verging_on_random

Not the ABC News

December 13, 2006 on 6:48 pm | In Uncategorized |

I watched the ABC News tonight. I used to do it religiously, every night, but lately I’ve been doing it less and less, partly because it largely consists of people re-hashing stories that were in the newspaper I read 12 hours earlier, and partly because the rest of the stories had already been adequately covered in my RSS feeds.

Tonight I was interested to find out what was happening on the bushfire fronts. I didn’t find out, unfortunately. What I did have to endure was several minutes of John bleedin’ Howard mouthing inanities as he visited some fire fighters, followed by about 30 seconds of Kevin Rudd doing the same thing (thereby demonstrating the ABC’s commitment to ‘balance’ in all its shows).

This maintains the tedious trend that Tim Dunlop first noted in his blog months ago: the media no longer reports news, it reports what politicians - especially John Howard - say about the news. Howard visiting fire fighters to tell them they’re great has become far more newsworthy than anything the fire fighters themselves might have done.

It’s lazy ‘journalism’. Instead of reporting news, all they do is collect the prime minister’s schedule for the day from their email and follow him around like puppies, faithfully recording every banality and conveying it to the Australian public. It’s a sad commentary on the levels to which the Australian media has sunk, and it also shows how easy it is for incumbent governments to manipulate the contents of the ‘news’ that gets delivered via the mass media.

Governments all over the world (excepting a few countries like Iran and China that are prepared to implement overt censorship) must be tearing their hair out in frustration at their inability to massage the content of online blogs. I’m sure they’ll come up with something sooner or later.