OnPoint: Beyond 'a bad look'
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Rob Stowell, in reply to
journalism in this country is dead.
My sis is a journalist and wrote this - I liked it :)
Visiting speaker Bryan Bruce knocked the stuffing out of neo-liberal economics in his Wanganui lecture on Saturday night. -
izogi, in reply to
I definitely don’t contribute by ever telling people they should use the MSM to get their opinions
On that, where are the best places for most people to get their opinions when not the MSM, or at the very least reliable analysis towards helping them to form them?
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With journalism in New Zealand there is something very, very disturbing going on. This is not just for the fact that most mainstream media is now under tight private commercial controls, or at least totally dependent on commercially earned advertising revenue, there are other forces at work, that have raised endless questions.
A couple of years ago we had TV3's '60 minutes' screen a program based on investigative journalism, exposing the so-called "exit strategy" that ACC were alleged to be following with high cost and complex claims cases.
Here is just one version of that program available via YouTube:
I understand the makers of the program even got a TV or media award. But the most bizarre thing that happened after that program was screened, soon NO media reported anything further about the allegations made, the facts presented, the interviews conducted!
This is extremely strange, yes suspicious. Had ACC sent their lawyers to silence media, to not make any further allegations, did they block all further cooperation with media re what was reported on?
We know some top bosses resigned due to privacy breaches and so, but as far as I can tell, there has never been a further investigation into what really went on at ACC, who was responsible for it, how many it affected and so forth.
I notice this with other reports and occasional "revelations". And "dirty politics" also revealed a fair bit many of us may have suspected, but had no proof of. Nicky Hager delivered at least some proof, a hacker later revealed a bit more.
It seemed to open a can of worms, but despite of all, suddenly a week or two out from the election, virtually all media suddenly stopped reporting and investigating any of the allegations and moved on.
This raises the question about higher level forces influencing the media, one way or another, that goes further than dependence on commercial revenue the media earns. I am still waiting for many answers, and I see instead only brief reporting of many bits of statistics, press releases, newsworthy events, and no investigation, no follow up reporting, no significant criticism and few challenging questions to the politicians that should be held to account.
This post explains a bit more what the problem is, but I fear we still deserve more answers. Could it perhaps be that "dirty politics" based on using certain bloggers and dark characters in back offices was just covering parts of what really goes on? Could it be, that "dirty politics" or at least "manipulation techniques" and undue pressures are at work beyond of the players that Hager exposed?
I have a very bad feeling about the media these days, I simply have very little trust in the media as we have it now, it is certainly not doing the job it is meant to be doing as the traditional "fourth estate".
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Joe Wylie, in reply to
...there has never been a further investigation into what really went on at ACC...I have a very bad feeling about the media these days, I simply have very little trust in the media as we have it now, it is certainly not doing the job it is meant to be doing as the traditional “fourth estate”.
These days we're sometimes better off treating editorial cartoons as infographics than we are relying on journalists.
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I think the fragmentation occurring across media must be taken into account. Yes commercialisation of TV, radio and print also the sheer number of stations and channels, add to that ‘rolling news’ and the attention/ratings suck from electronic media. It may not just be dumbing down but also spreading too thin.
It’s good to see weblogs like pundit becoming journalistically accredited, and perhaps in the near future we will see intelligent indepth, accredited internet news reporting, but almost certainly, it will need to be be paywalled.
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Katharine Moody, in reply to
Audrey Young somehow manages to repeat the phrase five times in today’s Herald.
The real hilarity in Audrey's article was this para:
Referring to Mr Little as "angry Andrew, Mr Key told reporters the public would not take Mr Little seriously while he was "just bashing out slogans" and not coming up with policy.
JK complaing about someone else "bashing out slogans" - surely it must be the next Tui ad.
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Sacha, in reply to
Unfortunately Karl Rove showed us that the tactic works - attacking a political opponent for your own weaknesses neutralises their criticism. Politics is not a rational thing.
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By refusing to put their own judgements as human beings into a story, they create a narrative vacuum, and then they fill that vacuum with people like Jordan Williams. There’s an entire industry of people like him who set themselves up to fill that vacuum, so they can control the narrative for their own private gain, or for the private gain of the people they serve.
Heh. Today I read this (quoted below) and it reminded me of the above passage:
The Bild story quotes the study’s lead author, Johannes Bohannon, Ph.D., research director of the Institute of Diet and Health: “The best part is you can buy chocolate everywhere.”
I am Johannes Bohannon, Ph.D. Well, actually my name is John, and I’m a journalist. I do have a Ph.D., but it’s in the molecular biology of bacteria, not humans. The Institute of Diet and Health? That’s nothing more than a website.
Other than those fibs, the study was 100 percent authentic. My colleagues and I recruited actual human subjects in Germany. We ran an actual clinical trial, with subjects randomly assigned to different diet regimes. And the statistically significant benefits of chocolate that we reported are based on the actual data. It was, in fact, a fairly typical study for the field of diet research. Which is to say: It was terrible science.
I haven't checked to make sure that io9 is a reputable publication, but it has a website and stuff.
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On the state of the Fourth Estate in the States;
http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2015-06-17/today-financial-journalism-suffered-epic-failure
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