THE MEANING OF OZ - All you need to know!

You said it...except I don't give a ferk about no wallabies.

I gather that PM is something of a menace. We've been in the same boat for a while, far too long actually, but the next election is looking promising and our boy (Pierre Trudeau's son) is my kind of fella.

Abbott's government has actually succeeded in shocking me. I expected bad, but this is stunning.

It's no shock that both our PMs are big fans of each other - joined as a solitary political beacon of climate change denial and shafting the poor for the elite.

There used to be a fairly broad progressive consensus in Canada, the US, Britain perhaps in Oz (I assume so) which has kinda been run over.

How seminal has Murdoch been in shifting that consensus?

He's had a fair hand, at least in supporting the people who been making it happen.

Not quite sure who or what you're referring to, hinge.

In England, as we now know in detail, he corrupted government, police and media - at the very top and down. I saw an interview with Ted Turner nearly a decade ago where Turner related visiting Blair who he described as a friend and warned Blair that Murdoch was accumulating too much power in Britain. Blair answered, "If it weren't for Rupert, I wouldn't be PM". A bit earlier, Dennis Potter the genius Brit playwright said that no one had been so responsible for degrading political discourse in Britain than Murdoch.

In the US, with Fox, he's managed to degrade discourse in the same way. He's not the only one but he's key because Fox is key, being the most watched network for years.

Why people vote for these horrid modern conservative leaders with their anti-progressive ideology seems a great puzzle.

I do seem to be underplaying his hand - there was a pretty cool series in the Guardian that said the recent trial wasn't about crime, it was about power.

Fox isn't the key in the USA though
Check the ratings
http://usatoday30.usatoday.com/life/television/news/nielsens-charts.htm

In terms of televesion networks it's not the top by a long stretch (http://usatoday30.usatoday.com/life/television/news/nielsens-charts.htm). In terms of cable news networks it is number one in the USA, but in a crowded field and it peaks at about 2 million views in a country 0f 300+ million

Sometimes I think with media, like politicians, you get what you deserve. And you've hit the nail on the head in asking 'Why' because clearly you can't blame one media outlet or one side of politics for delivering the message the voters want to hear. It's just a pity that so many of the souls on our planet want their prejudices confirmed, their narrow views affirmed, their fears titillated and their sense of righteous indignation pumped up.

Sorry, meant cable networks. But Fox, I'd argue, is unique in TV because it's function is so singular - it's a straight-up propaganda vehicle and reportorial integrity (not to mention truth) has no place whatsoever in its operation. Without Fox, there likely would have been no Tea Party phenomenon or it would have been a small and passing thing. They pumped it into media primacy through their own constant rah rah and assistance with getting that demographic to attend and support rallies, and, importantly, through influencing other media to follow their coverage (this is a commonplace aspect of what Fox does and how it influences). There are other right wing media such as talk radio, Brent Bozell, new media entities etc but none has such influence on what mainstream media feels obliged to repeat or discuss or cover.

I've been reading the Guardian most every morning for more than a decade so I'd attended to Nick Davies reporting on NOW before the Milly Dowler story blew everything into the open. And you're exactly correct to accept the Guardian's notion that the key subject is not crime but power. That is what Murdoch is about. Crimes are incidental.


Here's where I disagree most acutely. Marketing operations and propaganda operations both have the same desire and purpose - to alter consensus in some target audience. And very obviously, this can be achieved. It's not just that there is an audience out there with fixed prejudices, fears, ideas, values, etc. Each of those can be altered or expanded or heightened. Thus Fox, for example, pushing the Black Panther thing.

That's why I brought up the shift in consensus away from a prior broad acceptance of progressive ideas and values and towards what we're seeing in the nations we've been talking about. There is agency behind that shift.

Interesting programme on Radio 4 today about The Sun. I'd almost forgotten how repulsive Kelvin Mackenzie was.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b04f8m54

Great tip, izzy. Thanks. Everything Murdoch touches goes this way. He's a high functioning sociopath.

It's one of those examples of synchronicity. I took my boy to LEGOLAND today and that was on the radio on the way. I get back and you're talking about Murdoch.

Looks like it's not available for download, so far as I can find.

That's a shame. One thing that was surprising was how acceptable homophobia was just a few years ago. Kelvin Mackenzie used homophobic language all the time, even using the word "poofter" on the front page as a headline.

Perhaps they'll set up another rebroadcast or podcast. I'll keep checking.

I was just reading an Elizabeth Drew piece at the New York Review of Books and a point is made there which I'd previously not considered (re change away from the prior progressive consensus)...

http://bit.ly/1tMiQKg

Not sure why this hadn't occurred to me as it is bloody obvious. Though my parent's generation were rather reactionary as regards many other social issues, they had come through the depression and had personally witnessed the many gains that attended progressive legislation. But their children's generation has no such personal experience. In a discussion I had at NRO some weeks ago, people there were arguing that America was at its best ("most free and prosperous") during the period that we refer to as the Gilded Age. Their ideological fixed ideas and lack of knowledge/study about the past gave them high certainty on this. They were not amenable to any shift in perspective.

Of course, one of the key reasons they are so poorly educated or misinformed about their own nation's past is due to the media they attend to.

Do you believe that MSNBC is any less "straight up propaganda"? I don't know of any media outlet that is free of a point of view or preferred perspective in its reporting, or at least in what it chooses to cover. In that I would include all the prominent print media including the Guardian,the Washington Post, the NYT and the WSJ, In my impression, MSNBS is pure propaganda that doesn't even attempt the pretense of objectivity Fox occasionally adopts.

I believe your suggestion that Fox news made the Tea Party a relative success defies rather obvious facts. It was largely a near spontaneous and self-organized phenomenon. Indeed those qualities were rather obviously behind its inconsistencies and the several poor choices of candidates it put forward.

While the relatively conservative media gets a lot of focused criticism from its political opponents both here and in Britain, and conspiracy theories abound about its continuing popularity among consumers, the fact remains that in both countries the great mass of the media establishments are decidedly left leaning in their expressed political views - also contrary to your statements above. I suspect that both sides in these political debates enjoy seeing themselves as the tortured minority, bravely struggling for the truth against the better funded and organized evil conspiracies pitted against them. Intelligent, discerning people ought to see through all that stuff.

I can't argue that "intelligent discerning people ought to see through all that stuff" but not everyone is intelligent and/or discerning, particularly the latter. Lots of people love to have their biases confirmed, to have someone to blame, and have a simple solution to a complex problem - even when they are illusory.

Fox had a definite role in promoting the phenomena, and some sectors of business had a hand in funding and coordinating the activities of disparate groups a across the country.

But why are crapping on about this in a forum about Australia?

Oh right, Rupert, our gift to demagoguery

Yes. First, your generalized presumption of equivalence is not useful. Second, I've watched hundred of hours of both so the claim is not uninformed. Third, there's no equivalent individual at MSNBC to match Roger Ailes in terms of personal and professional history. Fourth, there's no individual at MSNBC to match Murdoch and we know, or ought to know now if we've kept up even shallowly with his history in Australia, the US and Britain (as Tony Blair said to Ted Turner, "If it weren't for Rupert, I wouldn't be PM", and as his purposeful corruption of media, police and politics at the very top there has now been made clearly evident). Fifth, there's no equivalent on Fox to the three hours each morning at MSNBC with Scarborough. Sixth, numerous polls over the last half decade or longer have shown Fox viewers to be consistently less well informed and misinformed than viewers of other media outlets.

Nor do I. But the point is irrelevant or too undiscerning to be of any use. Each human has biases but this hardly makes each human's ideas or speech equivalent in knowledge, honesty or integrity.

This sentence indicates you've watched almost nothing from the network, certainly little if anything that hasn't been offered up to you as "exemplary" by some conservative media component.

This isn't a "fact". It's put forward as an obvious truth or, when the writer is honest, as a thesis but it's fundamental use is propagandist. It is the central trope of right wing media as it has evolved and been constructed over the last thirty years or so. It's centrality is made evident through its constant repetition - daily, hourly - across the spectrum of right wing media. It's use is to 1) contain a conservative audience within a epistemic bubble ("We're the only ones you can trust - everyone else lies and leans liberal") and 2) it provides an apparent justification for a media machine which will and does almost nothing but promote a right wing ideology and work towards conservative electoral advantage with, very often, little regard for reportorial depth, honesty or integrity.

George, you're a busy guy and admit you don't read much political writing or analyses. That's your choice but it disadvantages you in understanding to any depth what's going on around you. Several years before the TP phenomenon, people in the Koch circle had devised a strategy of a "grassroots" populist PR initiative built around the "Tea Party" theme or mythology. Nothing was carried through at that time. Then Santelli did his thing. Within days, the label was affixed, groups formed/organized and Dick Armey, with Freedom Works (a Koch operation) was heading up the whole thing. I heard him on NPR at that time and he was nearly incoherent through having to add the phrase "grassroots" to every second sentence. The same marketing strategy of pushing the label and the "grassroots" meme became the central identifying feature of Fox coverage. Fox then moved into telling their audience of where and when groups were meeting or when protests were planned, encouraging their audience to attend. They sent cameras and high level personalities to these events where attendance figures were blown up and where staff were used to work up the crowds (who were then filmed).

I can provide citations for anything I've said above.

Edit: I'll add one more point here. The claim or pretense or goal of "objectivity" in news reporting or commentary is seriously flawed. It had led to an approach which deems it satisfactory to merely repeat conflicting claims (Bob says the earth is round, others disagree). Particularly now, where reporting budgets are slashed (for corporate profit margins) quality and in-depth reporting (or foreign bureau staffing) have suffered deeply. It becomes a cheap convenience to merely take on a stenographic role and then insist this is what news reporting ought to look like. If you want to read the smartest guy around who writes on this very important subject, that's Jay Rosen. Search on him and "the view from nowhere".

I think you are projecting a bit here. I don't know (or care about ) Roger Ailes or his equivalents at MSNBC, but I am an informed, experienced and discerning consumer of information from many sources and in many and varied situations in life (including military planning and operations and extensive contact with senior Defense, Intelligence, State dept. and Political figures), and I believe I have a pretty good bullshit detector. Though they can be valuable, there's a lot more to the understanding of current events than reading repetitive blogs and media accounts, and there are other ways of getting the perspectives they provide.

The MSNBC "News Reports" are a steady stream of propaganda, both in the material selected (or ignored) in the "reporting" and in the content & presentation. Fox is slightly better in that they make a modest (if pretentious) effort at presenting opposing views. One would not know of the existence of an opposing view on MSNBC (except perhaps for the identity of the characters being assassinated at a given moment.

Bad as it sometimes is, Fox isn't quite as biased as are/were Oberman (now departed) , Schultz, Sharpton, O'Donnel, Maddow, et. These folks are openly propagandizing specific points of view without any effort or pretense of reporting whole events or information.

I agree that both Left and Right see and report opposing bias in the media, that's just human nature at work. However if one makes the effort to compare the media treatment of analogous events in reporting Republican and Democrat administrations, the differences are vivid. Consider the treatment of Attorney General Alberto Gonzales compared to that of the current incumbent and the nature if the acts of which they are accused; or the reaction to the recent retaliatory IRS capers compared to analogous events in Watergate. I recognize that you are likely to breathlessly assert that they are leagues apart, but I firmly believe they are very comparable, and that there are huge differences in the media reporting of them.

That there were significant elements of planning and coordination (some funded by the perennial Koch brothers bogey men) associated with the Republican reaction to the opening years of the Obama administration does not mean that the Tea Party movement didn't have very substantial spontaneous grass roots forces operating. Indeed the very uncoordinated political agendas and activities that resulted amply testify to that. Your usual sense of critical skepticism appears to have vanished in this matter.