2 points:

*I'd like to see a permanent OLO thread devoted to debunking Biased articles that appear in our media.

* The main topic being spun in media today is "IMMIGRATION is good for Australia" and that the overcrowding and inconvenience it causes in our cities is OUR fault and so we have to pay for it with ludicrous Desal plants, increased bus fares, crappy hospitals, police with Italian names in an almost exclusively Italian State government and being told we are richer than ever when we feel so poor.

Are DICTATORSHIP & PROPAGANDA really too strong to describe this?

And then there's Coonan. Wow!

Would you upset your political masters when the Federal Liberal and State Victorian Labor governments are spending between them 2.5 Billion dollars on advertising. They are the media's largest single client.

In Victoria we cannot get any objective reporting on police corruption, even The Age police reporter John Silvester understated the role of former Premier Bracks in his secret deal with the Police union leader Paul Mullett. Silvester did not mention the Westminster doctrine of the Separation of Powers and what a perversion of democracy the secret deal was for Bracks to receive police union support for the 2006 election.

Commercial journalism standards sicken me so much that I have to write my own editorials, mainly on censorship and on ubiquitous police corruption in Victoria.

Joe Hockey threatened me with a defamation action for supporting Centrelink's aggrieved clients, so that cheers me up, but I receive zero dollars in funding or advertising.

http://www.hereticpress.com/Editorials/Editorial07.html#skipnav

Tim
http://www.hereticpress.com

Yes. I think the article is correct.

Just count the adjectives in a supposed objective news report (especially the commercial TV stations).

I thought, for instance, that when a newsreader delivered a report, if the journalist who wrote the report used an adjective, it was then a form of commentary and this is an insult to the audience.

And yes long, rambling sentences aren't appreciated either.

An excellent article but I would add one more criteria that seems to push poor quality publications of "facts". Political correctness over rides almost every story about the environment. From climate change to GM crops the media has done almost zero homework and continues to spout the politically correct (often dead wrong)version of the story endlessly.

Clearly written by someone who knows that working on the stone in a newspaper doesn't mean you're a sculptor.

When I was a young reporter (actually I was 28 when I started), we had to write intros of under 19 words or less and they had to be as tight as a drum. God help the reporter who hadn't checked a fact or wasn't contactable after they'd filed their copy.

What a fantastic medium TV news could have been but it has been take over by Sideshow Bob types who know that footage of newly born panda bears will always take precidence over a more complex stories where there are no heroes or villians.

> Perhaps it is because the public no longer give a damn whether anything they read or hear is true.

Certainly the public care about whether what is written is true, just they like more a good story, and a good story does not need to be true.

> Perhaps it is because the public have become inured to fork-tongued, piously delivered utterances of politicians, bureaucrats and executives; brutality by despotic, military-backed tyrants; self-righteous faith-based certainty by the religious; obscenities perpetrated by terrorists and governments alike; near inviolable white-collar crime; and to news of “miracle” drugs and “cures” from a world of science now largely owned and controlled by corporates rather than operating unfettered in independent research institutions and universities.

Nowadays many these forked tongues are not speaking from heart and mind, merely reading scripts written by journalists, media liason...

How much are our politicians and their backers spending to get their messages filtered, then presented ?

Where is the support to present all the candidates together on stages within their electorates to answer questions that are not scripted, so we can see how they perform on the run ?

Is the electorate prepared to listen ?

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