than merely denoting a few tax deductible dollars to the alma mater. They could, they realised, get their name up on the honour roll by getting the people of Australia to pay big bucks to schools already overflowing with swimming pools and polo ponies and acres of rolling playing fields. And they could lock in such payments permanently with a clever mathematical formula which achieved bias while appearing objective. A simple formula, always applied by conservatives, and always effective = The Rich get Richer. Genius eh?

So, it’s time for a reversal of fortunes. A simple formula = To each according to his needs. Identify the poorest public schools, give them more money to build up their resources to the level of the richer public schools. And then, whisper who dare, onwards to the levels of the private schools. Oh, sorry, getting a bit carried away there. Never mind, let’s get all students onto as level a playing field, playing fields, as possible. Cry havoc and let loose the dogs of class war.

But wait, there’s more. The other conservative legacy also affects equality of educational opportunity – religion. Separation of church and state? Yeah, whatever, but separation of church and school just as important. Yet John Howard unleashed the dogs of sectarianism. Loony tunes religious schools proliferated. Students taught curriculums in which garbage like creationism can be included, because religious freedom. “The more religion, the lower the quality of education” – write that on the blackboard 100 times Mr Howard

But worse is that schooling, meant to broaden horizons, introduce new ideas, allow children to mix widely, teach the ability to think and evaluate, to see a world beyond the walls of their home, has been narrowed. Religious fanatics have been allowed to carry out home-schooling in bulk. Allowed to make sure that no child raised in the closed little worlds of religious fundamentalism is allowed to discover that there is another real world outside.

So, equality of opportunity for all students? Absolutely, stuff of dreams. But understand that it involves more than just money. I have a dream of getting all students onto the playing field of secular education.

What’s in it for Australia? Only the next generation.

Ding Dong Battle

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by politics • Tags: , ,

In 1974, when Edward Heath had lost office, and there began to be talk of Thatcher taking over as Conservative Leader, my [very] English Aunt, Midlands family background of miners and factory workers, and memories fresh of Thatcher’s dirty work as Education minister, robbing poor school children of their milk, said to me “If that woman ever becomes Prime Minister I’m emigrating to Australia”.

Well, sadly Maggie did, but Ruby didn’t. People don’t of course, even though it is such a common reaction to approaching political storms (“if John Howard wins”, “if George Bush wins”). People like my Aunt don’t anyway, too emotionally rooted in family and community. Too costly to physically and economically uproot. Too loyal, I guess, right down to their bootstraps, to the country of their birth. So they stay, as the political storm clouds gather once more, and batten down what hatches they can.

Bit different when the Gucci Shoe is on the other foot. The mere whiff of what laughingly passes for a Blairite/Keatingesque/Obamacrat/Hollandaise “only-a-few-miles-right-of-centre-social-democrat-party” in the offing, and the Rich are, well, offing. Depardieuing to some less taxing place. And not just individuals – whole companies, corporations, faced with, say, a mining tax increase, threaten to dig up all the Australian iron ore, bury it again in, say, Myanmar, and dig it up again to sell to China, from a new head office in a tax haven.

But the poor stay behind, and watch as swine like Thatcher graduate from stealing milk from children to stealing mines from miners, factories from communities, houses and services from families, and set free the dogs of banks and financiers to ravage the economy. Oh, they try to fight back, some ding dong battles, but the power of the state, riot police on flying monkeys, is never so starkly on display as when it is being used by the rich, for the rich, against the poor.

Nor is the power of the media more starkly displayed than in these circumstances, when Rupert’s Unlimited News Bugles consolidate the gains made by the corporate and public order shock troops (while using some themselves to smash print unions), and convince the suddenly out of work and homeless that they will never have it so good again unless they vote the “bosses’ party” in again, or a “worker’s party” that has absolutely indistinguishable policies, because “socialism” is so nineteenth century. Like laissez-faire capitalism, I guess.

And then, when the Great Leader has trashed her (or his) own country, spread the disease to others, cosied up to even more obnoxious foreign dictators who stop at nothing until the jackboots are stamping on faces, and helicopters are flying out to sea, and, retired or been, finally too extreme even for his (or her) colleagues, shunted out, the Trumpets of the Free Press move in to start rewriting history even as the removalist vans are passing each other at the entrance to 10 Downing St.

And, when the Angel Gabriel’s trumpets sound to summon the old, cold, warrior to Valhalla, the Press write effusive, white-washed eulogies as if preparing for sainthood application, and any suggestion that history, real history, should be referred to, is shouted down with that old saviour of horrid right wing leaders (though not, apparently, those of the left), “Don’t speak ill of the dead”. And even the public broadcaster, in the face of widespread demand from people trying to fight back, refuse to play a very appropriate song from Wizard of Oz. Well, bugger that for a game of soldiers, a game of battleships – there’s a Class War going on all over the word, and it’s the Class of ’79 that’s winning it. Time to join the battle.

I wish my Aunt had come to Australia, unexpectedly turned up on my doorstep, rung my bell, ” Ding Dong”. Escaped from the stealer of milk, winner of battles, Boadicea risen again to fly in a Harrier Jump Jet. Mind you, with the advent of John Howard I think Ruby would have been packing her bags again in 1996 for Blighty, sure, and rightly, that Oz was also in for rule by a potential milk stealer and armchair warrior.

And with Tony Abbott now looming in Australia like a Wicked Wizard from the East, I think it might be time to pack my bags and join her. Well, except for David Cameron already at the other end stealing hospital services from old ladies, and old gentlemen, and taxing their homes, completing Thatcher’s work.

Where has that Yellow Brick Road gone?

Fiery particles

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by Cancer, Environment • Tags: , , , ,

So here I am again. Blogging, one-handed, in the oncology day treatment ward. For the last time. Ever.

No, mustn’t tempt the fates, waiting with their deadly scissors to punish both optimism and hubris. This is hopefully the last chemo treatment (astonishingly number 19) for quite a while after two years and 4 days since my first one, an age ago.

Side effects a bit rough last time, hope better this time.

This whole process is a bit like burning the forest to get rid of weeds and then seeing the good green shoots appearing again through the blackened landscape. Chemotherapy burns up all the white blood cells, including the bad lymphoma particles, and then the blood ecology comes back.

But just as the forest is damaged by each fire, and the more you burn, the less well the ecology recovers, so the more you “burn” the good cells in the body the more you damage them, and the less your body returns to normal. Moderation in both are needed.

There, managed to combine my fire research with my cancer treatment, not a bad metaphor eh?

So don’t forget to vote for me as Best Blog at http://www.writerscentre.com.au/bloggingcomp/peopleschoice.html – page 5 under THE Watermelon Blog.