The Findings of the Leveson Enquiry

Does the Leveson Inquiry have any teeth? Or is it just a metaphorical gummy shark? Reading the phone hacking coverage in the Guardian, it seems increasingly clear that there may be more of an agenda behind the process and the findings. They report that there is a 17 page section of the 85 page report that one side of the political divide (The Conservatives) refused to support. One quote even suggested that Tom Watson MP was so hell-bent on making the headline that "Rupert…is not fit to run a major company" that the entire committee was divided basically down the middle. Some points ring true from my cursory investigation in all this. 1. News Corporation did act improperly or, at least, did not act decisively enough in dealing with rogue criminal behaviour. Rupert admitted this much in his response this morning. 2. The management of News Corp have not admitted to sponsoring the behaviour from the outset. And really, as if they would. To do so would attract serious criminal punishment for those responsible and, even worse for the Murdochs, negative press. 3. Having said that, there is plenty of evidence that a great deal of dodgy dealings were afoot within the organisation, and it is arguable that the upper echelons of management knew about it. How much they knew, we may never know. 4. Partisan or not, there is no doubt that the report has landed some major blows to the Murdochs. Not a knockout blow as such, but one hard enough to leave them winded for a brief moment. How much of this was a response to the outrage that the phone hacking scandal caused is a matter for debate, and you can bet than within certain media circles, it will be a hot discussion topic. It appears to me that this may very well be the case - that outrage, in part dictated the findings of the enquiry. There's no doubt that the hacking the phones of celebrities and the parents of a murdered school girl is bad practice, and the outrage at the invasion of privacy of these people is well deserved. But should this be allowed to taint the view of an inquiry? What's more, if those who have been called to testify to the enquiry have misled parliament, what teeth does it have to call them into account? What powers does it have? Could this set a new precedent, considering that the House of Commons has not imposed a fine on an individual for contempt since 1666? It's one thing to point the finger at the Murdochs for publishing the rubbish they do. I also think that the "Great British Public", to borrow a phrase from Nick Park, should take a long hard look at themselves. Anyone who has ever bought a copy of News Of The World during the period it was a NewsCorp paper in effect contributed to the notion that scandal was what the people want, and if it becomes lucrative through increased sales and revenue, then why not keep going with it? Up the ante, make more money, and on and on it goes… It will be very interesting to see where this goes in the coming weeks...

James Murdoch resigns...

This quote from a friend of mine on Facebook really got me thinking

The fact that none of the Murdochs are sitting in gaol cells in the U.K. - while Julian Assange is under house arrest and Bradley Manning rots in a U.S. miltitary prison on suspicion - speaks volumes about the state of justice in the world.

- Glenn D.

It's a valid point. Julian Assange has been charged with supplied information that was obtained illegitimately, and yet News Corporation does it via mass phone-hacking and their directors don't get any punishment (as of yet) at all.

What's the difference? The Murdochs have money and power. They have so much influence in the media that they can write a news story, true or not, about a politician or public figure and the public will believe it. The power is right there to destroy a politician's career or a celebrity's good standing in the community. The fact that James resigned right at the time of the handing down of a report into the scandalous news collection practices at "News of the World" reeks of suspicion.

All Assange has done is create a conduit for leaked documents - he gets them submitted to his website. He doesn't solicit them or obtain them through illegal channels - people in possession of this information volunteer it to Wikileaks. How the leakers got hold of it is another story, and that's their cross to bear, not Julian's. News International has been the instigator of the illegal access to information and then publishes it - vastly different in behaviour to the Wikileaks problem.

The world needs change...and fast.

The Federal 3-Ring circus

All we've heard about in the news over the last few days in the leadership battle between the current and the former Prime Ministers of this country. It's driving me absolutely bloody crazy.

JUST SORT IT OUT ALREADY, PEOPLE!!! Get back to running the country, and do it as soon as possible.

All this reported* argy-bargy is doing major damage to the ALP brand, to the point where a lot of people, who wouldn't normally vote Liberal, will do so at the next election to prove to the Labor party that this kind of behaviour is wasting our time and wearing out your welcome.

* I flagged the term "reported" because I fear that most of this rubbish has been perpetuated by a number of media outlets who need to "drum up", or "invent" news in order to sell newspapers. Getting leaks from inside parliament, reporting on posts from Twitter, reporting opinion as fact - there's bigger issues to report on, rather than throwing Mentos into the metaphorical Diet-Coke bottle that is parliament.

Mega-upload's mega crash

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Convergence of Media in Australia

Ok, first of all I must disclose, before I start this rant, that I support Australian music 100% and I always will.

I have been following closely the progress of, and submissions to, a media review panel set up by the Australian Government into the convergence of distribution methods used by media organisations in this country.

By convergence, we mean that the various media organisations now have a variety of means in which to disseminate their content - through terrestrial broadcasting, the internet, digital broadcasting and the like. Convergence largely means that using all of these outlets, radio stations can almost be regarded as something more than just a radio station, because of the various other ways they can deliver their services now. Newspapers such as the Daily Telegraph and The Sydney Morning Herald now disseminate their news via the internet. They even have WebTV set up and also they show video news on alot of their stories. The internet has allowed far more methods of communication for newspapers that just in print.

I have been reading a few of the submissions to the review panel (which can be found here), and while some submissions make some good points, some, like the Commercial Radio Australia (CRA) submission and the Austereo submission make one particular point that is highly laughable and somewhat disturbing:

That the Australian content quotas should be dropped.

I, for one, think this is a ridiculous proposal, however I will examine the issues for and against.

As pointed out in the submission from the Music Council of Australia, Australian music quotas exist purely because of the behaviour of Commercial radio programmers. Local content quotas were first introduced in the late 1940s and have steadily increased over the years to a minimum of 25% locally produced music across all music played, and 6.5% of that must be new or recently produced Australian music.

These quotas exist because commercial radio just did not play locally produced music. Things have not changed at all over the years. Commercial radio has always lauded the new release from America before a local release. Most Australian music that gets played on Commercial rock stations has been played for months prior by the ABC's station Triple J.

Listening back to the history of Triple J and you will find that Australian music wasn't played on radio when the station started, and if it was, you probably couldn't tell it was Aussie. For example, the biggest Oz band in the 1970s was Little River Band, or LRB for short. They were huge in America, because they sounded American. And with lyrics like "Can you guess where I'm calling from? The Las Vegas Hilton...", you'd be forgiven for thinking they were based in LA instead of Melbourne. And yet, this was the standard for Aussie music on commercial radio in those days. Triple J changed that, by actively seeking out new local music and putting it to air. By the time Triple M in Sydney had started playing Midnight Oil (whose music it now plays heavily every day), they'd been featured on JJJ for over 3 years.

The argument against the local content quota, according to Commercial Radio Australia is that all the other content platforms do NOT have local content quotas, and yet commercial radio is bound by legislation to play local music. Fair point. So why not expand the legislation to cover all media outlets? Internet radio streams based in Australia and online content providers in Australia included? I think that'd be great, but it would difficult to police. For example, any Australian resident can start up an online radio station with the US based Live365.com and, being based overseas, could escape the local content rules. Additionally, any Australian can listen to hundreds of radio stations online from the same place and never hear an Australian song in any of it. Keeping track of it all would be a nightmare.

The other argument they make is that the Local content rules often don't fit the station "format". Considering that the local top 50 singles chart has only 5 Australian songs in it, I can see why "hit music/top 40" stations feel this way. However, it should be Radio, more than any other media's job to seek out and promote new music as music, apart from advertising and stupid people who think they're celebrities trying to be funny, is the other core part of their programming.

Southern Cross/Austereo also make the point that, even without the quotas, audiences will still seek out Australian music and then they, the radio stations, will respond to what the listeners want. This is complete and utter rubbish. The core audience of radio stations don't want to research music and discover for themselves. They want to hear it on the radio FIRST before they buy it. If radio don't plug it, there's every chance it won't get heard. To Austereo's credit, they have started a digital radio station called "Radar Radio" which plays unsigned local music, but of late it has seen established overseas bands like Amy Winehouse and Snow Patrol creep into the playlists which means that it could decide to take the overseas music option as a preference, as history shows it has done in the past. It needs to work both ways - listeners tell the station what they like, radio plugs music that the listener hasn't heard and the cycle perpetuates.

It could also be argued that the Australian content quotas don't work anyway. Inevitably Austereo's Triple M get around the local content quotas by playing INXS and Cold Chisel's greatest hits ad nauseum every day, at the expense of local bands. But, there are other stations that have taken the lazy way out, and avoid the Australian music rules by not playing music on air at all. Once great rock stations like 2UE (the first radio station in Sydney to play rock 'n' roll music) and 2SM have both been converted to talkback stations, with grumpy old men ranting and whining across the airwaves 24-7.

There are, of course, a number of barriers to the expansion of the local content quotas, talkback radio notwithstanding. Namely, the Australia-US Free Trade Agreement stipulates that local content quotas are NOT to be increased for the life of the agreement, thus giving ample opportunity for US imports to succeed in our marketplace. I don't see why this is necessary since the commercial media mindset has been for years that anything cultural that has been imported is automatically superior to anything created here. And if that hasn't been the case, then why did (now legendary) local acts like The Seekers, The Bee Gees, The Saints, The Triffids, The Go-Betweens and The Vines all have to go overseas in order to get noticed back in Australia?

It's my view that media can create the audience, and by extension, can create the buzz around a band, if they plug it enough. If radio make the effort and play a record a lot, it can get in peoples heads and then it becomes a hit. But, like it appears to be on most stations in England (except the top 40 ones) and America, that locally produced music is a top priority, over and above anything else. There is no reason why mainstream media in Australia cannot muster the same sort of confidence in the local music scene while still keeping an eye on what's happening overseas....

...and if Commercial radio think they are already doing that, then they are sorely mistaken.

Dear Mr Murdoch

Dear Mr J. Murdoch,

Based on your testimony at the Commons Enquiry yesterday (UK Time), can you please write me a cheque for £700,000? I won't complicate things by telling you what for, or by giving you any legal documents to read.

Seriously. How blind do you have to be to be authorising payments that large to people who complained to you about privacy intrusion, and having documents from QCs detailing illegal activity within your own organisation and then not reading them?

I can concede that News International is a very large corporation with many subsidiaries, and that it is hard to have a handle on everything that could possibly go on within it on a daily basis. But, when the alleged phone tapping was taking place, for a time, you were the Head of the business unit conducting the breaches, and handing large sums of money to high profile victims of the aforesaid breaches. How could you not know what was going on?

Probably a wise question to ask at this point would be "What is your responsibility in this scenario and where does your personal governance of the company extend to?" In other words, when does the buck stop? It's pretty clear some dodgy dealings have been going on, and there's no hiding from that. Even blind Freddie knows that. But, for some reason, you have no idea about any of it? It doesn't make sense.

So, maybe if you could just make out the cheque as soon as possible, and then, by this time in 2013, you'll have no knowledge of it and it will all be sweet?

Thanks,

Me.

Tyranny has come to Australia?

What garbage!!!

A Power Play for the Future


Sydney Morning Herald opinion piece re: Carbon Tax vote

In the last week there's been a lot of rhetoric, heresay and conjecture in relation to the Carbon tax vote in parliament last week. A lot of the critics have had some quite colourful things to say in terms of accusing the government of "tyranny" and all kinds of things.

The funniest one is that "democracy has died; tyranny has come to Australia". This is a general view held mostly by listeners to 2GB in Sydney, as evidenced by the comments on the topic from the listeners to the Alan Jones program. However, the view was first provided by certain members of the Federal opposition, most notably from the leader of the National Party, Warren Truss.

The dictionary definition of "tyranny" is:
1. Arbitrary or unrestrained exercise of power; despotic abuse of authority.
2. The government or rule of a tyrant or absolute ruler.
Pasted from

Forgive me for assuming that our elected representatives in the opposition are highly educated (something that cannot be assumed of the 2GB listenership), but you would think that they would be able to use the term "tyranny" in the correct context and with the correct meaning. Irrespective of what one's opinions of the Carbon tax are, tyranny did NOT happen last week. Democracy is typified by the ability of a person to vote on one topic one way or another, depending on that person's view. The carbon tax reforms, all 19 of them, were VOTED on by a full sitting lower house. This is NOT tyranny, this is democracy.

The vote on the last bill went 74-72 in favour. This is democracy. If it WAS tyranny, the PM would have stood up and said "This is how it's gonna be and there's nothing you can do about it". No vote, no discussion, end of story.

So the coalition lost - suck it up. You still have your chance to defeat it in the Liberal controlled Senate. But you could do us all a favour and stop with the histrionic bleating about tyranny just because your side lost. You're confusing the unthinking viewers of Today Tonight and the mindless sheep that Alan Jones likes to call "listeners". And God knows they don't need to be any more confused than they already are.

Television 4, Sept 18 2011

It still remains to be seen what this will look like, but if this is anything to go by I'm quite unsettled by it.

From what it appears, this could be a 24-hour digital infomercial channel as part of the Prime7 TV network for regional Australia. Seriously, do we need a 24-hour advertising channel on TV? Do we need more advertising?

Who would be brainless enough to watch a 24 hour channel full of ads? I'm naive enough to think that this won't be the case; that channel 64 would not be as vacuous as the press release makes it sound. But I'd be really annoyed it is...

Murdochs again...

Here is an opinion that makes some good sense (for once) about the level of influence Rupert Murdoch has in the media.

I see it as a real issue for the head of a media organisation to determine which way to slant a story as it appears in his papers. It's well documented how News Ltd's outlets are attack dogs for more small-L liberal type government groups (Labour in the UK, Democrats in the US, Labor and the Greens in Australia) and lap dogs for Conservatives.

The issue is more that this plays into the hands of those who are less engaged with their world and who are apathetic enough to accept at face value what the papers tell them. These types of people (and I refuse to identify demographics here) are the ones who will not get the full and unbiased account of what is happening - they get a dodgy slant on it that may or may not be correct, especially in light of the recent News Ltd scandals.

How they've managed to build themselves up with such power is beyond me, how they manage to keep it and continue to have such influence confounds me. I recently remarked to a colleague who said he holds a small amount of shares in News International that, in light of the phone hacking scandal, "if that was me, I'd be getting off that sinking ship". How wrong I was. News isn't going to go under with any small stroke of a pen. They are too big and have too much money to disappear overnight....

...unfortunately.

21st Century Propaganda

Here is an interesting story published recently regarding the release of a colouring book for young children explaining the events of the 9/11 tragedy 10 years ago.

If the idea of memorialising an event such as this in this fashion isn't strange enough, the blurb on the inside takes the cake. According to the story, it is full of factual inaccuracies and falsehoods, but more worryingly, it takes a pro-American, anti-Muslim view of the events.

The fact that Muslims are labelled as "extremist", "terrorist" and "anti-freedom" is of some concern. The target demographic (ages birth to around 8, I'd image) is largely unable to comprehend any sense of reasoning here. Everything they understand is, for want of a better term, black or white; no shades of grey. That comes with the ability to think in abstract terms into the high school years.

For the most part, kids of this age group believe almost blindly what their parents and teachers tell them. This in itself is not a bad thing. What IS a bad thing is when the kids are told something that is inaccurate, and they take to believing that in the same way. Explaining this to kids in this fashion is likely to make it easy to understand, but I do see potential for kids to assume wrongful views based on biased information.

Kids of all ages need to be given information that presents a cohesive view of the world. Most kids under the age of 10 can see both sides without getting confused. It's not hard to say that "a handful of bad people did bad things to innocent Americans. The bad guys identified themselves as "Muslims", but not every Muslim is a bad guy like them. Not everyone agrees with what these bad guys did. Killing people is wrong etc etc etc..."

Where were you when you heard about the 9/11 tragedy??

R.I.P. News of the World

I have been following this story with great interest since it broke a few days ago.

The British paper "News of the World" has maintained an international reputation as being sordid and scandalous, and not unjustly so. For 168 years they muck-raked the dirt on celebrities and public figures, telling sordid tales of the worst behaviour of humanity. In recent years it's been proven that indeed the story didn't even need to be true - it just had to be salacious enough provoke shock and outrage. And that, ultimately, is what sells papers.

For so long, stories of grotesque debauchery and sexual scandals have been tolerated, simply because they have involved celebrities. People, it is considered, that are not "real", who have so much money and prestige that they do not deserve any kind of sympathy. As a result, most people who read the paper would be quite happy to have these so called "journalists" and paparazzi hounding celebrities day and night and intruding into their private lives.

This is balanced with the journalistic "code of ethics", if it could be called that. The public has a right to know and to be informed. The press will stop at nothing to get conformation on the story. And of course, sources have to be kept anonymous.

We all know now that NewsOFT ran afoul when it started to intrude into lives (through the hacking of phones and voicemail) of the families of murder victims, politicians and fallen soldiers. This compromises their integrity and ability to inform the public.

The coverage in non-Murdoch press has been extensive (take a look on the website for NewsCorp Australia and you'll find precious little coverage, typically.) This quote is particularly chilling:

"Intrusions into the lives of celebrities and political figures by London's aggressive ''red-tops'' had long been tolerated, says John Lloyd, director of the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism at Oxford University. ''They are deemed to be able to look after themselves,'' he says. ''But to hack into the private world of ordinary people who are grieving, who have been caught up in a terrorist attack - clearly, this is bad.''

"This is bad"? That's all you have to say?

News Flash: intrusions into the private life of ANYBODY: rich, famous, powerful or otherwise, is not on and certainly NOT in the public interest. Now that we've crossed the line and intruding into the lives of ordinary people, we risk becoming a constantly watched society reminiscent of Orwell's "1984". No wonder public dissent if rife in England. I, for one, don't blame them.

Murdoch's next move would be to start a Sunday edition of his other best-selling paper "The Sun". You would have to be naive to think that this new sunday paper would be too far removed from the one that has just met it's demise. A leopard can't change its spots, and history has shown that Murdoch fits this bill to a tee.

Besides, anyone with two brain cells to rub together would want to read something a bit more substantial over their museli than stories of David Beckham sleeping with his babysitter.