What corporate sponsorship is determining your opinion?

The media is populated by spoilt, arrogant brats who, these days, can hardly use the tools of their trade - words - in an educated and coherent manner.

The average Australian need not take one iota of interest in the current hub hub about new media laws. It does not affect us. There are so many different ways of gaining knowledge and finding the truth now that the organised, preaching media is almost redundant.

Does a healthy democratic system depend on reasonably accurate reporting of facts and separation of these from comment which may well add context by referring to previous accurate reports?

If this is true then it is the main source of worry about media concentration.

Does media have to be profitable, excepting the ABC and to a lesser extent SBS yes.

Has the media been good at reporting? No.

Iraq is a prime example about which many people have analysed the content of media outlets and found them wanting in terms of my stated expectation of media role?
The recent Lebanese /Israeli I spat and Koreas petulant explosion of a bomb are examples in which the context necessary to both understand and devise approaches most likely to lead to practical outcomes. In these two cases as in others the media was along the lines “they are wrong, we have the might they will do our will’
Sounds a bit like Iraq and democracy!
Were media outlets subject to proprietor direction?
The finding would indicate yes by choice of journalist and source.
So we return to the problem how can a media be profitable and accurate embracing many sources, particularly when much of the readership is not interested apparently in much that goes on happy to trust their leaders?
I am not in anyway happy with Professor Flint’s analysis.

Perhaps David Flint should have read this article in the New Yorker magazine before he said that proprietors don't control the content of their media outlets: http://www.newyorker.com/fact/content/articles/061016fa_fact1

It shows pretty clearly that Rupert Murdoch can, has and does use his media outlets to influence the public. He doesn't have to be a superman to do this - all he has to do is select the outlet with the most influence/largest audience. The point is clear, I think - media ownership really does matter.

And as for the point out Fairfax/Channel10/WA Newspapers not having press baron owners - didn't Kerry Stokes just buy a large chunk of WANewspapers, and what about all the rumours of a PBL bid for Fairfax? Doesn't that mean they'd have a pressbaron owner?

Still, I like his final question - why aren't we trying to address 21st century issues? Like encouraging the spread of truly high-speed broadband access and more digital broadcasting? Doing things like that would give people access to many more choices.

I think the establishment of a bias assessor at the abc raises an important point. There is no regulation or even measure of bias and news content in the journalism industry.

Imagine if every news and current affairs show was rated on news content and bias, just like normal shows are rated on violence and sexual content or perhaps how fridges are rated on energy usage.

Opeds by Philip Adams and John Laws would be rated high on bias, 6:30 current affairs perhaps low on news content.

It will be interesting to see how the assessor will measure bias. Seats around the discussion table, seconds of air time? Quality of commentators? Just how many views should be represented just liberal v labour or those of splinter groups as well? And how should say airtime be allocated, should each group get an equal share or are they allocated on popular support in the community.

As for the assertion that commercial papers are not biased I would ask Mr Flint to read the West Australian for a couple of weeks. Not only is it extremely biased its standard of journalism rivals the Melbourne Truth. Sadly it is the only paper in town and thank god for the 2 out of 3 rule. The money I used to spend on the paper now funds my internet connection.

Does anyone seriously believe that a media 'baron' like Murdoch or Packer, or even formerly Ted Turner, would not try to influence public opinion on issues of vital importance to themselves and their high profile (but especially the very low profile) political and business mates via the mass media organisations they control?

True - Messrs Murdoch and Packer cannot possibly edit and dictate every item that appears in their media, that would be physically impossible, as well as highly impractical (read: unprofitable), but surely that is what they employ editors and sub-editors they influence for?

The journo hacks and 'celebrity' reporters write what they want to write but virtually nothing they write remains in the form they originally wrote. Just like' letters to the editor' the articles are edited for 'brevity', conciseness, punctuation and spin etc. (Most often so they can fit more paid advertisements on a page or in a news hour)

In every organisation there is a heirarchy. Each level of the heirarchy pays allegiance to it's superior - to fail to do so earns the wrath of their boss and promotion or even their very jobs depend upon this age-old tradition in big business as well as politics.

Therefore anyone (or any small elite) who owns a media enterprise is able to exert their influence throughout the entre organisation by way of censorship and rewarding of those who follow their master's ideology and i do not have the faith that Mr Flint seems to posses in the ultimate benvolence and altruistic natures and non interference policies of such powerful men (rarely are they women).

Listening to talkback from popular radio shows reinforces in me the doubt that the majority of people are able to form intelligent conclusions from the drivel they get fed in todays media. This mostly provides a very limited level of honest and accurate information without someone's personal or employer's bias.

Failing to try to address this issue (was it ever possible to be addressed seriously?) can only worsen an already appalling division of public understanding on those issues that we face each day.

I cannot believe this guy, there is a mountain of empirical evidence and an endless number examples of proprietors and senior management officials interfering with editorial content.

Every single editor of News Corps 73 newspapers worldwide supported the invasion of Iraq.

Democracy in the west has taken another giant leap downwards

I am truly curious to know what motivates someone as intelligent as David Flint to make such comments. It is not possible that he is ignorant of how much influence an owner can have over what goes on in their business - is he involved in some Machiavellian manipulations to help see the value of his portfolio soar or is he just screwing with the Australian public?

Rob513264 and Carl,

Evidence of a very senior journalist, the late Alan Reid, one-time doyen of the Canberra Parliamentary press gallery, having had an article editorially doctored nearly 31 years ago may exist in a thread to a topic on this very forum at the moment. Sir David Smith has meticulously noted details of content and publication chronology relating to a Bulletin article published on 3 December 1975 in his topic "Rex Connor: the other Dismissal"

http://forum.onlineopinion.com.au/thread.asp?article=5018

Posts in the topic thread point out inconsistencies that may indicate editorial tampering with the article as written by Reid. A possible consequence of such editorial doctoring of Reid's article was to have cast Reid at the time as having attributed actions to the Governor-General that in fact were never taken. Whether the tampering, if tampering it was, was proprietorial, is a matter for judgement. Was The Bulletin in the same ownership as The Australian in 1975?

Don't know if this helps you.

Forrest'

It is interesting you mention Alan Reid. A man I worked with and admired. (his wife made great cakes as well).

Alan Reid had written a novel that, in a legal first, had been judged to be defamatory without ever being published.

As another anecdote from ancient history Rupert Murdoch had a fetish against "Hush Puppy" suede shoes. The rumour is that he sacked anyone who wore brown shoes. Guess what nobody who worked for him ever wore brown shoes again.

Just knowing what the boss likes is enough to change the opinion of journalists who naturally want to advance their careers.

Just knowing what the boss likes is enough to change the opinion of journalists who naturally want to advance their careers.
Posted by Steve Madden, Friday, 20 October 2006 5:22:23 PM

This reminds me of a story I heard about Goebbels going into an 'outlaw' newspaper office in Berlin in 1936. He took with him a gang of SS. He didnt need to say a word. He just walked around looked at everything and then left. The editors, journalists and even the tea-ladies knew that the paper would have to toe the party line or those guys would be coming back after dark.

People who say there is no pressure because there is no evidence of anyone specifically ordering anyone to say anything specific are avoiding the fundamental reality. Normal people are well and truly smart enough to know what is wanted and what the consequences will be if the people in power are not happy - without a word being said.

On Thursday night's 7.30 report Kerry O'Brien ran this .... "To capture a rare insight into the lives of US troops in Iraq and their meshing with their Iraqi allies, London Guardian photographer Sean Smith spent two months with the 101st Airborne north of Baghdad. Peter Marshall from the BBC Newsnight team provides the commentary for the story. " and then in the interview with John Howard directed him to comment on this "rare insight into the lives of US troops in Iraq". Now our "champ" John Howard made little attempt to address any of the serious issues highlighted in this report BUT was quick to point out the connection with the London Guardian and dismiss it completely on that issue with his very own bias.

This example alone makes it quite clear that media ownership is very much a real 21st century issue and it is preposterous for Soapy Flint to assume otherwise. ps ... (He in fact belongs in some distant age hundreds of years ago, sucking up to nobility, kings, queens and ponces)

Read a more informed and intelligent account on this topic by Paul Keating here:http://www.australianpolitics.com/media/00-06-14keating.shtml

Extract from the Broadway hit, "The Media Game":

(Scene shifts to the Oval Office, a couple of years from now.)

The President is gazing into the middle-distance. A man, looking suspiciously like Dorian Gray approaches. He speaks with an Australian accent.

"Georgie Boy! Ol' Monkey Man! Mate, you're the prince of externalizers."

"Rupe, flattery will get you everywhere. Pull up a chair and have a soy, - er, soylent biscuit."

"Geez, George! How do you do that trick with your nostrils?"

Hmmmm - sniff. "Why George, this bonbon has the texture of a kangaroo turd and the bouquet of my Aunt Fanny. Not bad! Who's the chef?"

"Oh, it's just a little something cooked up by Dick and the boys down at The Project For the New American Cuisine. Do you think the mugs will fall for it?"

"Mate, once the punters get an eyeful of Krusty O'Reilly with his face full of this offal, they'll be fighting at the drive-thru like vultures in a drought! By the way, what do you think of my bio-diesel project?"

"Rupe, the extraction of volatile esters from the corpses of dead Arabs is a masterstroke. Given their prodigious abilities in the sack, we just might have the beginnings of a sustainable industry here ..."

"Well, I did express a desire for oil at $20 per barrel and you know how it is when I set my mind to something......"

(Camera pans across to a window, where a drilling rig can be seen threshing uselessly on the White House lawn ...)

A well-researched book on this very important subject is:
GUARDIANS OF POWER by David Edwards and David Cromwell(2006)
John Pilger comments on the cover: "The most important book about journalism I can remember"

Not related totally to this OLO, but it does try to give credit to journalists getting their word through despite war-related media suppression

Lat week’s Guardian in the Weekly Review section by Mark Lattimer, had the centre of his main page revealing what can only be a pictorial from a copy of a painting of the boy Jesus, surrounded by an ethereal glow with an adult male and female each side of him, also in Holy representation.

What made the pictorial even more breathtaking is that the foreground reveals the heads and shoulders of devoted looking Christian Arabs moving into the Church.

The major headline simply expresses the phrase MASS EXODUS - the accompanying italics intimating the following .........”as it is believed that half of Iraq’s Christians have now fled, why haven’t coalition forces done more to protect them?”

It could be suggested that Mark Lattimer and crew had gone to the trouble of showing the magnificient painting to reveal a truth that most academically trained journalists understand but not the general public.

From one who during retirement has spent years studying the philosophy of Western history, he becomes more and more shocked how much of what can be revealed as true Christian history has been left out because it is not the way the Church and the accompanying Christian governments want the Christian story to be told.

Seeing that so many of our OLO appear so learned, probably much more than myself with an early small school upbringing, would like comments regarding the following suggestions?

The boy Jesus revealed in the pictorial is very much like the story of the boy Jesus revealed to us by our mothers, myself having had a mother whose own mother was Irish and her father an Australian born German.

Bushbred Part Two

Therefore it was reasonably easy to believe later when studying historical philosophy that the suggestion that the boy Jesus with his so-called intellectual brightness could have been naturally gifted like the young Socrates.

Certainly the Bible does indicate the boy Jesus as eager to mix among learned people, as well as reporting that Jesus spent time in Egypt with his family. Accordingly, the Biblical history does fit in with a suggestion from some academics, that the young Jesus could have attended the Great Library of Alexandria in Egypt, particularly as history books do indicate that more than half the pupils of the Great Library, which had mostly Greek tutors, were Jews.

3. It is so interesting that the Sermon on the Mount without the accompanying spiritual content could have easily come from Socratic or even Platonic folklore.

One could also dare to suggest, that journalists like Lattimer desperately wanted to reveal in their reports that certain Christian groups have long been unaccepted and indeed been left to suffer even more by our Christian churches and our governments because they have stayed too friendly with the Arabs.

Indeed, from acadamics there is much evidence to support the historical fact that the Arabic type Christians could be the true Christians rather than the Latinised believers. The Coptic-style Christians, as they also called, are not accepted because they are not all forced to believe in the Holy Trinity, which after all was only finally made officially spiritual by the Roman Emperor Constantine when he presided over the Council of Nicaea in the early 3rd Century AD, when much of the Christian Church by then had become Romanised or Latinised.

Feel sure that Lattimer was attempting to get the true message through about the Iraqi Christians with his pictorial of the Boy Jesus. It is also felt strongly that because the article only mostly deals with the effects that the attack on Iraq has brought on Iraqi Christians, the use of the pictorial with its extra suggestive historical features must be seen as a tribute to the article editors