verging_on_random

If a tree falls in a forest …

January 23, 2007 on 11:45 am | In Uncategorized |

If a tree falls in a forest and there’s no one there to hear it, does it make a sound? Or more to the point of this entry, if the organiser of  a rock festival asks patrons not to bring flags and nobody reports it in the media, does it represent the greatest insult to the memory of our fallen diggers since those bitches splashed blood on the steps of the Anzac Memorial?

Residents of NSW who get all their news from either the Sydney Morning Herald or the evening news/7.30 Report on the ABC would have spent yesterday blissfully ignorant of the storm of hysteria generated by the Daily Terror’s front page bullshit story about the Big Day Out ‘banning’ the flag at the Sydney event on Friday. Yet News Ltd devotees who listen to talkback radio (and watch commercial TV news I assume) would have been under the impression that it was the biggest national crisis since Christmas (go here if you’d like to read the level of  hysteria).

I can’t say anything about the flag non-story that hasn’t already been said with a lot more passion, but the exercise does illustrate how the media can influence public opinion. Pundits spend too much time worrying about ‘media bias’, as if millions of readers will be influenced by the expressed opinions of the columnists and editorial writers. I think that’s a minor problem compared to the impact of the ‘news’ stories that editors choose to run in the first place, starkly demonstrated by News Ltd poking the xenophobia ants’ nest yesterday.

The same thing applies to industrial relations. If the media decides to run lots of stories between now and the election about fathers-of-five sacked without compensation and cute 16 year olds whose hourly rate’s been cut in half by some sleazy-looking prick who declined to comment, IR will be a major issue in the election. If, on the other hand, they get bored and decide instead to run stories about middle eastern thugs trying to steal the plans of parliament house or kids getting dirty messages from strangers on MySpace, Labor will struggle to get any traction with IR at all.

Thus does the MSM influence public opinion … it’s not the pundits we should worry about but the editors and sub-editors deciding what stories to run.