Strange rituals and bad jokes

I remember reading this shower of piffle from the ABC's Head of Policy and Staff Development and dreading the prospect of appalling and inadequate coverage of the next election. Reading Greg Jericho's The Rise of the Fifth Estate gave me the ability to validate and articulate that dread. After viewing the US election from afar you have to wonder whether the ground is starting to shift under Mr Sunderland's feet:

Alan Sunderland discusses how the ABC will provide both comprehensive coverage of the next federal election campaign and engaging coverage of policy issues.

Alan Sunderland discusses nothing. He makes announcements and engages in no discussion with the well meant and considered comments that follow his edict. His declarations toward the end that he's open to discussion bear little credibility:

There are few things we can really be sure of as the next Federal Election approaches.

We certainly don’t know when it will be. Officially, a full term would see an election sometime between August and November next year, but given the volatile state of politics at the moment, no one is relaxing.

We can’t even say with certainty who will lead the Government into the campaign, as Labor’s consistently low ratings in the polls mean that leadership speculation just won’t go away.

But there is one thing we do know with a fair degree of certainty. By and large, the voters are hoping for an election campaign with more policy focus and more substance than we’ve seen in the past.

All this doubt basically means that Alan and the gang are going to cleave all the more closely to traditional journalism: verbatim reportage of what was said and avoidance of what it might mean. Any hope in the fifth paragraph is pretty much in vain, because Sunderland is going to frame reporting on government as some sort of high-wire act rather than the certainty of what comes from all that legislation that is being passed by this parliament. That's how it is; policy and substance is second-order business at best.

And that, more than anything else, is what we are turning our attention to at ABC News.

Sounds like a call to action, doesn't it? That feeling lasts until the very next paragraph:

Of course, complaints about election campaigns being policy-free zones and the media covering them as if they were horse races are nothing new ...

He then describes his own experience of getting caught up in the hurly-burly of campaigns, where journalists allow themselves to be caught up in the hype and starved of information while fooling themselves that they were at the very heart of the action, people who confused motion with progress and who thought that they did the media favours by staging their own stunts.

The US election campaign of 2008 saw blogs and Twitter accounts erupt with rebuttals of assertions by candidates; some were splenetic outbursts while others were coolly backed by stats and anecdotes. This time the process of fact-checking has become every bit as professional as the speeches and ads they critique. Ari Melber is wrong when he says "We are all fact-checkers now"; it's reserved for those with the facts to hand an the wit to know which information addresses (or rebuts) which assertion, as he concedes toward the end of his article. As you'd expect from a mainstream journalist, Melber's regards the new development as "aggressive", without disclosing (or realising?) that not only politicians but the mainstream media have most to fear from any such aggression.

The great newspapers of Britain mostly started as coffee-shop pamphlets. What elevated them from diversions to Journals Of Record and Important Organs Of Democracy, etc., is their reputation for fact-checking and reliability. To lose that reputation is to reduce mainstream media outlets back to the level of coffee-shop pamphlets, or their modern equivalents in social media.

Both Melber and Greg Jericho warn, rightly, that facts aren't enough in themselves. For example, in the past week it is a fact that unemployment in the US has gone down:

• Is Mitt Romney right when he says that too few jobs were created in the past month, and that too many people have given up looking for work (and thus dropped off the lists of those officially unemployed, i.e. looking for work but not having a job)? Yes, he is.
• Is Barack Obama right when he says that more jobs are been created than lost under his Administration, in contrast to the Republican Administration that preceded his? Yes, he is.

What's needed is a deeper understanding, not only of the nature of unemployment statistics, but also of each man's record in using public policy to generate jobs and economic well-being generally. Mainstream media organs claim to have this in spades, but there is all too little evidence for it. This is the essence of notions like "experience" and "gravitas" that press gallery journalists (and their equivalents in the US and elsewhere), but which is more important to the journalists themselves rather than the media-consuming/ taxpaying/ voting public.

Regardless of all that, Sunderland does not promise to change a single thing about the ABC's coverage. The next election campaign will be run in pretty much the same way as the last one:

After all, when you’re about to choose the Government that will manage the country for the next three years, some proper consideration of their actual policies is not such a bad idea.

Yes! He gets it! This is the man to awaken the potential of Australian journalism and reorient it toward actual news and analysis! But then we get to the dead heart of Sunderland's article ...

Let me add a note of caution in all of this.

This is Alan's way of saying: let me ignore your concerns and kill your hopes stone dead.

The media does have a responsibility to cover the election campaign we are actually having, rather than the one we might wish we were having. And if, for the sake of argument, our political leaders are focussing on heat rather than light, moving from stage-managed event to stage-managed event with little or no time for detailed policy illumination, then it is reasonable to expect that would be reflected in the media’s coverage of the campaign.

A responsibility to whom?

When he talks about "the campaign", he means the succession of stunts set up and executed by major parties. These organisations have their own websites, Twitter accounts, YouTube channels and other means to get their message out in the best possible light. Sunderland holds up a mirror in which preening politicians may see themselves displayed and media strategists may judge their own efforts against their own nebulous criteria. He overestimates the extent to which this is important to viewers:

The public is entitled to know what is actually happening on the ground each day.

In election campaigns, voters' minds are "the ground", not the areas beneath the feet of politicians covered in TV camera cords. Strategists position politicians this way or that with the aim to create the impression that an issue is being addressed, but the more important question is whether or not the issue is actually being addressed. It is an issue that journos "on the ground", being whisked around and starved of information, have little role in addressing other than to run the day's talking points against wider information (and if there's a website available to all, and if the talking points can be had from the party's site, what value is there "on the ground"?).

And, of course, if ever it was relevant to focus on who is ahead in the race for popular support, the election campaign is the time to do it.

And what if it was never relevant to do so, Alan?

Murdoch biographer Michael Wolff nails the problem that Sunderland - and many other experienced journalists and editors - cannot bear and are not equipped to confront:

The crisis in the news business, involving, among other things, a massive decline in reading and viewing habits by the younger audience, is blamed on many things. Seldom, though, is it understood as the logical result of not giving its customers what they want. Or giving them what they don't want: banal and repetitive coverage of what Rasmussen calls the "strange rituals and bad jokes" that comprise modern campaigns ...

If Alan Sunderland wants to feed you "strange rituals and bad jokes" then that's what you'll get; or, as he puts it:

In many ways, an election campaign is something of a horse race, and it will always be covered like one.

So there. No discussion will be entered into, and you were a fool to think things might change.

As a consolation prize, Sunderland proposes to knock up a sandbox for social media users:

So our aim for the coming Federal Election campaign, whenever it is, is to tune into that emerging agenda, work with our audiences to identify the policy issues that matter to the community, and ensure they are front and centre in our coverage.

We believe we can combine the best and most comprehensive coverage of the campaign with rich and engaging coverage of the policy issues as well. Why shouldn’t ABC audiences get to have it all?

The key to this for ABC audiences will be an election website that brings together all of the rich, policy-based coverage we have always done during election campaigns, but makes it more accessible, more searchable and more comprehensive than ever before.

If Radio National provides a deep examination of the major challenges in health care, if Q&A has a program devoted to the big questions in education policy, if 7.30 has a debate between the Minister and the Shadow Minister on defence, the ABC’s election website will bring all that content together and make it available throughout the campaign.

For example, if you have a particular interest in environmental policy, the ABC’s election campaign website will give you all of the background on the policies of the major parties, a range of program material examining the issues in depth, and an easy way to track what is being said about environmental issues during the campaign.

If this had been available in 2010, it would have been awesome. Such is the speed of development of information and technology that it is not even adequate for 2013.

As with Coalition policies, the question must be asked of Sunderland: if you're truly ready for the next election, "whenever it is", why can't we see your wares now?

When journalists start using that information to change the question they ask, or even remove "political" journalists and replace them with subject-matter experts, only then would it be the change Sunderland hints at but could never deliver. One of the reasons why the Coalition's ICT policy at that election failed was because tech journalists, not press gallery hacks, took it apart and showed the politicians weren't across their own policy. This wasn't just the sort of gotcha moment that Sunderland and other senior journalists have built their careers upon, it provided real and valuable information to voters about those who would govern them.

I like to think that ABC News has always been about providing depth and analysis as well as covering the day’s events.

Translation: I'm not interested in any evidence that it was inadequate. We'll do what we like, and what we like is what we've always done.

But perhaps in the past, the problem was that if you missed a particular program on a particular issue, it was impossible to go back and find it again, or to locate all the relevant information you need in one location.

And if you find it, and it's full of pulled punches and begged questions and missed opportunities, what then? Is Sunderland fitting the problem to the answers he's already developed?

That’s where we are aiming for real improvement for the coming campaign.

More of the same, with public input sharply cauterised.

Now all we have to do is get Antony Green back ...

Green is one of the nation's pre-eminent psephologists, but every election-night telecast sees him wrestling with his own software as one of his assumptions ends up impeding our understanding of what is going on. This isn't a case of bagging Green, nor of offering uncritical praise; it means that Green's limitations as both a software programmer and an election forecaster cannot be relied upon as wholly as they have thus far, by the ABC and by viewers.

Wolff poses the sort of challenge for which Alan Sunderland, despite his protestations, is certainly not up:

So, what would happen if all general interest news outlets vastly downgraded their political coverage?

After all, politics, with its present niche focus, should certainly not warrant more coverage than, say, business. What would happen if the national media failed to show up for a political convention? What would happen if we stopped encouraging these squares and dweebs and wonks and Big Data idiot savants and hopelessly impersonal robo-types with our media attention?

In short order, we might start to see a new sort of politician who could speak to the rest of us.

The ABC is in no position to seek "a new sort of politician". This would require a new sort of journalist, which Alan Sunderland manifestly is not and cannot be relied upon to cultivate. Nor can Fairfax, News Ltd, nor any currently-operating commercial radio or TV network.

As a careerist, Sunderland probably thinks he's being clever by putting new technology to old uses. Hopefully between now and November he will throw out his plans (or they will be thrown out for him); and the ABC can lead the Australian media approach to covering the next election with a confidence Alan Sunderland cannot inspire, and cannot reasonably hold within himself.

(Thanks to Gordon Graham for the link)

Silent George and the death of a story

For hundreds of years, men have fought and died for liberal values. Today, Australian liberals are fortunate to live in a society which is relatively congenial to their beliefs. The danger of congeniality is complacency: it is all too easy to take the hard-won achievements of liberalism for granted; all too easy to forget what makes us liberals. That risk is especially great in the busy and unreflective world of practical politics, where so often rhetoric replaces reason and pragmatism supplants principle.

- George Brandis and others, "Liberal values", 1984*

We have come to a sorry point in Australian politics when a Labor government can propose something like this and the Liberals and Nationals in Opposition have nothing to say about it.

The press gallery, virtually untouched by downsizings elsewhere in the media, didn't ask them. They didn't mention the absence of comment from a reliably negative Opposition; after a hard-won reputation for relentless negativity it would be interesting to see whether they continued that reputation, or whether it's true that they vote with the government than against them. The Shadow Attorney-General fancies himself as a bit of an interrogator, and is voluble if not logorrheic when he chooses to be; even if journalists related the story of such a man going to ground, they'd have better stories than the ones they ran.

Disconnected individuals protesting against the Federal Attorney General, trying to raise an alarm that didn't resonate, might have satisfied the editorial need for 'balance' but the sheer asymmetry made Roxon's decision look like a done deal. You'd think this outfit and its member organisations might have something to say (and that a Coalition spokesperson on law-and-order issues might take issue with that silence, no matter what their own position) but clearly not when it counts.

Why he chose to be silent on this, the prospect of a vast government surveillance project, with the shift in the relationship between the individual and the state, is unclear. There are strong philosophical issues, as well as complex legal issues on both sides; the perfect opportunity to demonstrate superior understanding of what's important and of the complexities in comparison to an apparently stumblebum government.

The Liberals have three options in response to this proposal:

• They can agree with the government's wish to track every click of the mouse, in line with the momentum for an increased security state fostered by the US Department of Homeland Security and increased US-Australian co-operation on policing, defence and intelligence issues;
• They can disagree with it passionately on principle and stake a claim for freedom; or
• They can disagree just for the sake of wedging the government and forcing it to make a case against the presumption of innocence and freedom from government interference.

There is no sign of any debate in Liberal Party ranks on such an issue, which is every bit as far-reaching in modern Australian society as the Chifley government's proposal to nationalise the banks was in its time, or the Australia Card proposal as in the 1980s. It's not as though the debate has been driven deep underground: it simply is not being had. The ownership of a farm in outback Queensland causes far more angst than this. Nobody - not even the Shadow Attorney General - has the basis to make such a case, as the late Alan Missen did in the volume quoted above:

In particular, the [Liberal Party's federal] 1974 platform stressed the need for vigilant protection of privacy and reputation, particularly in the areas threatened by the use of modern surveillance systems and data banks.**

The 1974 federal platform looks like a high-water mark for moderate liberalism within the Liberal Party. Moderate liberals are dead, like Missen; have left the party, like me; or are refusing to admit that moderate liberalism is dead within the Liberal Party while doing nothing themselves to maintain or advance it. Moderate liberals can and do force no change within the party; only pressure from outside, like this feeble but potentially interesting campaign, will force the Liberal Party to stand up for values it no longer embodies.

Brandis will happily waste his political life on things like his failed Javert-like campaign to crack Craig Thomson because moderate liberalism, and liberals, have no power to compel his attention. Brandis' rhetorical record is no help; he has played all sides of the debate over time in the orotund and obscurantist way that second-rate lawyers revel in, thinking it makes them sound clever.

As to Labor, who knows what is going on with those people? You can get your whither-Labor fix elsewhere.

Now the Attorney General has shunted the debate to a parliamentary committee and it is unlikely the issue will be revisited by the government before the election. Given the reaction from Silent George, he won't be bringing it up either; not even Abbott would remember what undertakings he gave the US on his recent trip to Washington (and no journalist, not even stuffed-shirt Geopolitical Realists like Greg Sheridan or Peter Hartcher, have asked him about it).

For the journosphere, the Great Big New Monitoring System is now a dead story and they will do no further investigation on it (and anyone who presses them on this can expect a whiny tirade about stress and lack of resources, the aching of phantom limbs &c.). The issues are very much alive, however arrogant and facile editors will deem that no issue can survive the lack of their attention When, not if, the issue arises again the journosphere will be starting from scratch, and will not inform us well then either.

The parties of government and opposition will be ill-informed and will make binding decisions on that basis. They no longer have internal debates that help shape public perceptions as to how the issues may be approached regardless of the details at a later time; and yes, Virginia, it is possible for a political party to conduct a debate without behaving like a rabble.

Let us be very clear that it has been bloggers who have been both most outraged, and most articulate on what the issues are and why they matter. This is a very important issue to all Australians and the mainstream media has missed it, the political parties that actually form governments in this country have missed it, and at best non-government political actors have made token gestures in the general direction of these issues. The election campaign, as presented by the major parties and the mainstream media, will not enable voters/taxpayers/citizens to make informed choices either.

All cyberspace issues suffer from the duality where they are both overwhelming (Big Brother with his vast and expensive data banks will monitor everything you do say and think!) and trivial (IT is the preserve of children's toys, and boys who haven't grown up but are somehow overpaid) at the same time. This does not mean that the issues arising from it are trivial or hysterical, or are the sole preserve of obsessives. The reason why the mainstream media has lost its role at the centre of Australian public discussion is because it can't even participate in such debates, let alone lead them or be the forum in which public debate takes place.


* Brandis, G., Harley, T., and Markwell, D., "Liberal values", in George Brandis, Tom Harley, and Don Markwell (eds.) Liberals face the future: essays on Australian Liberalism Oxford University Press, Melbourne, 1984, p. 1

** Missen, A. "Justice" in Brandis et al., op. cit., pp. 232-233

Milling chaff

Never mind the vagaries of the online world. This article from the ABC's Jonathan Holmes could have been written in the 1920s about "the yellow press". John Norton or Joynton Smith or "Inky" Stephenson would have reacted in much the same way to Holmes' scenario as his straw man, Mr P.

My blog, and those blogs that really rattle journalists, are not those which make the sorts of claims that Vexnews or Pickering do; they are not even typical of political blogs. This is one point that Greg Jericho makes strongly in his well-written and highly recommended book, The Rise of the Fifth Estate. The blogs that really rattle journalists are those which analyse how well or badly journalists do their job. In many cases, bloggers point out when journalists depart from existing codes of practice (such as they are). Journos hate that, they hate it worse than being unemployed. They deal with it through laughter: laughing off Press Council adjudications, or stern admonitions from judges, or even the gentle chidings from Uncle Jonathan on Monday evenings.

This analysis is one that journalists will only tolerate being performed by other journalists. The fact is that no profession or trade gets to set and enforce its own judgments - and ironically, no journalist would tolerate any attempt by lawyers, doctors, politicians, or [insert other profession/trade here] to do this.

In a free country, where the press play an important role, it is not on for journalists to seek to exclude non-journalists from participating in and shaping debates about what good journalism is and what it should be. Such EXCLUSIVE behaviour is rude, it's stupid, it's unsustainable, choose your adjective; but know that journalists who cleave to this in the name of tradition are kidding themselves.

Fairfax's ability to sort the wheat from the chaff came under serious question yesterday, as they discarded some wheat (e.g. Ian Verrender, Cynthia Banham) and kept some chaff (e.g. Michelle Grattan, James Massola). The people who made those decisions set the editorial and commercial direction of that organisation's output; they are also people Jonathan Holmes has probably known for years and whose judgment he would regard as the best in the business (for the time being at least). Remember the universal acclaim about Greg Hywood's appointment as Fairfax CEO? I do.

A code of practice would probably mean that we'd all have to be nicer to one another, which runs the risk of anodyne comment limiting the potential impact of debate in terms of actually changing the outcomes that powerful people would impose upon us.

Yes, it's beyond the pale to call Leigh Sales a 'cow'; but it is probably no less hurtful to Tony Abbott to question whether he'd be a very good Prime Minister, or even to assert (as this unregulated blogger does) that he's not even good enough to make it to the top job in the first place. Holmes preferred option, a code of practice where journos look after their own, would focus on the niceties and improve nothing for the wider public in terms of either redress or better journalism.

On the subject of Sales' recent comments about "anonymous" people online: I use my real name online just as she uses hers. The fact that she hasn't met me, and that I don't mix in the media-political circles in which she mixes, doesn't make me "anonymous".

Holmes went into some detail about powerful people suing bloggers and experiencing popular condemnation for doing so. He seems to take Australia's libel laws as given, whereas in the past journalists questioned it and wondered how it might be improved. Has he never heard of The Streisand Effect? This phenomenon is extensively documented and as available to him as any other research he did for his article. If you're going to write about the internet and blogging you have no excuse for reinventing such a fundamental wheel. The editor of The Drum should have spiked his article on the grounds that Holmes has taken a lot of space to say not very much, a big no-no in professional journalism apparently.

It's interesting that Holmes cites Vexnews as his example of a typical blog. As I said in my post on The Herald-Sun Intern, it was Vexnews who put a name to 'Anonymous' and all of a sudden every journalist who rushed to condemn her used the name from a site which it was apparently beneath them to read. Does Holmes really believe that no big news story will ever from Chaff Media to Wheat Media if it's big/good enough? Worse, does he expect anyone else to believe that?

As host of Media Watch, Holmes has clearly decided that bloggers are part of his bailiwick now and is at least starting to take them/us seriously. He started on familiar ground of "the yellow press", which should have been like shooting fish in a barrel - but even so, he missed. Get a copy of Jericho's book, realise that your conceptions about "The Blogosphere" might not be as reliable as you need them to be, and start to rethink your assumptions about what media content is - let alone what it could (or should) become.

Honourable zombies gnawing at Tony Abbott!

The Howard government now looks like it created a golden age of prosperity which is lost ... Our task, to which we are wholly and solely dedicated, is to recreate those great days for our country and we will.

- Tony Abbott, address to the South Australian Division of the Liberal Party, 18 August 2012

Zombies have made a resurgence in popular culture, and economists such as John Quiggin and Jessica Irvine have titled their books to catch the prevailing pop-culture winds. Also interesting are the political zombies that stagger through Australian politics; the Coalition seem more beset with them than Labor.

Liberals believe that John Howard had found the political El Dorado of a political constituency that represents a majority of Australian voters in a majority of electorates that is sustainable over time. The last two elections seem to put the lie to that, but they can be explained away by a) Liberal exhaustion and b) the comforting notion that Rudd was like a rejuvenated Howard (2007), or lies (2010). Nobody blames Abbott's missteps in both campaigns for them being out of office now. I think this interpretation of history is bullshit and that they are kidding themselves, but to be a Liberal is to believe this; or at the very least, to maintain the facade. A loss in 2013 (made all the more bitter by the evaporation of all those if-an-election-was-held-today wallopings, like holding a heap of scrip in a stock that has soared and crashed) would shatter the myth of that the Howard Restoration was possible or even desirable.

Abbott has been all about the restoration of the Howard government as fully as possible. This has required the Liberals to crack down hard on any dissent.

Firstly, this is what Howard did; the habit is so ingrained they could not imagine doing politics any other way. Howard paid lip-service to the idea that Liberals were free to speak their minds, but MPs who did so were ostracised (e.g. Petro Georgiou). It was John Howard who preached "disunity is death", practicing it as fervently as any lifelong rank-and-file trade unionist.

Secondly, it was the price that Liberals paid for not having to rethink what it means to govern Australia from first principles. The Liberals spent more than a decade doing that, squabbling among themselves until the intellectual direction of the party was taken away from the parliamentarians; initially within the organisational ranks, where enforcers like Michael Kroger and Nick Minchin removed Liberal preselection from troublesome free-thinkers. This was then outsourced to wide-boys like Grahame Morris and Mark Textor, who bluffed many into thinking they were better at the thinking-and-perspective business than MPs, whose role was reduced to relaying pre-packaged and simplistic messages, bums-on-seats and fundraising.

The reward for all this self-censorship (and putting up with unelected drill-sergeants like Peta Credlin) is political success. Clearly, the mirage of polling will satisfy many but actual electoral victory trumps all and soothes all. No leader can maintain strict discipline in the face of declining polling, and as polls plunge the leader will demand line-toeing and loyalty all the more, and get it all the less.

John Howard knew this. He went through low polls and high ones, not despairing at the depths nor getting carried away at the heights. He isn't a candidate for the 2013 election, but for many Liberals a non-Howard election is unthinkable. What he wants is vindication, and the Liberal Party wants badly to give it to him. However, it is starting to bristle at the price to be paid for handing its strategic direction over to history.

What John Howard wants from the 2013 election is vindication. If he had gone to the election without having introduced Workchoices, would he have won? Would he have beaten Rudd in 2007 and then outflanked an inexperienced Gillard in 2010, beating Menzies' record and chewing through a generation of Labor leaders? We will never know, but an old man may be forgiven his dreams.

Howard worked hard to overcome both his race-based conception of Australian identity and Queensland-based rural protectionism. Like Peter Costello he was not going to see his legacy trashed by a bunch of yokels dragging the Coalition up a known dead end. If you're going to return to The John Howard Way, then nobody should be surprised that John Howard will tolerate no deviation from it. You cannot have Falstaff and have him thin.

Abbott has no choice but to accept Howard's admonitions and amend Coalition policy accordingly. It is unsustainable for him to claim that there is no going back, that Howard was two PMs and three Liberal leaders ago; Malcolm Turnbull might have swept Howard aside like that, so might Hockey have, but never Abbott. For Abbott to repudiate Howard, however gently, would be a breach of public perceptions about him as great as Rudd squibbing "the greatest moral challenge of our time".

By cleaving to the certainties of the past, Abbott avoids the thorny questions of the future. The absence of such questions makes for the kind of calm assuredness that conservatives, and journalists, crave. By departing from those certainties you open up a whole lot of questions that have no clear, vote-winning answers. You also accept that some of the measures that Rudd and Gillard put in place are irreversible, anathema to people who still can't accept they were ever in government at all (and that they are there at their expense).

If you're going to depart from The John Howard Way on Chinese investment and workplace relations, where does it end? Abbott has saved the Liberals considerable heartache by mandating that any disputes are to be settled in favour of whatever the Howard government did. He has, however, made a rod for his own back; one he had borne proudly until recently.

Tony Abbott was the most moderate of Howard's four Workplace Relations Ministers. I actually believe him when he says he wants to make minimal changes to the relevant legislation. I do not believe, however, that he is strong enough to beat off Abetz and the other gimlet-eyed fanatics who believe that Workchoices didn't go far enough in nailing the unions.

As someone who has worked on contract for the better part of 20 years you can imagine my surprise at Peter Reith's assertion that there is no legal framework for individual employment contracts. Abbott might be fooling the more gullible members of the press gallery about the purity of his heart on this issue, but nobody with an appreciation for red-in-tooth-and-claw power will give his mewlings the time of day. All Abbott's talk about forming a committee or whatever is just buying time; he hasn't given workplace relations any in-depth thought at all and resents being pressed on any matter that isn't his Issue Of The Day.

Howard is not the only political zombie reaching out to Abbott, in order to hold him back rather than help his quest for government. Peter Reith and Amanda Vanstone have each stuck their oar in; each has their beef with Abbott. Abbott promised Reith his support for Federal Presidency of the Liberal Party (a role that would enable him to hobnob once more with the big end of town, which is not available to underemployed consultants) and then went back on him. Abbott was junior minister to Vanstone early in the Howard government; he went over her head to Howard and she was dumped from Cabinet. They don't want to tear Abbott down (or be seen doing so) but they want him to feel the heat that the media have spared him.

What do Reith and Vanstone want? Vindication is part of it. Like all ex-pollies they assumed there would be this raft of board positions and other honoraria following their years in politics, and like all but a handful this hasn't happened for them. They keep seeking publicity even though they have run out of things to say.  Part of their problem is a failure of the model of younger, machine-made politicians, who end up in middle age becalmed and not much use to anyone: look upon these people, Josh Frydenberg and Tony Smith and Laura Smyth and Jason Clare and Sarah Hanson-Young, and see your future.

Nick Minchin rises from is crypt whenever the far right are feeling rattled. Since 2007 there has never bee a time when Minchin and Abbott disagreed on something, and Abbott prevailed. Minchin just wants to be the Australian Cheney, freed from accountability while making the Federal Parliamentary Liberal Party accountable to him.

Grahame Morris (the only one named here not to stumble through life with the prefix "The Honourable ...") was one of the wise heads in Howard's office who tempered the enthusiasms of people like Abbott, now he's a strategist. After calling for the Prime Minister to be kicked to death, and confusing a capable interviewer with a cow, there is serious doubt over the value of this man's strategic advice: you can read equal or better on Twitter, or on the walls of public toilets, for free. He is like Barry Humphries' Les Patterson, and shows that such a character could never be elected today. A man his age should have the feet up, but Morris has teenage children to put through school and no other talents to draw upon. One can understand how flattered he feels when media producers seek his time.

The mistake that Malcolm Turnbull made as leader was to assume that the 2007 election result really was a repudiation of Howard, and to start the process of rethinking what it meant to govern Australia in order to it (us?) to embrace the challenges of the future. At first the Liberals wen along with this, hoping a Turnbull victory would vindicate and ameliorate all and give a corner of public policy that they could shape in their own way. When Turnbull could not credibly promise victory in 2010, they bristled at the repudiation and replaced the man who was Howard in all but name.

Today, Turnbull is not crafting the big visions but stuck selling a zombie policy, crafted in the 1990s with technology that has since been superceded; as though it might be good enough for an ambitious people, as though the NBN was not a superior solution.

Chris Pyne's response to Gonski on schools funding is more zombie policy. It reads like one of his On Dit screeds from the late 1980s, or the stale farts of a shock-jock (even Alan Jones avoids this topic these days, as it only brings up his own teaching career and turns listeners away). It does not even address actual issues like the imminent mass retirements of teachers or the needs to embrace technology, mathematics, personal health and Asian languages within the curriculum at all, let alone show evidence of grappling with solutions.

Abbott will almost certainly survive as leader until the next election, even though his heart is increasingly not in it (Pyne and Julie Bishop have taken on the attack-dog roles in Parliament that seem to bore Abbott these days. For the government, this must be like the experience of encountering a couple of pampered yappy dogs while doorknocking). His leadership would only become untenable under either/both of these circumstances:

• His lack of popularity, as I've said before, is a prophylactic against the election of a Coalition government. Gillard's popularity only has to rise to about 40% and he's in trouble.
• He explodes, and reveals some aspect of his character that just confirms people's worst suspicions about the guy.

In that case, the next leader of the Liberal Party would be Julie Bishop. She'd negate the gender issue and has a hint of steel, but is not deft enough or deep enough to parry with Gillard. She would not go back to first principles and rethink things, as Turnbull would, and she would put up with the clowns that preselectors have foisted upon her better than Turnbull would.

Labor has its old hands but they tend to stay out of the way. Hawke and Keating seem largely content both to let Gillard chart a path they would never have charted (but which builds on their legacies to some degree), and to recognise that the impending passing of Whitlam will overshadow them both for a time. Kristina Keneally is doing her time in community service and Anna Bligh is spending time with her family, and even "Media Mike" Rann is keeping his head down. Peter Walsh and Bill Hayden have retreated to vast acres. Richo is the exception that proves the rule.

It is Coalition figures, with political standing but no political future, who won't return to give Abbott such old-time magic as they have and nor will they shut up and leave him to get on with it. Abbott doesn't have a program and he doesn't have the substance or the temperament to develop one; but the zombies don't have sufficient substance to fill the void, either. Abbott has assumed that everyone enjoyed the Howard government as much as he did, without realising that you can enjoy a memory while also accepting that it's over.

The honourable zombies show that using the Howard government as your platform is not the bed of roses it might have appeared to Abbott and his supporters, and that there isn't really an alternative as far as dealing with our country's future is concerned. The next election is about the following three years, not the last ten, and people will vote accordingly.

Making a fist of it

It might feel good
it might sound a little somethin'
but damn the game if it don't mean nothin'
what is game who got game
where's the game in life behind the game behind the game
I got game
she's got game
we got game
they got game
he got game
it might feel good
or sound a little somethin'
but fuck the game if it ain't saying nothin'

- Public Enemy He Got Game

A senior political correspondent can't tell when he's being gamed:

One of the many intriguing aspects of the slush fund scandal that was revived against Julia Gillard this week is that the opposition had almost nothing to do with it.

In the annals of scandal-based attempts to embarrass or pressure prime ministers, this makes it as rare as a blue diamond, but nowhere near as attractive.

The opposition was not hawking to the press a dirt file on Gillard. It did not promote the story or brief reporters on the key questions to pursue. It did not use question time, not even once, to pressure her on the matter. These are the time-honoured hallmarks of an opposition-led assault; they were missing this week.

Oh, please.

And when Abbott was intimately involved in undermining the Pauline Hanson support movement, and lying about his involvement, Hartcher would not have dug for the real story: he'd have been satisfied with the surface appearances and left it at that.

Had Hartcher been a White House correspondent in 1972, the official denial of any involvement in the break-in the Democrat party headquarters in the Watergate building would have seen the story end there.

Tony Abbott did egg the media on by repeatedly telling reporters, when asked, that the Prime Minister had questions to answer. But he did not specify any, even when invited to. He was a bystander enjoying the spectacle and cheering it on, but not a participant.

Abbott has the most to gain from the political destruction of Julia Gillard. Had the Prime Minister faltered there was a real prospect that he would have been in the Lodge by Christmas.

As the putative Prime Minister, Abbott could have demonstrated some much-sought-after statesmanship by declaring the Slater & Gordon allegations to be some sort of internal Labor kerfuffle and refusing to discuss it. Had this happened, the press gallery would have rounded on those who really are peddling the story (Hartcher used to get feeds directly from Kevin Rudd when the latter was on the ascendant, and this story has that old-time's-sake feel about it), and dusted off their Gillard leadership stories once again. The fact that Abbott, like Rudd, neither put up nor shut up looks weak; they look like those appalling football spectators who love on-field scraps more than the game itself.

There are some obvious questions for Gillard here. Did she know about his alleged fraud? Did she knowingly abet theft in any way?

Thanks to ABC24, I saw the press conference where those questions were put to and answered by Gillard.

I do not know if Hartcher was there (maybe he was busy, y'know it was just before Question Time) but it does not reflect well on Hartcher for him to put those questions:

• If Hartcher knew those questions were asked and answered, it's craven and dishonest to put them to readers of his article; and even worse
• If Hartcher didn't know those questions were asked and answered, his reputation as a journalist is on the line.

Even more damaging is Hartcher's sad attempt at the smart-arse thinking that passes for political tactics these days:

It looked like a perfect opportunity for the opposition to embarrass Gillard because it reminds the public of the intimate relations between Labor and the union movement, because it reminds the public of union corruption, and because it allows the opposition a new way to accentuate the old theme of Gillard's trustworthiness.

There is clearly no interest in the Labor-union links and union corruption, otherwise this would be a hotter story for the MSM than it would appear to be. Abbott has pretty much negated the untrustworthiness thing with whether or not he read the BHP announcement over Olympic Dam. Clearly, Hartcher's musings come from outside the Abbott brains trust; from people who think they can second-guess them.

Why pass up the chance? There are three reasons that the opposition chose to sit this one out.

Yes there are, but they aren't the ones cited by Hartcher:

1. The Coalition have an unrelentingly short-term focus. If they can knock Gillard out with a single blow, they're interested; but to do any in-depth forensic digging (like John Howard did over the Loans Affair in 1974-75) is all too hard;
2. The Wilson-Gillard thing has already claimed the career of Glenn Milne, whom John Howard wanted as his press secretary, later the most pro-Coalition member of the press gallery; now apparently picking coins out of Canberra gutters. That's why Josh Frydenberg dodged the questions-to-be-answered question when they was put to him on ABC Breakfast; and
3. They've seen what Gillard is like when she's full of fight, and they can't cope. As with all big beasts, you don't wound Julia Gillard; you knock her off quickly and cleanly or you put the gun down and drive on.

Maybe Hartcher might have been at that press conference after all:

So how did the Prime Minister arrive at the point on Thursday of icily declaring that "I have determined that I will deal with these issues", "given we have got to a stage where false and defamatory material is now being recycled in The Australian newspaper," and taking questions from the press gallery until the questions were exhausted.

Umm, was it The Australian newspaper, perhaps?

The watershed moment was when a member of Gillard's own caucus, Robert McClelland, stood in the House on June 21 ... he committed an act of political bastardry against his leader.

Why the two-month lag between then and Thursday? A gun political correspondent could tell us that, but there's nothing here. Surely McClelland learned the lesson of going off half-cocked in February.

A former industrial lawyer with the old Builders Labourers Federation ... Nowicki and Blewitt are hunting for documents.

Would you lump them in with those misogynists and nutjobs we've heard so much about lately? Why is it OK to make the Federal Opposition and the Federal Parliamentary Press Gallery put up or shut up, but these guys can come out with anything as and when they feel like it?

With an entire ecosystem of anti-Gillard activists, dedicated promoters of the Wilson scandal like Nowicki and Blewitt, a split and bitter Labor caucus, and the anti-Gillard agenda of The Australian, this affair is not going to fade away.

If there are no issues of substance to be raised, why shouldn't it fade away? If it does not fade away, it is an indictment of pretty much the entire Australian media. We saw how it pissed away its credibility over Howard-Costello, Rudd-Gillard, Thomson-Jackson and Ashby-Slipper. You'd think these guys would quit while they're behind, but you can't do fearless foot-in-door journalism when your foot is in your mouth and the door is closed.

Indeed, Gillard has now turbocharged this affair. She has elevated it to a legitimate subject of prime ministerial scrutiny.

No, Peter; as with the Rudd Government, she's buried it. There is no new material, champ, and even if there is he sources are so discredited they may as well not bother.

Hartcher has been a Canberra correspondent for twenty years, no longer an up-and-comer but not an Oakes-Kelly doyen, either. Consider the dire financial position of Fairfax against its expensively-maintained non-AFR team at the Canberra press gallery:

• Hartcher has been there half as long as Grattan and is her logical successor, but Fairfax can't pay out her entitlements and stay solvent;
• Phil Coorey has a sinecure as correspondent to the Labor Right;
• Misha Schubert has already gone;
• Maley and Murphy are expendable and each is almost certainly paid less than Peter Hartcher.

If you're playing a game and you've failed to work out who is being gamed, maybe the player being gamed is you. Why should we listen to you about matters that you clearly can't fully explain or understand?

Update: Bushfire Bill on the press gallery, comment 4468.

Huzzah to the future

HAMLET:
Hic et ubique? Then we'll shift our ground.

Come hither, gentlemen,

And lay your hands again upon my sword.

Never to speak of this that you have heard:

Swear by my sword.

GHOST:
[beneath] Swear by his sword.

HAMLET:
Well said, old mole! Canst work i' th' earth so fast?

A worthy pioner! Once more remove, good friends.

- Shakespeare Hamlet Act I Scene V

This is quite a long blogpost about how rubbish the Australian media is, and how it can't really be saved, so if you can't bear any more of that bloggy stuff from someone who was never a journalist then what are you even doing here?

Recently a student at the University of Melbourne went on an internship at The Herald-Sun, Australia's biggest-selling newspaper, and afterwards wrote about the experience in the campus paper. It caused a great kerfuffle as pretty much every journalist in the country dropped whatever Big-Time Serious Scoop that they were all working on to denounce the intern for allowing daylight in upon the magic. They claimed this person was irrelevant while intensely demonstrating the opposite; complaining that the intern was ill-informed when this a) wasn't the case, and b) is hardly a barrier to becoming a successful journalist in this country.

Compare the "Anonymous" article above to this, written by someone highly regarded and rewarded over the years for skill and experience in journalism. Is the intern's effort really several orders of magnitude below that of the doyenne? The latter has a byline attached to it, but it (too?) is badly written and tendentious in its logic, the professional pursuing a petty vendetta no less than the student.

Oh, and incase you think I'm being unfair to Ms Grattan with that link: point me to her finest work, go on. Dive into four decades of workmanlike-at-best pap and bring forth the deathless phrase that only she could have coined, the complex development rendered clear and complete by her deceptively simple prose.

It was funny that it followed the path of most media-industry kerfuffles, where such a non-issue became very much an issue, and then quickly became boring; but then again that's fairly typical of the Australian media. I'm not being slow to this issue: it is worth revisiting now that the dust has settled because I think a central lesson has been missed from what should have been a valuable exercise for people who pride themselves on Getting The Story Right and in believing that Stimulating Debate Is A Good Thing.

Mostly the debate went in two ultimately fruitless directions:

• What happens in the newsroom stays in the newsroom; and
• Toughen up, princess.

Nobody expected it to maintain the intensity of that week but I didn't expect it to fade away so fast. I thought it would give rise to multiple inquiries and long-form expositions on the subject, as happened at the same university twenty years ago when some female students accused a middle-aged male administrator of sexual harassment. During the early 1990s I can still remember getting onto crowded train carriages in Sydney and seeing several passengers reading The First Stone, day after day.

One prime example - again, highly regarded and retweeted by journalists like Mia Freedman - is this piece by Wendy Squires, who deserves some kind of Germaine Greer Award for Unhelpful Remarks By An Older Woman Toward Younger Ones.

And you seem to have missed the class explaining that losing big mastheads is not a good thing. Not for journalists, the public, or democracy.

Really?

• The Argus shut down in 1957, and then Menzies attempted to ban the Communist Party - no, wait, it was the other way around, those two events weren't related at all.
• Then there was News Corporation's decision in 1987 to shut down The News, the Adelaide paper that gave the corporation its name. Within five years of that closure, Communist regimes in eastern Europe had collapsed and so had the State Bank of South Australia. Coincidence? Yep.

Democracy survives the closure of mastheads, and so do the public. As for journalists, depends who you mean: old-timers like Wendy Squires, with little to show for their career and less time to make up for it, or promising up-and-comers like "Anonymous"? The latter will flourish whatever form journalism takes; the former not so much, lacking the sense or good grace to provide useful guidance.

Note how Squires bestows a name upon the "Anonymous" student. The name she uses came from this article, on a website that MSM people regard as the very acme of the nasty amateur online world, all that is infra dig and unprofessional and threatening about the Fifth Estate towards the Fourth. Yet, when it suits them, the MSM can (as LBJ once said about Richard Nixon) turn chickenshit into chicken salad.

But before we get carried away ...

Before who gets carried away, o seasoned pro?

... let me first congratulate you on your courage.

In her fourth paragraph, after a few opening volleys of condescension, Squires gets around to what's "first". Apparently, such structural sloppiness would have earned her a rap over the knuckles which would have been seared onto her consciousness and made her The Professional She Is Today (or isn't, as in this case).

The congratulations serve to hide another nasty swipe that is leavened by the unintended humour of:

Because a newsroom like the Herald Sun's is actually a microcosm of real life ...

No, it isn't. It never was. You're kidding yourself, and those who told you that were kidding you and themselves; you should not be passing forward this self-serving and ultimately unhelpful bullshit.

The newsroom of the Herald Sun is no more a microcosm of 'real life', or even real life in Melbourne, than the things growing under Wendy Squires' toenails are a microcosm of Squires herself. Show me the demographic stats of the rapidly-shrinking staff versus that of Melbourne or Victoria or Australia or [insert your definition of 'real life' here] as a whole. Show me the mature and dignified manner in which the Herald Sun copes with even mild and constructive feedback (never mind the trolls).

The only people who think that "a newsroom like the Herald Sun's is actually a microcosm of real life" are those who entered such newsrooms at impressionable ages, have known no other working environment or intellectual stimulation other than those the job provided, and who face a post-newsroom future with the same dread that "Anonymous" has for the prospect of going into one.

And so, your shock at life outside the bliss bubble of like-minded souls at uni is understandable. It's a cacophonic mash-up of personalities and politics in the working world - as I'm sure your course teachers will explain in due time.

More sarcasm from Auntie Wen, with the hope it will give her arguments a force they don't have. Think about a university, now about a tabloid newsroom: if you had to label one "a cacophonic mash-up of personalities and politics", and the other "the bliss bubble of like-minded souls", which would you apply to which?

You see, a lot of people have found your comments ungrateful ...

At the risk of displaying journo-like qualities, which people? A lot of like-minded souls?

That you had the opportunity to learn at the coalface of newspapers, only to ultimately decide it was all too grubby and beneath you. People who really want to learn can get shitty about things like that.

Not really. I like to learn. I reckon it must have been like going to Sovereign Hill and watching coopers or loom-weavers or COBOL programmers at work. Dying trades are so cute!

Let's look at some examples in your story. There's the senior Hun journalist you recall asking, "Why are they [the gay community] making such a fuss [in regard to gay marriage rights]? It's been this way for millennia, why change now?"

Another affront you mention were comments on a piece about an overweight man who was trying to lose 200 kilograms through hypnosis: "Of course he's fat, look at what he eats" and "How does someone let that happen?"

In being mortally offended by these statements you seem to have overlooked the pink elephant fact that a significant portion of the Australian population is saying the exact same things as the staff at the Hun. Maybe not in your media class, Sasha. But I'm sure any minute your teachers will explain that most journalists don't go into the profession to preach to the converted. The real aim - and thrill - is to educate, enlighten, entertain and inform.

What's missing from that is the example Squires wants to show (what she assumes is there but can't prove) where the dross of oafish comment was turned into  educative, enlightening, entertaining and informative pieces. And printed in the Herald Sun. Squires assumes they are there (you there, stop laughing), but she can't provide any proof. That's a no-no in terms of lofty journo ideals, but you'd have to check with Squires or "Anonymous" as to whether newsrooms are cool with no-proof journalism these days.

But back to your complaints. It appears "white, elitist opinions" were not the only affront you endured during your work experience incarceration. You were also personally slighted - "I was consistently subjected to patronising attitudes, being referred to as 'Little Bud', 'Champ' and 'Kidlet'. Men were also continuously and unnecessarily sexist, waiting for me to walk through doors and leave the elevator before them."

Again with the sarcasm. Kim Powell deals pretty comprehensively with the idea that such people are just trying to be friendly or inclusive, and without being snide like Squires.

But where you disappointed me most, Sasha, is that you missed the very point of your argument, which was a valid one. Yes, the media deserves to be outed and shamed. I have spent 20-odd years in the business and can attest, heart and soul, to experiencing rampant sexism and more. In fact, I wrote a novel about this very thing ... set in the world of free-to-air TV where I unhappily resided for a year. The opportunity to expose the abhorrent treatment my female colleagues and I endured was worthy of not just burning career bridges, but detonating and decimating them. So, I get where you're coming from.

But without sounding like the relative who walked to school barefoot in the snow - it has always been a lot worse than you exposed. There was too much emotion and not enough fact in your argument. The instances you note hardly make a toe-curling point in an environment where women are still sacked for being fat, pregnant, old or, worse, opinionated.

So a student with a short experience in a newsroom did not draw upon "20-odd years in the business" (is the hyphen redundant there?) but upon what was personally witnessed and recorded. This makes her a poor journalist, does it? Surely decimation would be redundant following a detonation? And if Squires' career bridges really have been burnt, why isn't the option of being published in Fairfax closed to her?

Oh, and she failed to write a novel about it, so that makes her a failed novelist as well (Squires may well be a failed novelist herself; I'm not going to rush out and buy her tome either, but having written a novel is no proof or otherwise of journalism)?

I reckon you will make an editor one day. It just won't be on a mainstream publication; that is, one that will reach the very people whose opinions you want to change.

What will "a mainstream publication" look like by the time "Anonymous" is as old (and hopefully more distinguished) as Wendy Squires is today? Who will guarantee that the Herald Sun will even exist then, let alone be classified in that manner? Maybe you could get a youngster to show you how to Google, Wendy, it won't hurt a bit.

It's time here to do what intra-journosphere squabbling will never do, and that is raise the standards of journalism. I am an enthusiastic consumer of media, an industry with declining sales, so whether you have 20-odd minutes of journo experience or 20 years, you need to keep in mind a saying from my profession that should apply to the profession trade of journalism:

Never assume. It makes an ass of u and me.

Wendy Squires has made much, much more of an ass of herself journo-wise in her small-f farrago than "Anonymous" has, and has fewer excuses. But far from being fully condemnatory of the oafs she worked with, and offering pissant excuses for those she didn't (but who Powell and "Anonymous" did), Squires has missed the wider point about such behaviour that "Anonymous" grasps clearly and strongly.

Imagine an experienced journalist and/or a manager of same, and who happens to be male. Imagine such a person presented with a young female intern, making her feel as though the most important thing about her is the shape of her body and her youth: the intern may be guilty of a lack of judgment at having come to such a place, but the senior journo/editor definitely is for creating and maintaining such a culture.

Senior journos and editors who are stuck in that mindset, and who are doomed to propagate that mindset, cannot be said to have otherwise impeccable news and business sense (though this is one of the abiding fantasies of the journosphere). What other misjudgments have these clowns made along the way that have contributed to the decline in sales and sheer damn respect that has beset the Australian media, and sent once-proud organisations to the brink of bankruptcy and irrelevance?

It is a cop-out to say that sexism and harassment exists everywhere; most other organisations have measures in place, and cultivate supportive cultures, that minimise if not eradicate such behaviour. Do you want cop-out merchants running your company and training future staff? What hot stories or business opportunities are going begging because the cop-out boys, the leerers and scoffers, the group-thinkers who all went through the same cadetship program, occupy the commanding heights? What emerging technology have they waved away as a fad, only to embrace something that is crumbling before their eyes? "Anonymous" knows that sometimes the only way you can get someone off their high horse is to shoot the horse.

All that crap that Squires and other experienced journalists go on about how people who've survived long enough in a newsroom have "a nose for news" and that sexism and other forms of social myopia are mere human flaws that can be overlooked (or written about in throwaway novels) is rubbish. If you're running a wilfully dumb organisation, you have no business telling me what is going on in the world. "Anonymous" knows that she is going to have to carve her own main stream in a new landscape, because Squires and her pals are going to bequeath the next generation of journalists pretty much bugger-all.

Alexandra Wake of RMIT and Jenna Price of UTS both administer internship-style programs for journalism students, and wrote pretty much the same article in response to the "Anonymous":

• We have to maintain good relationships with the people you dumped on, "Anonymous", thanks for nothing!
• Aww, it's alright and no long-term harm done, thanks for caring!
• You've got to be in it to win it!

I have some sympathy for their positions, but I despair of the idea that those who run our major media organisations are the same people who can turn things around, including fostering and hiring people who are better than they are.

Price gives an example of how her journo-persistence paid off:

A long, long time ago, in a newspaper far, far away, I was a bossy cadet who called herself a feminist. The blokes on the subs desk would make fun of me endlessly. But we women reporters collectively organised to get the term Ms recognised by the then editor-in-chief. A tiny victory.

In the community which that newspaper covered and served, that battle had been fought and won 10, 20 years before. If the subs or the editor was as across that community as journo-lore assumes they are, then that "tiny victory" would have been won long ago. This isn't to belittle Price's efforts; it shouldn't have been her role to manage upward like that in an organisation that should pride itself on its openness.

The idea that you can only reform an institution from the inside is one with which I have great sympathy: I'm a gradualist by inclination, and in my politics I regard the various flavours of far left and right as irrelevant with their calls for smashing this and that. I took the in-it-to-win-it approach to membership of the Liberal Party, another organisation not lacking in obtuse oafs. Increasingly I'm not convinced the Australian media is as good an example of gradual reform either, despite what Wake and Price might hope. You don't have to become a Muslim to deal with Lashkar-e-Toiba. If you did an internship at Phillip Morris it might turn you off smoking, whether or not Wendy Squires gets pissed off about that. No amount of push-from-within could turn Cobb & Co into Qantas.

However much you might have to work with the sheltered workshop that is the Herald Sun, and whether the people there are naughty or nice (or a bit of both), the fact is there is a duty to prepare students for a workplace where the people who run it are probably running it into the ground. There's little an intern can do to change it; to throw your heart and soul into it might be no less educative or constructive than the good old point-and-jeer.

I am not saying that Fairfax CEO Greg Hywood is anything but a gentleman, but I will wager he has worked with many of the same sorts of people that Squires and "Anonymous" identifies. He may even have such people report to him. He has been in his role for some years now and had to announce these results: when he was first appointed, he was praised for being steeped in the sorts of newsroom cultures that Squires romanticises and "Anonymous" demonises. And yet, if his career had been in merchant banking or something other than journalism, how could things be worse? Has he rooted out the sorts of boofheads that all those quoted above have had to deal with, or are they still running the show and making the sorts of misjudgments whose consequences Hywood had to announce yesterday?

Huzzah to the future indeed. The future may or may not include the Herald Sun, but journalists whose tolerance for feedback is so low that it trips up their bullshit detector have less a place in that future than they assume. An oaf who has been wilfully blind and deaf to changes in our society simply cannot report usefully on it, let alone run organisations that do so: this is the enduring importance of what Twitter called #interngate. When "Anonymous" realises that, the future in journalism may be more assured than it might appear; I'd certainly give her the benefit of the doubt over some of the socially-retarded fools clogging up that industry.

Can I just say this is the second time I've been on radio?

In case you missed it, I was on ABC Radio National's Sunday Extra this morning with Chris Berg and Eva Cox, who each have nicer websites than I do.