2GB is no longer Macquarie and CH9 would readily sack Jones a smaller cog in a much bigger wheel. (ODT)
A veteran radio executive puts it bluntly: “Alan’s a big fish at Macquarie but a small fish at Nine,” he says, pointing to the company’s portfolio of TV stations, newspapers, websites, streaming service Stan and real estate brand Domain. “He makes a lot of money but Nine won’t sit back and let him taint their whole reputation.”
While Jones insists his Ardern comments were a “mistake”, his detractors pointed to his growing rap sheet: calling for Opera House chief executive Louise Herron to be sacked last year for not allowing advertisements to be projected onto the building; suggesting that former Prime Minister Julia Gillard ought to be “thrown in the sea“; reading a text message on-air in the lead-up to the 2005 Cronulla riots, urging “Aussies” to “support the Leb and wog bashing day“; and a $3.74 million defamation payout in 2018 to a family Jones wrongly implicated in the deaths of 12 people.
In the UK, television news is governed by impartiality rules but our press is fiercely partisan, predominantly towards the right, and it is important that people understand this.
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But the current undermining of public trust in media, fuelled by President Donald Trump’s attacks on “fake news” and now mimicked by the UK government, goes far beyond scepticism or challenge. When research shows 72% of people in Britain believe television news to be accurate, it is right to be angry that Mr Johnson spurns it in favour of a union-flag-bedecked turn on Facebook.
“Decisions about what constitutes the truth may be fraught, but this reform has been achieved in other jurisdictions and these sorts of considerations are already routinely made by companies and regulators under consumer law.”
Critics of truth in advertising laws argue that it can be difficult to adjudicate claims, particularly in relation to the future.
For example, the former AEC official Michael Maley has questioned whether politicians “have a legal right to be believed when they say they don’t have a plan to do something”.
“In 2013 Tony Abbott said there would be no cuts to the ABC or SBS – he denied [the cuts], so does that mean you can’t say anymore about it?”
Conspiracy theorists are angry that recommendations for Fox News segments are appearing on their YouTube videos.
QAnon and other conspiracy theories are a “domestic terrorism threat” that may drive people to violence and crime, the FBI declared in a recently released intelligence bulletin.
NOW YouTube has made FOX/ Trump News the Primary Conspiracy Channel
Previously, users who watched videos about hoaxes such as QAnon or Pizzagate could easily be pulled into an echo chamber of disinformation by YouTube’s autoplay function, which queued up one conspiracy theory video after another. But now, those who seek out such content will often find a lineup of Fox News videos in lieu of more conspiracies.
He’s now denying any of it on Twitter employing his two word slogan Fake News (ODT)
President Donald Trump’s reelection campaign has harnessed Facebook advertising to push the idea of an “invasion” at the southern border, amplifying the fear-inducing language about immigrants that he has also voiced at campaign rallies and on Twitter.
“We don’t have a country right now,” he said in footage shown in one ad. “We have people pouring in, they’re pouring in, and they’re doing tremendous damage.”
He seized on the “invasion” imagery again in the run-up to the 2018 midterm elections, when he claimed without evidence that a caravan of migrants making its way north toward the border had been infiltrated by “criminals and unknown Middle Easterners.”
News Corp is taking us Back to the Future of the world of “Dole Bludgers” and a Labour Force that simply doesn’t want to work. (ODT)
The “job snobs” are back on the agenda.
With some in the Australian government’s own ranks arguing for a lift in the unemployment benefit, senior ministers appear to be upping the rhetoric about joblessness being a matter of choice for many.
“There are jobs out there for those who want them,” the federal minister for employment, Michaelia Cash, has told the Australian.
The Murdoch-owned newspaper published her comments in a front-page story on Monday that suggested Department of Employment research showed almost half of all employers were finding it difficult to hire workers due to “lack of interest” – or because applicants did not have adequate qualifications.
The article was vague on which issue was the bigger problem, but it led with the claim “job-seekers are actively snubbing work opportunities”.
Which organisations are the primary generators of destructive falsehoods in Australia? Here, IA’s trusty Facebook friends have been helpful once again.
The groups nominated most frequently by readers include:
News Corp;
commercial radio and television newsrooms;
the Institute of Public Affairs;
the Liberal Party;
the National Party;
public relations consultants used by the above parties;
big business peak bodies;
the big four banks and some other finance corporations;
mining and forestry corporations and industry groups;
Bad blood between media chiefs and the Morrison government deepened on Friday after Home Affairs Minister Peter Dutton rejected demands to drop police action against three high-profile journalists and implied the reporters committed a crime by receiving top-secret documents.
“I think it is up to the police to investigate, to do it independently and make a decision about whether or not they prosecute,” he told Nine’s Today program.
UN
“We are seeing a lot of backsliding around the world in democratic societies around basic protections, and a lot of it has been digital interference [with press freedoms],” he said, citing newly intrusive laws in France and Britain.
“Australia is following that line. But I think it’s also gone a lot further.”
“We are in a golden age of surveillance: all these digital tools of convenience [we use] have given governments enormous technological power to get access to everything we do and everything we say,” he said.
“There is this deeply unfortunate confluence of post-9/11 and the rise of the digital age that made it close to impossible to protect the privacy of [journalistic] work.
“People could care less about journalists. But they should care about the possibility in the future to have adequate and accurate information about what their governments are doing.”
To sum up, no one should ever claim that we Americans aren’t “at home” in the world. We’re everywhere, remarkably well funded and well armed and ready to face off against the aggressors and provocateurs of this planet. Just one small suggestion: thank the troops for their service if you want, and then, as most Americans do, go about your business as if nothing were happening in those distant lands. As we head into election season 2020, however, just don’t imagine that we’re the good guys on Planet Earth. As far as I can tell, there aren’t many good guys left.
A new report of sexual assault committed by President Donald Trump has come to light, but several major newspapers didn’t find the story important enough to place on their front pages.
Difficult to pin down when this narrative actually began, but for argument’s sake I’ll posit its start with the recent Australian Federal Election and the plethora of fake news trumpeting a Labor victory.
A successive run of negative polls published over at least two years, pointed to this mythical Labor win.
Indeed, dire poll numbers prompted Malcolm Turnbull’s putsch, which lead to the demise of Tony Abbott and ultimately the triumph of Scott Morrison.
The script suggested a brave new Shorten Labor Government replete with the sparkling post-modern trappings of a new Whitlam/Hawke/Keating imperium.
But the thumping hangover of this self-inflicted delusion is made worse by recent raids on the ABC and a News Corp journalist, both aided and abetted by the home-grown master of the dark art of fake news, the Minister for Home Affairs, Peter Dutton.
Jones is one of these illogical people. The problem is that he has been given a microphone to peddle his rubbish to thousands of listeners and give succour to far-right politicians who spruik similar rubbish in the party room.
One of the most disturbing outcomes is not prosecutions or even the raids themselves, but the chilling of public interest journalism. Sources are less likely to come forward, facing risk to themselves and a high likelihood of identification by government agencies. And journalists are less likely to run stories, knowing the risks posed to their sources and perhaps even to themselves.
Is this a false flag to distract from the ATO’s whistle blower? (ODT)
The actions are in connection to an April 2018 story that revealed internal government discussions about giving electronic intelligence agency the Australian Signals Directorate greater power to respond to threats on Australian soil.
“The reason is simple: for political parties, elections are make or break, determining their fate for the next three years; for the media, an election is just another story, admittedly a long-running and important story, but not an organisation-transforming event.” Conversation
I disagree I believe elections are a long runningmedia “investment” $80 million proved that and Murdoch media was a long term investor in the the conservatives and has been since Bob Hawke. It’s conservative leanings aren’t aimed at the general electorate but are focused on where the profit is and that’s not with the ALP. News Corp is less focused on news and far more on influence for money and PR. How much did they make this election? To say News Corp runs at a loss is merely to say they don’t pay tax. (ODT)
Soundbytes won the last election in Australia because of short memories and Media (ODT)
5. Trump claims that U.S. economy is better than ever
Trump obviously realizes that many Americans, like himself, have short attention spans. Democrats are much better at nuance, but when so many Americans respond instinctively to soundbites — not nuance or intricate details — Democrats are fighting an uphill battle. Trump has repeatedly congratulated himself for the United States’ low unemployment rates of 2018 and 2019, but the devil is in the details: the country was recovering significantly from the Great Recession when Obama was still president — and not all Americans have been feeling the recovery. But when Trump stresses that “our economy is better than it has been in many decades” and tries to take credit for it, his base is going to buy into it — even if they’re still struggling.
“If you’re constantly winding up audiences and telling them that all of their troubles are a result of this other group that is literally Hitler, that they’re literally Nazis, they’re literally Stalin, sooner or later some people are going to start picking up weapons and do something crazy,” Taibbi said. “This is why people are correctly upset about Fox News. But they should also be concerned about other forms of media. The formula is similar across the board.”
“Our system of bubble economics is going to produce some kind of a catastrophe at some point,” Taibbi, the author of one of the finest books on the 2008 financial crash, “Griftopia,” concluded. “At which point, if you tell people often enough that their next-door neighbor is literally in the league with Nazis or terrorists or whatever it is—of course Fox pioneered this, going back to the Iraq War, when we were told liberals were terrorist supporters—sooner or later, there’s going to be violence. The inability of society to agree on a common set of facts means the media has failed already. It means we’re just not reaching people. [In this atmosphere] we will never be able to work things out in a civil way.”
Thirty-seven percent of American citizens are socialist or communist. That’s far more people than voted for either Hillary Clinton (28% of eligible voters) or Donald Trump (27%) in 2016.
The majority is voiceless. A privileged minority rules. The United States is a political apartheid state.
If the Left were allowed on the ballot in this fake democracy, given space in newspapers and on television, invited to join political debates, and if it wasn’t brutally suppressed by the police and FBI, the Left wouldn’t need to wage a revolution in order to take over the country. Leftists could easily win at the ballot box if America were a real democracy.
Problem the electorates that count don’t watch Q&A (ODT)
If you were wondering what the newly-elected Morrison government has in store for the next three years, Q&A was the place for you to come … and leave with absolutely no idea.
Andrew Bolt was never a “chief lieutenant” so he just hung on the tail of the rise (ODT)
Rupert Murdoch’s former chief lieutenant in Australia, Chris Mitchell, says criticism of News Corp’s political reporting from current and former journalists is “worth thinking about”, amid outrage over the media empire’s election coverage.
Mr Mitchell – who was editor-in-chief of The Australian for 13 years until 2015 – praised this week’s two most prominent News Corp critics as excellent journalists, although he argued the furore about the company’s coverage was overblown.
With Assange being treated as a felon of grave importance; and Manning’s continued detention for her ongoing refusal to cooperate with the investigative grand jury in the United States, the press corps of the world should be both revolted and alarmed. What a delightful World Press Freedom Day it turned out to be.
O’Donnell introduced the clip as “one of the ugliest lies of his presidency, possibly his ugliest lie, possibly his worst lie,” which it is. After warning that he was playing the clip rather than reading the words, he played a brief clip of the “poisonous” lie that doctors and mothers conspire to kill babies.
“This is vile, despicable, deplorable lying by a man who clearly now is willing to say absolutely anything to hold onto the presidency,” O’Donnell said.
Could Conspiracy charges extend to all those that supported Wikileaks too. Morally, Financially, technically how far can the US spread these charges? (ODT)
CPJ has long raised concerns about the legal implications for a prosecution of Assange, primarily related to legal theories that he could be prosecuted under the Espionage Act. In 2010, CPJ wrote a letter urging the DOJ not to prosecute WikiLeaks under the Espionage Act for publishing activities. In 2018, CPJ published a blog arguing that conspiracy charges against Assange could set a dangerous precedent.
Ann Arbor (Informed Comment) – The dishonest smearing of Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-MN) by the Rupert Murdoch press,including the New York Post and Fox Cable News, on which the despicable Trump piled on, contains more ironies than her defenders for the most par realize.
Omar spoke at the Council for American Islamic Relations (CAIR) in March, saying, “Far too long we have lived with the discomfort of being a second-class citizen, and frankly, I’m tired of it, and every single Muslim in this country should be tired of it . . . CAIR was founded after 9/11 because they recognized that some people did something and that all of us were starting to lose access to our civil liberties.”
She is right. The 9/11 terrorist operation that killed nearly 3,000 Americans was the work of a small fringe extremist group, consisting of only a few thousand vigilante guerrillas out of a world-wide Muslim population of 1.8 billion.
It is not the Muslims’ fault that 51 of their number were killed. It is not the Greens’ fault that it happened. It is the fault of the individual, the movement that took him in and radicalised him, the ideology that informed him and the institutions that supported that ideology — such as the Australian media. In 2017, I stepped into the light of national mainstream media attention simply by putting on a ridiculous pantomime of real patriot groups. I succeeded in it with ease, because our mainstream media apply no critical thinking when broadcasting organised white supremacists. It was a fun failure to point out through MFP in 2017.
Mean wealth per adult: down from second to fourth.
Household debt: up from the fourth highest to the second highest.
Gini coefficient (equality of wealth distribution): downfrom 12th to 28th.
Government and business measures
Budget deficit as a percentage of GDP: down from ninth to 25th;
Government spending as a percentage of GDP: down from fifth to eighth;
Growth in the volume of exports of goods and services: down from fourth to 18th.
Heritage Foundation economic freedom: down from first to third.
Value of the Australian dollar: down from 92 U.S. cents to 71.1 cents.
Value of the Australian dollar: down from 91.3 Japanese yen to 79.3 yen.
Value of the Australian dollar: down from 116 Kiwi cents to 105 cents.
There are probably only two significant variables on which Australia has improved relative to the rest of the world since 2013 — executive salaries and corporate profits. This explains why this analysis will not be found in Australia’s mainstream media.
There it was in black and white — or black, white, and a palette of gentle greens and blues. With a headline predicting that natural gas “will thrive in the age of renewables,” the article made the case that there are limitations on solar and wind power and that — as a subhead spelled out in aquamarine type — natural gas “is part of the solution.” Why was the Washington Post weighing in on the need for continued production of this fossil fuel in the face of climate change?
Or was it? On closer inspection, the report wasn’t coming from the D.C. paper’s newsroom. Though the link takes you to a page published by WashingtonPost.com, the story is actually a publication of WP BrandStudio, the paper’s branded content platform. In other words, the article is really an advertisement, and the copy was paid for by the American Petroleum Institute. The tagline — “Content from American Petroleum Institute” — is plain to see if you’re looking for it, though easy to miss if you’re not.
Foreign interference in Australian Politics, Murdoch is American and driving 66% of our media (ODT)
The Daily Telegraph and its stablemates have taken the blowtorch to Labor’s climate policy, labelling it a “lunchbox tax” across numerous news stories, editorials, graphics and opinion pieces.
The barrage of negative stories is in sharp contrast to the glowing previews of Scott Morrison’s first budget as prime minister which the publications say will bring “tax relief for millions of workers”.
Without its legacy film and television business, Fox Corp’s most-high-profile division is Fox News, which is in a symbiotic relationship with the president of the United States. That relationship is already challenging Lachlan to deal with what one Hollywood executive called “the elephant in the room” for Fox – the toxic identity of Fox News in a mostly liberal entertainment industry. On the other side of the political spectrum, several Fox News staffers said they are distrustful of Lachlan’s devotion to the cable news channel, and some call Lachlan “Fredo” behind his back, an unkind reference to a weak-willed son in “The Godfather.” The opinionated, conservative faction of the company that supports Trump is already testing his authority.
Trump became president, giving Rupert unprecedented access to a sitting US president – a relationship he has long coveted. The two men talk weekly, according to people close to them, and sometimes more often than that.
Lachlan doesn’t like to talk to the politicians. Rupert, however, has always has been attuned to political realities.
This is what Murdoch has always been about THE ART OF THE DEAL something Trump could never finese. (ODT)
“Rupert understood all along that governments care about media and that they meddle in it, and they have rules and you have to have a rapprochement to be successful,” said Reed Hundt, a former FCC chairman in the Clinton administration.
The Murdochs agreed to the Disney offer as the Justice Department was fighting AT&T’s $US85.4 billion acquisition of Time Warner. In contrast to the hostility Trump displayed toward that deal, Trump spoke to Rupert the day the Fox deal with Disney was announced and “congratulated him,” according to White House press secretary Sarah Sanders.
(In another sign of the Murdochs and Trumps having close ties: When Ivanka Trump joined the White House, she relinquished her role as trustee of the fortune of Rupert Murdoch’s two youngest children.)
“It’s Lachlan versus the president,” said the 21st Century Fox film executive. “Who do you think is going to win that?”
A tactic that has worked well in the face of hateful rhetoric in the media is a pressure campaign against advertisers. This is exactly what a March 13 protest called “Drop Fox” was designed to do. Even in the lead-up to the protest, more than a dozen advertisers had already dropped their sponsorship. Gertz shared that “This is all happening at a very dangerous time for Fox News,” and that Fox organized the meeting in March rather than in May—the more traditional time for ad buys—because of a “series of advertiser boycotts against their major hosts over a series of months.” In their call to “Drop Fox,” Media Matters and other organizations and activists are demanding cutting ties with the worst elements in American society.
That is not a big ask, but in Trump’s America morality has been distorted and hate continues to have a place on television and in the White House—until the nation chooses another way.
Limbaugh: “There’s an ongoing theory that the shooter himself may in fact be a leftist who writes the manifesto and then goes out and performs the deed purposely to smear his political enemies”
Abbott flipped, Coleman’s flipped, Morrison flipped the panic is unbelievable (ODT)
Unbelieveable just how gutless this government is. Yiannopoulos Came fled the country witha pocket ful of cash abd an unpaid invoice for $56,000 and and they are invinting him in to do it again. Why Australia because we have a government of suckers logged into and working for Murdoch media. This isn’t about free speech its’about fraud. (ODT)
The initial push to reject the visa was met with a furious response from pro-free speech Coalition MPs, One Nation leader Pauline Hanson, and some media commentators including Sky News host Andrew Bolt.
“Of course this is a backdown,” Bolt said Saturday.
So it’s when in Rome do as the Romans do. Do a Trump. Does it matter locking out fake news? (ODT)
The Democratic National Committee has decided to exclude Fox News Channel from televising any of its candidate debates during the 2019-2020 cycle as a result of published revelations detailing the cable network’s close ties to the Trump administration.
On the one hand, I’m glad Ms. Mayer’s story — rich with telling details as it is — exists in the world. And that fact that it was printed in The New Yorker has given it social media rocket fuel.
On the other hand, this feels so much like reading a weather report from 20 years ago that I don’t know whether to laugh or cry.
Politico later reported that it was Hannity’s seventh interview with the President, and Fox’s forty-second. Since then, Trump has given Fox two more. He has granted only ten to the three other main television networks combined, and none to CNN, which he denounces as “fake news.” Hannity was treated in Texas like a member of the Administration because he virtually is one. The same can be said of Fox’s chairman, Rupert Murdoch. Fox has long been a bane of liberals, but in the past two years many people who watch the network closely, including some Fox alumni, say that it has evolved into something that hasn’t existed before in the United States. Nicole Hemmer, an assistant professor of Presidential studies at the University of Virginia’s Miller Center and the author of “Messengers of the Right,” a history of the conservative media’s impact on American politics, says of Fox, “It’s the closest we’ve come to having state TV.”
For both Trump and Fox, “fear is a business strategy—it keeps people watching.” As the President has been beset by scandals, congressional hearings, and even talk of impeachment, Fox has been both his shield and his sword. his press secretary, Sarah Sanders, has largely stopped holding press conferences, but she has made some thirty appearances on such shows as “Fox & Friends” and “Hannity.” Trump, Hemmer says, has “almost become a programmer.”
Bill Kristol, who was a paid contributor to Fox News until 2012 and is a prominent Never Trumper, said of the network, “It’s changed a lot. Before, it was conservative, but it wasn’t crazy. Now it’s just propaganda.” Joe Peyronnin, a professor of journalism at N.Y.U., was an early president of Fox News, in the mid-nineties. “I’ve never seen anything like it before,” he says of Fox. “It’s as if the President had his own press organization. It’s not healthy.”
Shine, the Fox and White House payrolls actually do overlap. The Hollywood Reporterobtained financial-disclosure forms revealing that Fox has been paying Shine millions of dollars since he joined the Administration. Last year, he collected the first half of a seven-million-dollar bonus that he was owed after resigning from Fox; this year, he will collect the remainder. That sum is in addition to an $8.4-million
Andrew Bolt has for a long time been George Pell’s staunchest supporter, among a large group of acolytes in the media ranks. But his decision to back the cardinal after he was convicted of child sexual abuse this week has cost his employer dearly, both in ad dollars and reputation.
When Bolt announced he would be talking about his serious misgivings about the guilty verdict on The Bolt Report on Tuesday night, Sky News Australia took the unprecedented step of stripping all advertising from the show.
Advertisers on the Bolt Report in the days leading up to Tuesday were Ford, Coles, Audi, Ikea, Jenny Craig, Coca-Cola, Budget Rent a Car, Audi and dozens more. Many of them had already been targeted by social media activist group Sleeping Giants Oz for appearing on Sky After Dark programs in general and Bolt in particular. Some advertisers, such as pool company Poolwerx and builders Hotondo Homes, responded to the activism by removing their ads from the after-6pm lineup on the pay TV channel.
“The reason is simple: for political parties, elections are make or break, determining their fate for the next three years; for the media, an election is just another story, admittedly a long-running and important story, but not an organisation-transforming event.” Conversation
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