Tweeting with Rupert

If you were in any doubt about Rupert Murdoch’s integrity, take a look at his tweet from 10:15am Sunday (left). The tweet suggests fairly bluntly that the reason why Malaysia Airlines flight MH370 is missing is related to a jihad, which implicates Muslim involvement. The tweet goes on assign a motive for the "attack", and recommended changes to American – and therefore Australian – foreign policy as a result of the crash.

This tweet is astounding for several reasons.

•       Rupert Murdoch tweets. As far as we know, he doesn’t hand it off to his minions to type. These thoughts are his.
• ·         This tweet was sent just over 24 hours after Malaysia Airlines announced that the flight was missing.
• ·         The plane, or wreckage indicating its location, had not been found – it still hasn’t. Authorities are still searching. No physical evidence of what happened has been located.
• ·         If the flight has been the subject of a terrorist attack, no-one has taken responsibility for the attack.
• ·         No evidence has been released to suggest the ethnicity or religion of the terrorists, if indeed terrorism is involved.
• ·         The purpose of the terrorist attack, if that’s what was, is unknown.
• ·         If all of Mr Murdoch’s assumptions above are accurate, he proposes that it’s an opportunity for America to realign themselves with China, leaving the Russians to crush Ukraine and make themselves look bad to the rest of the world.

That’s quite a lot of assumptions to cram into 140 characters, but Mr Murdoch has a track record of tweeting absurd missives, particularly in support of the Republican agenda, and with more than a touch of Islamophobia.

This garbled tweet is from March 2:

Obama should all Chinese President following today’s incident and say “we both have the problem of Muslim terrorism. Can we work together?”

Again, on March 2, he made his opinion on New York City Council known. This tweet follows a twitter rant at New York City’s new mayor, Bill de Blasio’s education policy. 

      

NYC now totally managed by leftist activists with no experience in running anything beyond protests. Big mess ahead.

This is, of course, an impertinent generalisation, nothing more than an especially vague form of trolling powered by sour grapes. Democrats won 48 of the 51 seats in the New York City Council elections.

From February 25, he weighs in on Prime Minister Tony Abbott’s close adviser, Cardinal George Pell, who is before the Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse:

Pope Francis appoints brilliant Cardinal Pell from Sydney to be no.3 power in Vatican. Australia will miss him but world will benefit.

And earlier, still singing the conservative Top 10, Mr Murdoch reveals himself as a fully-fledged climate change denier.

Wild winter in US, UK, etc. no respectable evidence any of this man made climate change in spite of blindly ignorant politicians.

Respectable evidence, Mr Murdoch? Like the NOAA, Australian Bureau of Meteorology, the CSIRO and about 97% of scientists publishing peer-reviewed papers on the subject? As the twitter iikes to remind people who deny climate change.

If 97% of doctors tell you have cancer and 3 doctors say you don’t, are you going to treat it, or just hope they’re wrong?

And on Australia’s economy, Mr Murdoch’s tweets are entirely in line with Treasurer Joe Hockey’s talking points. One could also believe that Mr Murdoch was pulling the strings:

Australia in deep economic trouble left by last six year wildly incompetent government. New govt must take quick, painful actions.

By every economic measure, Australia was doing fine when Mr Murdoch posted that tweet on December 23^rd. I wonder if the same can be said after a full six months of Coalition government.

I must congratulate Mr Murdoch on one fiercely accurate tweet, in which he argued with himself about the outcome of Australia’s federal election in September.

@rupertmurdoch “Tele wot won it”! No, Australians just sick of Gillard-Rudd incompetence and infighting wrecking great county.

At least he didn’t suggest that the Coalition had won the election…merely that the ALP had lost it.

But really, how much notice should we take of Mr Murdoch’s tweets? His credibility in the UK has been shot to pieces, and the one-sided commentary in his USA and Australian media is the thing of legends. 

I hope he's entirely wrong about Flight MH370, and that his tweet about it is nothing more than his personal nightmare where his people tap the wrong phones.

If he wants to tweet, I say “go for it”! No-one who isn’t already welded to his traditionalist right wing agenda takes any notice anyway.

Follow Mr Murdoch’s personal tweets at @rupertmurdoch.

CAAANBRA: Fair & Balanced

If you’ve been paying attention, you’ll have no doubt that Rupert Murdoch, that former Australian and worldwide media boss, prefers the conservative side of politics. He’s made no attempts to hide it; in fact, many of his News Limited/News International/News Corporation news outlets actively promote a conservative agenda. Fox News is so far to the right, they're the least trusted news organisation in America.

Nooooo, scream the conservative consumers of Mr Murdoch’s newspapers and television interests. In their view, conservative is “normal” and the rest of us are lefty communist stirrers. Hmmm. What you perceive really does depend on where you stand, but regardless of your position on the political spectrum, few would argue that Mr Murdoch’s news organisations are more conservative than most other news organisations.


Headlines and leaders from News Limited today

With new Newspoll and Neilsen federal opinion polls being released today, the headlines are telling. Fairfax's online titles, including the SMH, the Age and the Brisbane Times, are running the headline “Gillard Budget Boost”, while Murdoch’s press prefer to point out that the Coalition still has an ALP-slaughtering lead. Fair enough too – we need different perspectives on our world.
It's not just the Aussie press, though. Rupert Murdoch is not holding back. He has a personal twitter account, and this morning Mr Murdoch tweeted the following:

“Oz polls show nothing can save this miserable govt. Election can not come soon enough. People decided and tuned out months ago.”

With all due respect, I don’t accept that. The polls Mr Murdoch refers to are the Neilsen and Newspoll  numbers released overnight. Both sets of numbers are either stable or slightly positive for the government and for Ms Gillard as preferred PM, in a post-budget context where ALP votes should’ve been lost, not gained.
Internationally, political pollsters aren’t having a great run of late. In British Columbia, all of the media-aligned pollsters were wrong in their recent election. Every single one of them said that the Liberals would romp home and they didn’t. They lost. According to CBC News British Columbia: 

Angus Reid forecast in its last poll before the election that the NDP was the party of choice for 45 per cent of decided voters and leaners, with the governing Liberals in second place with 36 per cent support.

But in Tuesday's election, the Liberals won 44.4 per cent of the popular vote while the NDP ended up with 39.5 per cent. The win gave the Liberals 50 of the province's 85 seats, five more than the party had going into the election.

Back in Australia, Neilsen’s numbers this week show the Coalition leading the ALP 44-32, a slightly larger gap than was reported in British Columbia, but the BC polls were taken just prior to the election, not 4 months out. There were other similarities too: both leaders were fairly unpopular, and the economy was a key election issue, at least according to the pre-election polls.
The same inconsistencies were a factor in poor polling accuracy in the 2012 American Presidential elections. Gallup, one of the world’s oldest and most respected polling organisations, are holding an internal investigation into how and why their results all pointed to a Romney victory last November. Less than two weeks before the election, Gallup predicted a solid Romney victory; he was leading in the polls by 4%. The final result saw President Obama re-elected by the same margin. In polling terms, that's a big mistake. Huge.

Fox News's Bill O'Reilly, deep in denial on Election Night

Politico has put together a handy summary of some major polls conducted up to Election Day, and few of them had Obama in front.

Remember the faces at Rupert Murdoch’s Fox News when it became increasingly apparent that the Republicans would lose the election convincingly? Less than a month out from the Presidential Election, Fox News ran the story of Los Vegas bookie who was predicting a Romney landslide.  The conservative media in the USA was so sure that their man would win that they were visibly shocked when he didn’t.

The headline doesn't reflect the content of the story.

But Nate Silver, statistician, author and commentator, predicted the election so accurately, he called the result in every one of the fifty states, and DC. He had a look at the Australian situation when he was here in January this year. He predicted a Coalition victory, according to a headline in the Murdoch-stabled Australian.

What he actually said was that the ALP government would be the underdog:

In his first Australian interview after arriving in Melbourne yesterday, Silver said given the recent Australian polls, "clearly the government would be the underdog" but "the most important variable is not how many polls are taken but when the polls are taken relative to the election".

My lefty tendencies aren’t giving this election away just yet. Perhaps it’s wishful thinking, perhaps it’s the weather or some hitherto unknown clairvoyant powers, but this federal election is still up for grabs. Don’t be surprised if, come September 15th, we see more sad Murdoch employees - Andrew Bolt, Janet Albrechtsen, Piers Ackerman, Dennis Shanahan and the rest - wondering how it all went so wrong.

Fox News - America's least trusted news source

Just the Facts, Ma'am

Once upon a time, in a generation not too far ago, journalists were respected, news presenters were trusted, and politicians were at least, polite. Those were important times, easy times, when you could watch the news at six o’clock or seven o’clock or both, and you could believe what Brian told you.


Journalists were never in that same league of trusted professional as perennial winners nurses and paramedics, but they weren’t bundled in with the lowest of the low either.

Politicians were always a bit further down the list of trustworthy professionals than the journalists who reported their stories; they have a vested interest in telling people what the people want to hear. In this year’s poll of the most trusted professions, newspaper journalists, television reporters and radio talkback hosts were ranked 20, 21 and 22 respectively. Federal MPs ranked 25 and state MPs ranked 26…out of thirty. The only professions ranked lower than politicians were real estate agents, advertising people and car salesmen.

Poll upon poll, list upon list, the story remains the same. Journalists aren’t trusted much more than the politicians they report on. How do you know who to trust? Paul Murray on Sky News promises to tell you what “really happened”, Bill O’Reilly refers to his show, The O'Reilly Factor, as the “the no-spin zone” and our own ABC News tells us that they’re “more than the headlines”. And that’s just television.

Please don’t take this the wrong way; I’m not suggesting that the fourth estate is unrelentingly shonky. The miserable fact is that enough reporters have been untrustworthy enough to build a perception that we should question the news we’re provided. High school students are being taught to be critical consumers of news. Scepticism is hardly surprising in an global news environment dominated by Rupert Murdoch's right wing Fox News and bumbling CNN on one side of the Atlantic and the now-defunct News of the World and the rest of Murdoch’s News International on the other.

And what of Australia’s media? More Murdoch, a relatively small population and a ridiculously high concentration of media ownership makes for easy targets and large ripples. If you control the media in Australia, you control the Australian agenda.

Never was that more evident that in the reporting of our Prime Minister crying in parliament yesterday. news.com reported the tears as being the result of stress, until Sky News’s David Lipson tweeted a card from some of Queensland’s disabled population, thanking the Prime Minister for making the NDIS a reality. But of course, News Limited’s first instinct was to show Ms Gillard being weak, rather than showing her being compassionate. They interpreted what they saw and reported it through their lens of right wing negativity.

And what are we talking about today? Julia’s tears, of course. 612Brisbane’s breakfast producer Anne Debert was not impressed with Ms Gillard’s tears, yet couldn’t explain why it annoyed her so much. The fact is, we are talking about whether it’s appropriate to cry in the workplace, whether it’s a gender issue, and if it is, is it one we should embrace, or one which deserves censure. How has this become the talking point of budget week? Most of our news outlets have led with stories of the PM being “reduced to tears" or “driven to tears” or even “moved to tears” rather than discussion of the Federal Budget, the actual DisabilityCare scheme, or any of the other valid news stories of the day.

And before anyone makes the obvious gender related gags, allow me to remind you of Bob Hawke, crying on television during an interview about his private life and again, during the Tiananmen Square massacre in 1989. Malcolm Fraser cried the night the Liberals lost power in 1983. Kevin Rudd cried the night Ms Gillard replaced him as Prime Minister. There’s a long tradition of Prime Ministerial waterworks in this country and beyond. The Sydney Morning Herald chronicled just some of it in 2010, after Mr Rudd’s final press conference as PM, and observed then:

It seems we have finally come to accept such outbursts of emotion from our male political leaders as displays of genuine human feeling. And yet, for many women in business life, crying is still seen as a sign of weakness.

If the tear ducts of our first female prime minister runneth over at any point, I wonder: will it be interpreted as weakness or strength of character?

I love that the question was asked, for runneth over they did. Few media types attributed it to weakness, though. Initially, it was reported as a reaction to stress; later, as compassion, and more recently, opinion writers have written their defence of tears. 

National Nine News seems to have an opinion on tears.

So where does that leave us, the news consumers who don’t have a front row seat and rely on the accuracy and objectivity of news professionals to keep us informed? With the federal election now less than four months away, is it even possible that votes will be decided on the basis of whether the tears of the PM are conveyed as a strength or a weakness? Why are we talking about this, when it's not even the first time Prime Minister Gillard has shed a tear in the house?

The millions of choices made every day by our news media about which word to use here and what tone is needed there will influence the votes of many Australians. Like Anne, you might not be all that keen on a teary PM, but if those tears are reported as a sign of emotional fragility, it could be a vote changer for some. If the report suggests it’s a sign of strength and compassion, different votes might change.

A vote or two here or there won’t make a difference, and isn’t that the beauty of democracy? If you change enough minds, you change a result. The consistent messages - just a few words, or a blaring headline supporting the Coalition - has continued over three years now, and has thrived during this hung parliament. A daily avalanche of negative spin will change minds.

This stuff matters.

Some get it right, some don’t. American Democrat and sociologist Daniel Patrick Moynihan said, “You are entitled to your own opinion. You are not entitled to your own facts.”

From PolitiFact's American election coverage in 2012

Apparently that’s not entirely true any more; it seems that the Climate Change Denialists like the Galileo Movement are entitled to make up their own “facts” – but 97.1% of peer reviewed scientific papers still agree that climate change is real and we’re making it worse.
All of which leads us to PolitiFact Australia, the first international incarnation of the Pulitzer Prize-winning American fact-checking website. According to their own website:

PolitiFact Australia is a non-partisan, independent journalistic venture run by Peter Fray, the former editor-in-chief of the Sydney Morning Herald, and staffed by experienced reporters and researchers.

Our goal is to bring greater accountability to the federal election campaign.

We want to help Australian voters make better-informed decisions.

We want to help keep our politicians honest.

We want to restore faith in the political process — and the role journalists play in it.

Journalists exist to hold the powerful to account. PolitiFact in the US and now in Australia is an affirmation of that deep tradition.

I’d like to proclaim publicly my support for our truthy new overseers, but you see, there’s this pesky thing called Social Media which is making life interesting for politicians and journalists, and now for PolitiFact Australia. Their judgment has already been questioned on social media.
And isn’t that how it should be? In a mature society we should hold eachother to account. In fact, we should strive for a higher standard? When, for whatever reason, the news media falls for the line which today’s politician is peddling, we have a team of professionals who are spending their discretionary time checking facts…and if they get it wrong, social media will let them know it.

The world will change, just a little, for those paying attention.



All of these images were borrowed from social media: thanks to those who created and posted them.

The New Revolutionaries

A few weeks ago, I was asked a life-changing question: What are you tolerating? What are you putting up with you don’t want to, don’t have to, shouldn’t have to put up with? Where do you draw the line between what you’ll accept and what you won’t – and what has strayed to the wrong side of your personal line? The most important questions of all were these: Why are you tolerating sh*t in your life, and what are you going to do about it?

For me, the obvious answer related to a situation I’ve been tolerating at work. With a little inspiration from the Destroy The Joint movement, I’ve escalated the issue and I expect a result before Christmas.

The less obvious answer is also the bigger answer. It seems that right now, this decade, many of us have decided that this is the time when we won’t just put-up-and-shut-up any longer. It not about bringing anyone down or destroying anyone’s joint; it’s about living in a world that is smaller and more connected than it has ever been. It’s about accepting that you won’t agree with everyone and being secure enough to let others have their opinions too. It’s about respect for people who aren’t like you are, and being truthful and acting with integrity and holding each other to account.

Perhaps I’m just feeling more confident after President Obama’s re-election, Cardinal Pell’s ruinous press conference, or the resignation of Bruce Flegg from Queensland’s ministry, but I feel something happening. Perhaps it’s the English-speaking world’s equivalent of an Arab Spring. Perhaps its astrology, or maturity or simple old coincidence. I think it’s more: the passage of time combined with incremental social change over several generations, social media and connectivity, and the understanding that people have power.

It’s complicated.

Look at the events of last year or so, which have challenged the behaviours and institutions that make up the basic societal structure of the past decade or so.

News Limited and the phone hacking scandal

The Occupy movement

President Obama’s re-election and the rejection of Tea Party values

Destroy The Joint & Alan Jones and advertisers

The international response to the shooting of Malala Yousafszai

Julia Gillard calling Tony Abbott a misogynist

The Royal Commission into institutionalised abuse

What’s driving these campaigns? It’s not government, and often tackles issues which are entirely removed from Government. Equally, sometimes the campaigns are targeting potential legislation. Organisations like GetUp! now operate alongside industry lobbyists, trade unions, and churches. Social Media platforms like Facebook and Twitter now connect users to online petitions where they can show their support for or against a cause.

The diverse list of headline grabbers above has one thing in common: there’s an energy coming out of a collective challenge to “the way we were”, particularly when “the way we were” allowed the more powerful in our society to do whatever they want without thought for those who have less power, less money, less influence.

But before the ‘establishment’ cries foul, those who are driving change are not all gay Muslim hippy-dippy feminist socialist global-warming advocates, dragging the world towards single planetary governance and a carob-coated Soylent Green existence. They – those people who destroy the joint and start petitions (and sign them) and choose to become whistleblowers and speak out? They are us.

The Royal Commission into the institutionalised abuse of children is the most recent example of what is happening. Despite Cardinal Pell’s denialist perspective, it’s correct to say that the sexual abuse of children, particularly boys, has been an open secret for decades. It may well have been going on for centuries – we don’t know. What we do know is that there was no support for victims, who rarely spoke out in any case. Paedophile priests concealed each other’s crimes, and the Church’s own customs and dogmata allowed these men to find absolution.

So secretive is the church that even now, they choose the sanctity of the Confessional over their responsibilities as humans, as adults, and as moral leaders of their community. Any attempt to impose a secular law to over-rule the rule of their church would probably fail; the collective will of "the church" - those who have perpetrated crimes against our most innocent, those who have concealed it, and those who turned a blind eye - will defy en masse
 
It’s handy to have no legal status whatsoever.
 
And so something is starting. Something to do with intolerance, but as a positive movement rather than a negative descriptor. We’re challenging the way things are now, and sending strong messages out into the world.

No, Mr Murdoch, it is not acceptable for your organisation to source its scoops by illegally hacking phones and email accounts, by bribing officials and by lying about it.

No, Mr Romney, we are not going to vote for a President who will legislate to control women’s’ bodies, gay rights and immigrant’s rights, while making it easier to get guns. Nor will we watch you talk about reducing the deficit will simultaneously reducing taxes on the rich and services for the poor.

No, Alan Jones, it is not okay for you to continue your abuse of our Prime Minister…or your abuse of anyone, for that matter.

No, Mr Abbott, you may not continue to mutter derogatory and sexist comments across the despatch boxes in Parliament, and to base an entire party leadership on the absence of policy.

Hell No! Your Holiness, we are no longer willing to accept the way your church has treated young boys and girls in our communities for generations; neither will we accept your church’s intricate attempts to cover its tracks, evade responsibility and use your Holy rituals as an excuse for inaction.

And to my employer, thank you for noticing.

Missed Manners

After my blog post earlier this week in which I compared Liberal parliamentarian Sophie Mirabella to Jane Austen’s delightful Miss Jane Bennet, I’ve been thinking again about standards of behaviour, where they come from, and what they mean. I’ve also been thinking about how Ms Mirabella is actually a mishmash of all of the worst qualities of all five Bennet sisters, but I’ll leave that one for the Austen aficionados. 

So what is the ultimate authority on manners? Who arbitrates good behaviour and differentiates it from poor behaviour? How are these standards communicated through a community, and how are they enforced?
Should we defer to the teachings of American Judith Martin, better known as Miss Manners? I’d mention her age, and suggest that perhaps her preferred style might be out of vogue, but I’m sure she wouldn’t approve of me talking about a lady’s age.

"You can deny all you want that there is etiquette, and a lot of people do in everyday life. But if you behave in a way that offends the people you're trying to deal with, they will stop dealing with you...There are plenty of people who say, 'We don't care about etiquette, but we can't stand the way so-and-so behaves, and we don't want him around!' Etiquette doesn't have the great sanctions that the law has. But the main sanction we do have is in not dealing with these people and isolating them because their behaviour is unbearable."

 
Australia has our own maven of manners, the indomitable Miss June Dally-Watkins. Around the same age as Miss Manners, Miss Dally-Watkins started Australia's first finishing school for young ladies in the 1950s, and still makes occasional media appearances to talk about etiquette, deportment and 'shoulds'. There are many many 'shoulds' in the world of manners, yet probably many more should-nots.

I have no idea what Miss Dally-Watkins would think of Ms Mirabella's performance on QandA, but I have a fair idea what she thinks of Kyle Sandilands and Jackie O. I'd guess she would dismiss Vile Kyle as absolutely beneath her contempt. His entire existence is a should-not. 

Jackie O would attract fierce criticism for tolerating Kyle's appalling behaviour, and for associating with him. The contrast is even more dramatic against the backdrop of Jackie O's gig hosting Channel Ten's Australian Princess, a reality show in which a selection of less-than-genteel young ladies were transformed into pretentious young ladies with near perfect manners. This was dramatic irony at its best.

But these are, of course, personal judgments, made with only my own sense of etiquette to guide me. There are some authorities which have to make official determinations: ACMA has found Kyle Sandilands to have crossed their line, and has imposed additional conditions on 2DAY-FM's broadcasting licence in an attempt to control Kyle's personal imperative to shock. 

Clearly, 2DAY-FM management has been willing to overlook Kyle's disregard of social standards to keep the money flowing.  They have implemented their own safety measures to ensure Kyle can be 'dumped' before anything too offensive goes to air, but against what standards do they measure  'too offensive'?So desperate are they to keep Kyle on air, they have taken ACMA's decision to the Appeals Tribunal today to have he conditions diluted. The SMH reported: 

Southern Cross Austereo's barrister, Richard Cobden, SC, said in response to Sandilands's behaviour, the broadcaster had taken ''remedial action'' to prevent further breaches, including a 30-second delay and two censors to warn him if he was likely to cross the line. All staff involved in producing and presenting programs had undergone training and Sandilands had been counselled.

But Richard Lancaster, SC, for the authority, said the watchdog wanted the condition to apply 24 hours a day, seven days a week. The condition states ''program content must not offend generally accepted standards of decency … having regard to the demographic characteristics of the audience of the relevant program''.

Wouldn't it be cheaper and simpler to employ a radio host who can be both entertaining and controversial, and can also be trusted to use common sense to censor himself? Or is Kyle's risky on-air behaviour the key to his success?

My friend Jillian suggested that one of the factors that determine standards is celebrity: if enough influential celebrities exhibit a certain behaviour, it can transition quickly from fringe to mainstream. Just look at the way glasses frames have changed over the past 40 years, or trace the origin of almost any fad you care to name, from miniskirts to destination weddings. 

Standards do change: Are the repeated behaviours of Kyle and Jackie O - Kyle crossing the line, and Jackie giggling - influencing standards and behaviours in their audience? Do young male listeners think its okay to call women "fat slags" when they disagree with them? Are  women learning that the appropriate response to hearing a man call a woman names is to emit an embarrassed giggle?

That's the only argument I would need to reject 2DAY-FM's appeal and uphold ACMA's ruling.

Technology is playing a larger role too. Social media provides the means for people to indulge in behaviours - often abusive - that they wouldn't dream of trying in a real life situation. Federal MP Andrew Laming (@AndrewLamingMP) has a reputation for questionable use of Twitter and Facebook, being provocative, at times rude. Failed Sydney politician Mark Sharma (vos2135) is abusive on Twitter, although he cleans up his act during any campaign in which he's a candidate. Dare to contribute an opinion under the #auspol hashtag and you should expect to be attacked for it, by people you don't know. 

In one of the truly great moments of Twitter irony, Rupert Murdoch complained how hard it was to have a civil conversation on Twitter, amidst all of the ignorant, viscious abuse. Is this a sign of social decay, Murdoch asks. Thousands of responses included suggestions about the risks of stones and glass houses, that pot and kettle have met, and that finally, Rupert is reaping what he has sown. 

And I'm still no closer to understanding standards of behaviour, other than to suggest that in most cases these days, the majority rules. Miss Manners, ACMA and even 5S are all about imposing external standards. I'd like to think that we each have our internal gauge of what is acceptable.

In the absence of anything better, The Golden Rule (Do Unto Others) seems appropriate. It's a rule, a guideline, a commandment in every major religion, it has credibility in psychology and sociology, and it's common sense if you don't try to complicate it. 

Let's all try that one for a while.


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