Fishermen Marooned - Blame Fish

Shaun Carney's boss is going broke - and it's all our fault!

Want to read Sunday's New York Times on a Sunday? Or a fair chunk of Vanity Fair even before the airmail version is dispatched? Or simply read the morning paper? Just log on. Want to see the latest episode of Entourage? It's not hard to find it; you can save it to your hard drive if you've installed the right plug-ins.

The same goes for almost any album of popular music you can think of. Surf around on torrent download sites - all it takes is a rudimentary inquiry via a search engine - and entire back catalogues of artists' work are there to be downloaded. For nothing.

The important thing to note is that some of the above actions, such as reading magazines and newspapers, are legal, and the others are not. But somehow, as we've revelled in this cornucopia of offerings, a lot of us have lost sight of the distinction.

But now it's time for a reckoning; Fairfax, like Rupert Murdoch's News Limited, will have to start charging us for the privilege of reading Shaun and his colleagues, and we'll just have to get used to it. Unless we want to do something naughty, like downloading the daily news bit torrents from the sites that will doubtless spring up once the pay walls are in place. Carney's article is a good example of how the media doesn’t understand the issues that have put it into its present position.

It's well known - but widely ignored, it seems, in news rooms - that the main business of newspapers, television and radio is selling advertising to advertisers. News, cop shows and talk-back are just there as bait to bring in the readers, viewers and listeners; it's the advertisers who pay most of the bills - the cover price of The Age and its rival The Hun make only a token contribution to revenues. If it were raised to the point where it covered even 50% of the production costs of a single issue, the newspaper would lose circulation, and with it, advertising revenue.

The 'old media', regardless of whatever delusions their management and staff may entertain, have been in a business a lot like long-line fishing. Their business is hooking your attention to what advertisers are selling. We're the fish, News Limited and Fairfax are the fishers and the advertisers are the buyers. Blaming us for not taking the bait - because we can get tastier, meatier bait elsewhere - makes as much sense as blaming the collapse of the Grand Banks fishery on the moral laxity of cod.

Storm Warning

It's a pity I don't have a prize to offer. If I did, I'd run a quick sweep on who is going to be the first MSM opinionator to denounce the judgment of Chief County Court Justice Michael Rozenes in the case of Danielle Boundy. Andrew Bolt is my pick for odds-on favourite with The Hun's editorialist, Neil Mitchell and Alan Howe equal second favourites at 2:1.

Anyone care to make odds on other commentators?

A Great Way to Start the Conversation

Maybe it's just my PC, or the browser - they're both getting on a bit.

But What About the Piccaninnies?

Andrew Bolt, The Hun's answer to Kyle Sandilands, has had a very angry bee in his infested bonnet this week. Andrew is outraged that prizes and scholarships for aborigines are going to people who are too deficient in skin and hair pigmentation to be proper blacks.

On Sunday, artist Danie Mellor, winner of the 2009 National Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Art Award attracted Bolt's outrage with a double offence: not being black enough for Andy and his readers, and winning the prize with an art-work that wasn't proper aboriginal art. It wasn't a dot painting. Mellor was brave (or foolish) enough to reply to Bolt; all it got him from Bolt and his readers was more derision and contempt.

On Wednesday, it was Fulbright Scholar Mark McMillan's turn in Bolt's pillory. Bolt found plenty to sneer about, including this article by McMillan at ABC Online, where 'McMillan describes the agony of not being discriminated against for being Aboriginal'. In keeping with Bolt's high journalistic standards, a bit of deft cut and pasting produced an edited quote that depicted McMillan as a chronic whiner - 'Just the kind of Aboriginal who needs a special handout.'

On Thursday, Bolt added Rebecca McGrath, the latest recipient of the Monika Law Scholarship at the University of Technology Sydney, to his roster of fake aboriginals, went McMillan again (for receiving the Black Women’s Action in Education Foundation Scholarship) and took a gratuitous swipe at UTS Law professor Larisa Behrendt (A frequent target for Bolt).

Knowing that a picture is worth a thousand inflammatory words, in all three posts, Bolt included photographs of the undeserving 'whites' and the real aborigines they were elbowing aside, including pictures of 'real draw-in-the-dirt Aboriginal artists such as Dorothy Napangardi, Mitjili Napanangka Gibson and Walangkura Napanangka' and a pair of smiling aboriginal children who looked much too young to benefit from either a Fulbright scholarship or a scholarship to UTS anyway.

By Friday Bolt had enough material for a column; he'd also (perhaps at the behest of The Hun's editor) managed to concoct a couple of principled reasons for his outrage. The first we've already heard - white folks shouldn't be taking awards meant for black folks. The second:

And here’s my other objection.

Seeking power and reassurance in a racial identity is not just weak - a
surrendering of your individuality, and a borrowing of other people’s
glories.

It’s also exactly what we have too much of already.

The noble ideal of Australia, that we judge each other by our character
and deeds, and not our faith, fortune or fatherland, is breaking down...

For me, Bolt's resort to calling his targets 'weak' carries vague echoes of the schoolyard of the 1960s, where being 'weak' was an invitation to bullying. It suggests a very unpleasant mentality to match Bolt's unpleasant public behaviour. What he has to say about those who 'borrow other people's glories' might equally apply to the history warriors, like Bolt himself, who want history teachers to ignore the bad stuff and concentrate on giving kids a history they can be proud of. We have too much of it already? That wasn't what he was saying about John Howard's 2006 history summit and for years he has been routinely ranting about the superiority of our culture over all others. Bolt, it seems, is as weak as those he targets.

That final invocation of 'the noble ideal of Australia' rings especially hollow, when Bolt has spent so many words (and so much of his time over the week) on attacking people not so much on their characters and deeds, but on the spurious grounds of race. But then no seasoned Bolt reader expects to find principled consistency in his writing. That's not what he's paid for.

Elsewhere: Jason Wilson describes what it's like to be 'Bolted' at New Matilda.

A Token Effort...

... at a post actually relevant to the course. Bill Wyman on why newspapers are failing (via Core Economics).

A Short Trip Down Confabulation Lane

Melbourne Sundays were pretty dire before 1989. Not much was open, apart from churches and your local milk-bar, which was very likely to be picketed by hard-line Sabbatarians. There was nothing on television or radio, not one CBD restaurant or cinema was open and neither was the NGV. The gates of the Botanical Gardens were firmly shut and padlocked, all the pubs were closed - well, you get the picture.

I was reminded of all this by Steve Foley's reflections on the coming 20th anniversary of The Sunday Age:

Twenty years on, Victoria is no longer the ''odd state'' or, as early advocates put it, ''one of the few places of its size in the developed world without large-circulation Sunday papers''. In no small way the advent of the Sundays transformed the day itself. Shedding its ''sleepy town'' image, Melbourne finally matured into the upscale version of the civilised society it always maintained it should be.

A Tale of Two Subbies

Same day, same story, same newspaper, but what a difference a change of shift makes:

Stop feeding me: quadriplegic's court plea (SMH, 2:15pm)

Let him starve: court rules on quadriplegic's plea (SMH, 3:34pm)

Meanwhile, In Brazil...

...the future of reality television has arrived:

A Brazilian TV presenter and politician accused of organising killings to feature on his crime show has spoken out to deny the allegations against him.

Police believe Wallace Souza staged crime scenes to eliminate rivals and boost ratings of "Canal Livre", aired in Amazonas state.

Dodging the Column

This cartoon from xkcd is the first, second and third image to come up when you Google 'wrong on the internet'. Just what you need when you've just read the dumbest defence of Kyle Sandilands ever (no names, no pack-drill, no links, no payback).

And there's another thing I dislike about the whole public outrage thing - once you've been manipulated into getting righteously angry, it takes weeks for that brand new red button you've had grafted on to burn itself out.

Bottom Feeding

I spent far too much time over the past week following the Kyle and Jackie-O blow-up. Even two minutes spent on Kyle and Jackie-O is too much time.

I'm not a big fan of public outrage - too much of it seems to originate in the editorial offices of news organisations looking for ways to prop up flagging circulation or ratings. It's the stock-in-trade of talk-back radio and radio shock-jocks who hang around the deeps of the same barrel that Kyle and Jackie-O have been scraping the bottom of for years - six of them. according to Kyle Sandilands' self-defensive post at The Punch:

We have had the lie detector thing on regularly for about six years.
It’s a semi-regular segment on the show. We check with the mother
before hand, and go through the questions they want asked.

And there's the problem - according to Sandilands' own admission, he's had teenagers 'strapped into' a 'lie-detector' on a regular basis for the past six years. With parental consent. But it was only last week that he crossed the line; the line between 'tacky, but great radio' and 'tacky, totally unacceptable radio'. Sandilands' big mistake was picking the wrong child from the wrong dysfunctional family to exploit.

Don't believe me? Check out what Channel 7 will be showing as 'family viewing' next Thursday night.