With the demise of Michael Jackson at age 50 consuming the public imagination The Times of London has delivered an absolutely corking insight into the sad weird world of the star.
Daphne Barak’s long time personal friendship with the Jackson family’s nanny make for a fascinating read.
Old media are having a love affair with Twitter…
I suspect because it’s media in a format they understand.
They, the mighty, exposit. The adoring masses, in turn, become “followers”, hanging (in theory) on every update, hoping to discover if there were peanuts in the latest bowel movement.
With a 140 character limit on each “tweet” there’s a haiku like brevity, but also no competition between twitterers to make more substantial contributions.
It’s essentially ephemeral, and highly commercial. All the old men in the big media companies have leapt upon it shouting “At last, New Media I can understand”.
The problem is that everyone’s shouting and no-one’s listening.
A friend of mine in the process of building an online presence for his business recently bought 500 “followers” for $10 from a dodgy company. 5 seconds googling found me a mob offering 100,000 followers for $3,479.
So even at its inception the process is inherently corrupt.
And aside from a very small number of weird tragics most people don’t actually want to know what their local newsreader had for lunch. They just want the newsreader to read the news.
Now it’s true that if you live under a despotic dictatorship 140 character tweets might make for better news than no other news service at all. But after watching recent events in Iran you can be sure that in future events security services will be polluting the pool.
Announce a thousand events through a thousand channels all with thousands of bought “followers”. Have your goons lined ready at each place with the truck waiting to cart away the silly kids.
To say nothing of the reason teenagers use Facebook and not Twitter. Anyone can be reading what you post. Hundreds of Iranian government workers are no doubt hard at work right now identifying Twitterers. Teenagers are more concerned their parents will find out they’re planning to get smashed on goon in the park on Saturday night.
Today’s confusion with twitter posts claiming Harrison Ford and Jeff Goldblum had died on a movie set joining the genuinely deceased Michael Jackson and Farrah Fawcett was a case in point. With legitimate news sources crapping out under celebrity overload people turned to Twitter and they got crap back.
So yes, Mark Scott at the ABC might get an ego boost Twittering to his troops. But he could just as easily have sent them an email.
Forget Godwin Grech, forget misleading the house, or not.
Annabel Crabb in the SMH has put her finger on the real implications of the whole weird sorry business:
“The chief of the Motor Trades Association, Michael Delaney, insists Grant got no special favours.
Delaney’s remarks were repeated with enthusiasm about a gazillion times by both the Prime Minister and the Treasurer, which tended to confirm suspicions about what this episode has done for the trustworthiness of politicians in general.
It is understood to be the first time a prime minister has sought a character reference from a car salesman.
The NY Times has an excellent article explaining what could really be happening in Iran.
Basically their suggestion is that Ayatollah Khamenei, faced with a splintering of his support in the Guardian Council has cast in his lot with President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and the revolutionary guard.
Essentially Iran is being transformed from a theocracy into a military dictatorship.
There’s a coup going on here as well as a revolution.
The Register explains the furore surrounding The Times outing a prize-winning blogging policeman.
At issue is that having discovered his identity the courts refused to injunct to prevent publication of his name.
While I might quibble as to there being a public interest in revealing his identity I’ve never thought that anonymity was a right.
Having been in the blogging game for more years than are healthy I can’t help but sympathise with the judge.
It’s also worth noting that with sufficient research and effort it should be possible to reach a level of anonymity that is beyond the capabilities of journalists to uncover, and possibly even law enforcement agencies.
If it matters that much then start using proxy servers from internet cafes. And if you get lazy and get caught then you’re just going to have to accept putting your name next to what you write.
It’s braver to quit and write a memoir than to hope to tell all and keep the position of trust.
To seek an injunction against any other publication in the interest of freedom of speech is ridiculous.
The New York Times’ Roger Cohen is on the ground in Tehran and has put together vignettes from the crushing of dissent following the election.
London’s Times had a story in the last few days which I sadly can’t find, but they claimed to have seen polling by the ruling party showing they were going to lose big.
Instead, within two hours of the polls closing, a bizarre victory was announced with the winning margin weirdly uniform across the whole country.
Cohen also has this claim from a man in the street:
“He was from the Interior Ministry. He showed his ID card. He said he’d worked there 30 years. He said he hadn’t been allowed in; nor had most other employees. He said the votes never got counted. He said numbers just got affixed to each candidate.”
So there’s a lot to suggest Iran can no longer lay claim to being a democratic Islamic Republic.
How 58% of the population who’ve had their votes stolen reacts to this is going to be interesting. With a large US army just across the border some might think they can be braver than they might otherwise be. For all that an intervention would be the very last thing Barack Obama will be wanting to undertake.
Considering that Iran’s burgeoning youth population couldn’t even vote it’s probably going to be worse than in the ranks of the young and the brave.
One always have to put the money on the apparatus of State, especially when its as ruthless and religiously inspired as the Iranian State.
But stranger things have happened, and bludgeoning people rarely wins them over to one’s point of view.
So Peter Costello has announced he’s leaving politics.
One suspects he reached this decision after his colleagues failed to beg him to lead them.
So what was Peter Costello?
He was one of very few Liberal MPs able to understand the benefits of genuinely liberal policies (both social and economic). Sometimes he even advocated for them.
He had some ability to deliver a line. In the dross of parliament this made him appear at times to be funny.
He did what Treasury told him to do, the mark of all treasurers considered successful.
And finally if he’s remembered at all it will be as a warning to other aspiring politicians that they need to be ruthless if they want to get to the top. Outside of royal families no-one just gets handed the crown.
If he seriously wanted to be PM he should have gone to the back bench early in John Howard’s last term.
When the Liberal polling collapsed he probably would have been able to do six months in the top job and had some chance of winning the election.
But in the end he lacked the guts for it.
The Australia is gleefully reporting that Fairfax is at long last beginning the consolidation of its redundant offices in the federal Parliamentary press gallery.
A fifth office services Fairfax’s Sydney Sunday, The Sun-Herald, and Rural Press papers.
Michelle Grattan must be losing her mojo for this piece of sanity to finally get up.
Many trees have died, and many electrons have been squirted telling the tale of Senator Bob Brown’s legal woes and the risk he could be expelled from the Senate were he to become a bankrupt.
Firstly, it probably is distasteful for a parliamentarian to be as litigious as Bob Brown. He’s in a big party, itself part of wider movements. He can offer support without signing up as a plaintiff himself to everything.
But we probably do need to look at barring bankrupts from parliament. In the 20th century as a number of countries slid into dictatorship bankruptcy was used to remove inconvenient parliamentarians and disbar difficult lawyers.
Garnishee a parliamentarian’s wages if they owe you money sure. But distasteful as bankruptcy is we might well need one in parliament one day.
The Age informs us that the ABC has sacked their head of comedy, Amanda Duthie, over allowing The Chaser to outrage the parents of sick children.
Now many years ago my boss made me write our cinema’s column for the company newsletter. He wanted something funny that would stand out and despite already working me 80 hours a week getting his popcorn sold he also wanted 250 words of news from our front for the rest of the company.
The first two went out to rave reviews. The third I tackled angry and sleep deprived. It went through a manager in our workplace who approved it. Then it went to the editor of the company newsletter who approved it.
When the publication was out and the CEO of our large multinational read it word went out that a head must roll.
So as a non-sacred cow in the organisation I was forced to publicly state my contrition and fall upon my sword.
As luck would have it I’d already resigned to claim a redundancy package so other than some smarting about the unfairness of it all I really wasn’t worried.
The point is that by sacking the head for failing to control the talent, rather than sacking the talent, the ABC have really shown that it’s the Chaser puppet master, Andrew Denton, who’s really wearing the pants in the organisation.
Good luck to future heads trying to reign in the sacred, but ever tireder and more forced, cows.
Website Collider.com has broken the news that Futurama is returning with Comedy Central ordering 13 new episodes.
Collider has since been smashed off the internet by the weight of interest but Tvsquad has the gist of it.
If ongoing fan interest can bring back Futurama there’s hope yet for Firefly surely.
All the world remains a-twitter with talk of swine flu.
Vast sums of money are being spent and there’s widespread disruption which doesn’t come free either.
And yet the disease itself is by all accounts an extremely benign form of flu.
So at the risk of being accused of conspiracy theorising, one has to wonder if the over-blown response is being used as a practice for something more serious.
It would be nice if someone could say “This is a drill” somewhere along the way.
Hee hee. Reuters is claiming that the implementation of climate trading in Australia is going to be pushed out to 2011.
Which leaves Labor promising to do it without having to explain the economic dislocation that will ensue to the electorate.
Smart politics, but perhaps a little too slick?
So we have a shiny new defence white paper.
There’s also a very large number of media releases outlining bits they want to draw attention to.
Of striking interest seems to be a lack of interest in unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) mentioned just seven times in the whole paper and almost entirely for a surveilance role. One has to wonder if this has something to do with the Air Chief Marshall currently running the ADF, and it’s a great concern. We seem to be planning to use manned helicopters, so very slow, expensive, and vulnerable for weapons delivery at sea when UAVs could do the job better, cheaper and more safely for no reason other than the pilot’s club needing to justify their ongoing ability to get a job with Qantas and marry an air hostess. There is one very hazy media release which might suggest some hope in future.
The biggest shift from the current force structure is a huge expansion of the navy.
The “20 new Offshore Combatant Vessels” could end up being anything, but with the capacity to embark a helicopter sound suspiciously like a frigate.
12 new submarines is a serious strategic force, bear in mind that submarines aren’t just useful for sinking enemy shipping, they’re also a very important tool for the sinking of other people’s submarines.
That will go nicely with a force of 8 larger frigates, a fourth air warfare destroyer with enhancements to the weaponry of that class will give us a very interesting force.
But what are we going to spend these billions on?
From the white paper here’s the second priority to good old “Defence of Australia”:
“Our next most important strategic interest is the security,stability and cohesion of our immediate neighbourhood, which we share with Indonesia, Papua New Guinea, East Timor, New Zealand and the South Pacific island states. While we have a wide range of diplomatic, economic, cultural and other links with those countries, from a strategic point of view, what matters most is that they are not a source of threat to Australia, and that no major military power, that could challenge our control of the air and sea approaches to Australia, has access to bases in our neighbourhood from which to project force against us.”
And here’s what the proposed force will be good for: Stopping a major power to our north (China) deploying troops into these countries in our region, preventing the re-supply of any that do make it across, and allowing for our own troops to be landed to intervene decisively.
It appears to be predicated on a collapse of American power in the Eastern Pacific, which is why we’ll need to be able to do these things for ourselves.
The China lobby will be upset, but our Chinese friends are more likely to negotiate in good faith on a range of issues when faced by a deterrent to adventurism like this.
The hard part will be paying for it all, and convincing the public that they want to.