Strong Article, and strongly worded too.

Protest is so much a part of democracy, and yet it is glibly ridiculed. I have been thinking about how to break through with messages that are subversive and contrarian. And your article clearly states the barriers to entry.

The mainstream media is being slowly streamlined into a machine of propaganda for unrestrained neoliberal market capitalism. And capitalism is not evil per se. It is the exploitation that prevails unrestrained in a market where the playing field is slanted toward the wealthy and the powerful.

Of course in a market where the channels are being streamlined, and the supply of a range of views remains constant, which views are going to be given the flick? Which will be over-represented? The loudest voices will prevail and the voices of contrarians will be muted.

The challenge is using the radio and internet to the advantage of contrarian voices. How to make it work, particularly given the diversity and size of both media?

Bloody good article though Tim. Thought provoking.

This article and the comments are evidence of the emergence of powerful media discussion and protest. A point in Nahum's second last para. contains a possible answer to the difficulty of being heard - "the diversity and size of both media".
Diversity, and to a lesser degree size, is what reduces monopolistic control of public thought.
With an increasingly more media savvy society, albeit with exhaustive research and effort of spin doctors to manipulate minds, many of us metally say "Oh yeah?" to those writers and commentators who try to tell us what to think and do.
Corporations and governments try to "dumb down" their communication with Australia, but it's so blatantly obvious that I suggest it produces the reverse result of creating enhanced criticm in our minds.
Time is a factor which can work against public opinion; issues are often forgotten in the plethora of daily messages, yet every time I hear or read a statement by government on some contentious matter, I immediately think "have more children been thrown overboard?"
OLO and similar internet media are a good facility for countering falsehood and revealing unpleasant facts which the mainstream media would like to suppress.

Thanks,Tim, for a thought provoking article.Try getting it run in Fairfax or Murdoch publications, or maybe Alan Jones will grant you an interview.

Such a thought provoking piece ! Yes ! Let's have annual prizes for journalistic criminality. There are obvious instances: e.g. those who continue to deny global warming in the interests of mining corporations; those who most assiduously promoted the big lie about weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, and I'm sure we can think up many other appropriate areas. Tim, you set up the presentation of these prizes and it will be bigger than Meredith Burgman's Ernie Awards.

Interesting item.

Not mentioned, but worth a mention, is the impact of ethical investment strategies and presence of people with a local community focus at board meetings of corporations. The majority of shareholders are all too often loosely coupled, or uncoupled from and ignorant of, the cities and towns their investments impact most directly.

My own assumptions about capitalism are strongly influenced by the Club of Rome Report of 1972 (Limits to Growth) and the more recent publications of the Club of Rome (see www.clubofrome.org), which make clear that, just as a joey outgrows its pouch, an economic system based on unlimited growth will outgrow its geographic base - in this case, the planet we share with it. People may classify me as they like - I don't think "neoliberal" would fit very well.

Direct contact between local community and top corporate representatives has a lot to recommend it. The audience provided by an AGM is inevitably swayed by such debate as can be reasonably and civilly pursued. Many of those people who attend AGM's are there because they are aware of a larger pattern, a big picture. Their views of social amenity are not so entirely profit-driven as the behaviour of the specific company in which they hold shares.

I'd be pleased to know more of the ethical investment funds and watchers currently affecting Australian investment patterns, as direct contact at AGM's is but a small part of any strategy to put the brakes on an economy which just keeps getting bigger and bigger.

“We compete, on ridiculously uneven terms, so as to be able to occasionally challenge their paid hacks who pump out reactionary and poisonous drivel, day after day. “

Poor old Lefties and Entryists, cut off from funds because unionists and their fellow even-more-left-leaning travelers no longer have unfettered access to the public purse through their labor party stooges.

The thing with “neoliberal market capitalism” is – it works, when the moribund and stagnant ideas of “the peoples central planning committee” failed to deliver a bent penny.

This is just another sour grapes whine about how the left lost the debate, the initiative and the right to direct the rest of us.

I guess the old saying

“if you are not a socialist by the age of 20, you have not developed a heart but if you are not a conservative by age 25, you have not developed a brain”

still rings true, every generation will have some left wing ranters marching to the Internationale, behind the red flag of socialist solidarity

But these day, not so often in Berlin, Warsaw, Moscow, Budapest, Prague or Beijing.

The problem is Col, they are not actually conservative but quite radical so your aphorism does not work. It manifests itself in a different form and a takes different direction but pressing these quite radical changes on the community surely does not meet any reasonble definition of "conservative".