Have I missed any?

Well, some of it is clearly genuine stupidity. While, it is well-known, not all stupid people are conservatives, it is undoubtedly the case that all conservatives are stupid. Add to that natural stupidity the pungent anti-science of the Tea Party style no-nothings in recent years, and you have the perfect recipe for believing any kind of crap nonscience that people of ill-will feed to you. If some clown pretends that there is a link between wind farms and an imaginary disease, then no matter how much proper science disproves this pretence, British Conservatives and Australian Liberals and Nationals will believe the clown every time. If only someone would tell them that gravity is a communist plot and a chap calling in to Alan Jones say it is well-known you can jump from high buildings but our socialist prime minister has covered it up!

But we are in the realm of fantasy there. In the real world there are people who are making use of these useful idiots for their own purpose, but what is the purpose? I mean, we know these faceless men are trying to prevent any meaningful action to reduce fossil fuel use and greenhouse gas production, but windfarms?

Oh, sure, wind is contributing more to our energy requirements and in that way reducing fossil fuel use to some extent, but the coal and oil industries grind on remorselessly, growing bigger enough, you’d think, to keep any neocon think tank paid to support them laughing all the way to the bank. So why put so much effort into blocking wind energy?

Well, two reasons. One is that wind is the biggest renewable energy source after hydro power (which effectively has reached its full potential). Already over 20% of renewable energy supply, way above all others, and already forming a major industry in terms of manufacture and installation, with huge potential to expand further. Wind is the one you need to stop to prevent more and more replacement of coal and oil by renewables.

The second seems to me perhaps an even greater motivation for the dark forces arrayed against renewable energy. Wind power is highly visible, impressive, clearly a serious energy source while being absolutely clean and harmless, and being seen in many parts of the country. You see an array of wind towers and you immediately know two things. First, renewable energy is growing ever stronger, and second climate change is a real and present danger to the planet. Must be because serious people are spending serious money and doing serious work to reduce greenhouse gases. Why would you go to this effort if climate change wasn’t a big serious issue? People may not understand the physics of the atmosphere, or the changing climate, but wind farms are a strong message no one can fail to see.

And so it must be stopped before too many people start to understand the issue and the campaign against them has been unremitting. They are harmless, clean and green? No matter, little challenge to the forces of coal darkness. Get someone, anyone, to say the sound of the turbines causes illness. Doesn’t matter who they are, some kind of medical link, fine, whatever, no one will inquire to closely, just get them to keep saying it over and over. Doesn’t matter they are opposed by every serious scientist and health professional in the field, disproved by thorough serious studies, the physics of sound, and, indeed, common sense. The media will treat this now “controversial issue” (because of this one person) with “balance” and your one maverick will be treated as if of equal weight to the totality of the others.

Set up astroturf groups (see second link above). Put “environment” and “landscape” in their names as if they are genuine scientific and conservation groups. Have them hold public meetings, write to newspapers, phone talkback, frighten locals, get a bandwagon effect going. Know that again the media (including, shamefully, the ABC) will treat these fake fronts as serious bodies who must again be given equal platforms with genuine scientists for the sake of balance (the Australian media, as in so much else, has served Australia very badly on this issue). Get shock jocks to promote the cause. Enlist the climate change deniers in the conservative parties.

Kick up enough fuss and soon conservative state governments will announce extreme limits on where windfarms can be put, so severe as to effectively prevent their use anywhere. Bring in the future conservative federal government, climate change deniers all, to announce they will, once in power, dump renewable energy targets and funding and hold “enquiries” into windpower. Job done.

There’ll be no more use of wind to help power Australia as the planet fries and this country suffers more than most.

As some day it may happen that a victim must be found,
I’ve got a little list — I’ve got a little list
Of society offenders who might well be underground,
And who never would be missed — who never would be missed!

PS there is a “Rally for Renewables” on in Canberra on 18 June to help counteract Alan Jones and Coalition mps rallying against windpower on the same day. Come along, help counteract the vicious campaign, might see you there.

On the occasions when those of us on the Left dare to question the rise and rise of libertarianism, neoconservatism, conservatism, drown-government-in-a-bathtub-but-promote-the-combination-of-church-and-state, corporations-are-people nastiness, we generally get told we are wishy-washy idealists who have no idea of human nature which is red in tooth and claw and the devil take the hindmost because there is no-such-thing-as-society.

How to decide? Well the problem of course is that age-old conundrum “nature or nurture”. Have human societies often tended to be brutal big-dog-eat-little-dog affairs in which the poor give all their money to rich royalty and religions who get even richer because, well, that’s just the way human beings are made, or are human beings corrupted from an original much nicer disposition by the brutalities of states full of vested interests?

Very difficult to distinguish because we are always in, always have been in (with the exception of the occasional religious lunatic), a society, so there are no experimental subjects. We need something equivalent to the twin experiments, the ones where identical twins, raised separately, are tested for similarities and differences. and we do have equivalents. The first is that there are many societies around the world, Australian Aboriginal society being the one I know best, in which cooperation, altruism, sharing, equality, are the order of the day, and as far removed from Ms Rand’s nasty dystopia as it is possible to get. So, starting off from identical, or near identical, points of genetics, societies have different outcomes of human behaviour in response to different social, cultural, economic frameworks. Human behaviour, it would seem, is a response to society, not the reverse.

The other “twin experiment” is the one where the species Homo sapiens as a whole is compared to the “twin species” that have branched off from the ape line along the evolutionary pathway. How do humans, one could ask, compare to their nearest relatives the chimps, or to their slightly more distinct relatives the gorillas, and so on back through the ape lineage as a whole if one wished. The comparisons are made in relation to broad areas most relevant to humans. For example of intelligence (eg tool use, problem solving, language use), social organisation (hierarchy, sex, care of young, aggression, cooperation), nutrition, motor skills and so on.

But such comparisons in a sense miss the point. There isn’t much point in comparing modern humans with, say, modern chimps, because the two lines have gone their separate ways, under different selection pressures, for some four million years. Chimps are not the ancestors of humans, but their cousins, of exactly the same antiquity and origin.

So what we need to do is think about those early hominid groups moving out of the forests, leaving, as it were, their cousins lotus-eating back in the ancestral home (although I guess it was more a case of the forests, as a result of climate change in their part of East Africa, leaving them). Nature was certainly red in tooth and claw all round them, and just finding food, no longer a matter of plucking fruit from a tree you were resting in, would have been a constant challenge.

So these groups, these ancestors of Homo sapiens, would have been highly cooperative. Men cooperating in a hunt, women cooperating in gathering, all cooperating in child rearing and caring for the elderly, the elderly responsible for maintaining knowledge. A group that didn’t cooperate wouldn’t survive. Individuals who didn’t cooperate, tried to monopolise resources, or get others to do their work, wouldn’t have been tolerated. The ancestors of Ayn Rand, Freddy Hayek, Maggie Thatcher, Ronald Reagan, must have been very different people to their descendants.

It is only very late in human history, as cities, monarchies, hierarchical religions, develop that some individuals, eye on the main chance, see opportunities for concentrating wealth and power in themselves. Such people, and their friends with aspirations to be like them, told the population at large, unaccountably tending to challenge the huge discrepancies of wealth in the new order, that this was mother nature’s way, pity, but what can you do, human nature is as human nature does. Or, more succinctly, all animals are equal, but some are more equal than others.

Don’t you believe them, pigs on two legs are still pigs.

But no cause for celebration that I can see. I began the blog in late 2005, following a year or so of writing a column for a couple of local newspapers. It seems a very long time ago, and much has happened in personal terms as well as nationally and internationally in the last 8 or so years.

I began blogging in an attempt to add my voice to the many other new voices which were beginning to emerge, in Australia and around the world, to challenge the mainstream media voices. I not only began this blog but began contributing to the new Huffington Post, the first attempt at a commercial version of a blog, and to the ABC, Australia’s public broadcaster, as it caught up with the new medium of blogs.

I was consciously, from the start, trying to reach an audience ranging from people in my local area, to Australians in general, and to the world as a whole. Although I gave up writing for both HuffPo and the ABC, disappointed in both cases with the directions they were taking, I have continued to aim at an international audience, with the result that, very pleasingly, there are many more blog visitors from America than from Victoria (and not many fewer than from NSW).

But if the geographic spread is pleasing, and the steadily increasing number of subscribers (Hi there!), the lack of general increase in visitor numbers after reaching a plateau a few years ago is disappointing, and if I had thought I might make any difference to the public conversation I would be sadly disappointed.

The world in general, and Australia in particular seem hell-bent on going backwards. Most notably Australians seem intent, on 14 September, on electing a Prime Minister in Tony Abbott who will make George Bush seem like a genius socialist greenie president. Who will make Tony’s hero Maggie Thatcher seem like a paid up member of the coal miner’s union, doing good works for the poor in her spare time.

A Prime Minister who has announced his intention of reversing all environmental gains, of dumping a price on carbon and dismantling marine parks, and who will happily encourage conservative state premiers in their rape and pillage of National Parks. Who will abandon renewable energy developments and encourage the digging up of coal. And who will send industrial relations rocketing back to the dark days of the nineteenth century. All the time promoting the privatisation of everything in public ownership and the role of religion in society.

It will be the antithesis of everything I stand for, have written about over these eight years. It will be a reversion made possible by a media campaign over three years unlike anything we have seen since the days of 1975 when Murdoch destroyed another reformist government led by Whitlam. In the face of Murdoch, Fairfax, the shock jocks and, sadly, the ABC, the puny efforts of bloggers like me and so many others have naught availed.

In 2005 when I began John Howard was firmly in power. In contrast to what Abbott has in store, Howard’s dour, conservative, backward-looking time will seem like an Australian Enlightenment. In 2005 also there were few Greens in the federal parliament. Just the perennial Bob Brown and I think one other senator, Kerry Nettle. The Australian Democrats (like the British Lib Dems, doomed to repeat history) had destroyed themselves in the previous few years by working with the conservatives. They, and later the Greens, had made their sales pitch one of holding the balance of power, “keeping the bastards honest” in that memorable phrase.

It was a futile strategy. Oh, it might have knocked off the odd rough corner, but a determined conservative government, the media wind in its sails, brooks no opposition. John Howard sailed merrily along creating an Australia in his own image. You’d think the Greens would understand this, forget it as being the sole aim of their existence (a major quarrel I had with them as a candidate in 2004, and a major reason for leaving the Party about the time I started blogging). You’d think too, they would have worked with the other left of centre party, Labor, to the advantage of progressive policies. Instead, again a cause of my disquiet in 2004, they have treated Labor as a worse enemy than Liberal. Have contributed a great deal towards helping destroy the Labor government. And are now, bugger me, once again happily announcing that their only aim is to hold the balance of power to “control” the Abbott government they have helped make inevitable. Well, here’s a change Christine Milne, after several decades of voting Green I’ll be back to voting Labor in 2013.

The other major change since I began blogging is my shift in health status from being someone who hadn’t been in hospital in 55 years and rarely saw a doctor for anything except flu, to someone with two life threatening diseases, and an extensive treatment regime that has left my body as battered as the media regime has left the body politic battered.

I plough on with my treatments, trying this, trying that, fixing up the other, seeing one specialist then another, rolling into one scanning machine then another, leaving ampoules of blood, like offerings, in collection rooms all over town. Still, you do anything to try to set yourself right, if one thing doesn’t work you try something else.

All a bit of a clumsy metaphor for my blogging I suppose. Having totally failed to set the world to rights in the last 8 years, do I carry on? As a dark cloud is about to set over the continent do I keep trying to fight a rearguard action and then head into the maquis to conduct a lonely resistance? Not a shirt on my back, not a penny to my name Lord I can’t go a-home this a-way.

So I suppose I fight on, being a stubborn bugger if nothing else.

If you miss the train I’m on you will know that I am gone, you can hear the whistle blow a hundred miles.

Couple of things struck me. One was that the media report felt obliged to seek the “reaction”, in the interests of balance you understand, of a spokesperson for the biggest tobacco company in the world. Now you, I’m sure, like I, will be amazed to learn that the BAT man was opposed to the Irish government’s move. Shocked I was.

It was the perfect illustration of the futility of this “false balance” journalism, and the unshakeable grip it has on every story these days. Why on earth would you ask a tobacco company for its views? Clearly its response is utterly predictable, but in addition there are no “two sides” to this story – cigarettes need to be wiped out for public good, BAT wants to keep selling them for enormous profit – that isn’t “two sides”. Why, it’d be like doing a story on climate change and seeking the view of an oil company executive … oh, hang on…

But the other nonsense here was the nature of the response. Oh no, said the BAT man, no purpose in doing plain packaging, because there was no evidence that cigarette packaging influenced consumers!

Now you, I’m sure, like I, will be amazed to learn that the BAT man thought that the packaging of cigarettes was of no interest ["We are strongly opposed to this measure given there is no proof to suggest that plain packaging of tobacco products will be effective in discouraging youth from smoking or encouraging existing smokers to quit"]. Shocked I was. For several reasons.

First of all, this is an industry that spent millions of dollars on running a High Court case, running to the WTO, and running a publicity campaign, including funding for think tanks and political parties, to fight against the Australian legislation. To fight on the legal proposition that their intellectual property (ie the names, colours, logos, wording on the packs) had been carefully cultivated and was of great value.

Certainly carefully and expensively cultivated over many years. Carefully researched designs and colours aimed at being attractive to particular groups of consumers, all linked to extensive advertising campaigns (until these began to be curtailed on tv for example) in media, at sporting events, on billboards, in product placement, in sponsorship and so on.

So, leaving aside commonsense, the mere fact of so much effort and money being put into product identity through packaging of cigarettes shows what cynical nonsense the BAT response is. Not that a journalist would ever think to question such a response – a response has been made and therefore balance is achieved. Nor would a journalist ever comment back to the cigarette spinmeister – “so you are saying your product is so good it doesn’t need packaging? That the packaging has no effect on the consumer at all? That you could bundle your cigarettes in brown paper bags and people would still rush to buy them? Well, in that case legislation on plain packaging in Australia and Ireland will have absolutely no effect on your sales, so why are you fighting it?” A pity.

A pity because this kind of specious, cynical nonsense is trotted out all the time and swallowed uncritically by journalists. Apparently the purveyors of junk food, alcohol, gambling, to name just three, love to spend huge sums of money in advertising and promoting their products in all kinds of venues, in all media, often targeting children or teenagers, knowing that such promotion is absolutely ineffective.

“No, no” they cry, whenever someone suggests that advertising junk food in schools or during children’s tv programs, or advertising alcohol and gambling during sporting events, might be restricted to reduce the harm these products do in our society, “No, no, our promotion has absolutely no effect on consumers at all and therefore must not, we repeat must not, be restricted in any way. Also Nanny State.”

And politicians, hammered by right-wing think tanks awash in money from such producers, and themselves not averse to the odd dollar or two in support from, say, tobacco or gambling companies, run screaming from the prospect of regulating the ineffective but strangely expensive promotion activity. And journalists, complacent in their balanced reporting, let them.

In those distant times the only “museum” in Canberra (leaving aside the War Memorial) was the “Institute of Anatomy”. I don’t now remember its history, but it had been established early in Canberra’s history in a splendid Art Deco style building. I presume they funded research, conferences etc, maintained collections of anatomical specimens, but the main function by 1976 was their display area which was like a Dickensian museum of glass display cases full of all sorts of bits and pieces of flora and fauna and rocks and humans.

It was open to the public, and I assume visited by school groups desperate for an outing in those days when not only did Canberra lack a museum but has few educational attractions of any sort. Anyway, some visitor had looked at part of the display, been horrified, and had (unlike any other visitor in the previous 40 years or so), complained. Made a complaint to the institution I worked for, which was geographically close by and had some tenuous links with the Anatomy Institute. [just for interest this formed a kind of seed from which the vastly different National Museum of Australia would later grow, and I was also briefly involved in the original committee which began to establish the Museum].

So off I went, and there it was – a display case with the heading “Human Evolution” in which there were three skulls. One was a Baboon Skull. One was a European skull. And, in between, showing the “evolution” of humans, was an Aboriginal skull.

Now this display in itself was stunning. The idea of me investigating and reporting was ludicrous, so obvious was the problem. If I could have dismantled and removed it on the spot I would have. But the whole situation was much worse than it was even at face value.

First, as I’ve pointed out, there seem to have been no earlier complaints – thousands of people, including children, had apparently looked at this display over the decades and easily absorbed the message that Aborigines were primitive, only half way evolved from apes, much less advanced than us “Europeans”.

Second, while it is quite possible to imagine such a display being assembled in the 1930s, when such an attitude was commonplace in Australia, it was hard to believe that it was still there 40 years later. A difficulty compounded by the fact that I was being called in to explain to this organisation that no, this was not ok.

Not ok just because of its racism, but because it was totally wrong. Humans didn’t evolve from Baboons, both evolved from a common ape ancestor. “Europeans” didn’t evolve from Aborigines, both groups are equally modern humans originating from the earlier human groups moving out of Africa in the last few hundred thousand years. Yet the public were being told, in an apparently scientific context, that they were vastly superior to the original inhabitants of the Australian continent. Not just red neck racists saying it, but scientists.

Finally of course it was just a matter of fact thing that an Aboriginal skull, like a baboon skull, was perfectly appropriate as an exhibit in a museum. It would be a couple of years before I would retrieve the stolen skeleton of an Aboriginal man and return it to his community for burial, a first. In subsequent years this kind of action became common, and continues today, from museums all over the world, as Aboriginal people discover where remains of their ancestors and relatives are being held. And a display such as this one that I had just succeeded in having removed, could no longer I think be mounted anywhere. Progress of sorts I guess. Evolution even.

But it all came back to me this week, for some reason, when a young girl football fan screamed at a star player on the opposing team, an Aboriginal man, that he was an “ape”, and later said that she didn’t what it meant or why he would be upset (as he was) by it. And then, making it worse, came the President of her club, trying to make things better, who talked about the Aboriginal player being suitable for launching the King Kong movie!

Anyway, as I say, don’t know why I was reminded of my long ago removal of an exhibit purporting to show that Aborigines were not much evolved from apes and were vastly inferior to us. Perhaps you can work it out.

Me and The Guardian go way back. Began reading it in 1973 when I lived in England, caught up with it again on later visits, saw the Guardian Weekly on occasion, leapt, with glad cries, on the internet edition as soon as it became available, and now, at last, the Australian version has arrived.

One of the reasons I, we, are so pleased to see it pop up on our computer screens this morning as we went to read the UK edition, is the hope, indeed expectation, that a new player in the Australian media could break the narrative mould that has contained all mainstream journalism in the country for three years. You all know the narrative – Julia knifed Kevin the once and almost future king; Julia was dishonest about the Carbon Price and misogyny; dysfunctional government; scandals; hung parliament preventing legislation; Abbott the genius Opposition Leader; inevitable election loss for Labor, and so on and on.

Nothing can be written outside those frames. No Opposition action can be criticised, no Government action can remain uncriticised. No political stunt by Tony Abbott can be treated unseriously; no performance by Julia Gillard can be treated uncynically.

With the Guardian, we all hoped, escaping both the dead and self-interested hands of the gang of Australian media chiefs, and the circle jerk of journalists scared to step outside the rigid narrative because of peer pressure and laziness, would be able to write its own narratives as seen through fresh eyes and provide a circuit breaker.

So, did our media benefactor turn out to be Havisham or Magwitch?

Grotesquely unfair to judge anything much on the first issue of course, but expectations have been so high that it would be ridiculous not to. The lead article, by Editor Lenore Taylor was an exclusive interview with The PM Julia Gillard. Something of a coup I guess, although the PM presumably is also hoping The Guardian will be a narrative changer and was probably happy to oblige.

So, how does this exclusive begin?

“Julia Gillard refuses to commit to political career beyond election” is the title of the piece, and the sub-heading is:
“In exclusive interview with Guardian Australia, prime minister declines to confirm that she will stay in parliament if Labor loses”

Now this is the kind of gotcha journalism (including those weasel words “declines to confirm” and, in a separate piece later, “tight-lipped”, an even worse cliche) that the recent narrative thrives on. It’s the classic “have you stopped beating your wife, yes or no?” question which will provide a journalist scoop however it is answered. It is just another form of the narrative that the government is heading for inevitable defeat, the cause hopeless. And to answer it the PM has to accept the premise on which it is based, therefore adding to the narrative. In any case the question is meaningless. A win in the election and she goes on, victor of the new “sweetest one of all” election win. A loss and almost inevitably she would resign as an MP – no precedent for anything else really.

So not a very promising start for a new age of journalism. The heading is all nudge nudge wink wink, the gotcha question and its non-answer becomes “news” picked up by the ABC, in the now standard circle jerk of anti-government journalism. The Guardian narrative indistinguishable from the old narratives. And it continues to not be a breath of fresh media air blowing through the corridors of power:

“Gillard claimed Tony Abbott’s signature policy for women, his $4.3bn paid parental leave offering mothers 26 weeks’ leave at their full wage – a benefit worth up to $75,000 – was in fact an anti-women policy, and against Australian values. The scheme – which has been strongly backed by some feminist commentators – is to be paid for by a 1.5% levy on big business.”

Notice the “claimed” here, the standard way any Labor announcement is described. Notice too that the “claim” is immediately rejected by Ms Taylor with the remark about it being “strongly backed” by ” feminist commentators” (take that Ms Gillard) with a link that leads to Eva Cox whose support for the scheme has been attacked by many other “feminists”. But, let nothing get in the way of a good narrative.

Later still we have: “After a term in office wracked with leadership tension and political scandals, Gillard also reflected on the challenges of political leadership and her personal feelings during the last botched challenge to her leadership, which rival Kevin Rudd did not, in the end, join.” Well, there was indeed leadership tension, strongly enabled by the media, but I’m not sure the government was “wracked” by it except in the 2010 election. But political scandals? Really? AWU was a beat up. The Slipper and Thomson matters have been strongly questioned by independent media, questions which the mainstream media have refused to follow up. Seems the Guardian won’t be either, being happy just to accept Opposition spin about scandals.

And there is more: “Asked what her agenda would be if she did defy the polls and win re-election, she nominated the two policies Labor sees as among its strongest achievements this term – the national disability scheme and the schools funding package – saying both would need “patient nurturing” to be fully implemented.”

There you go again, “defy the polls”, and we are back to the inevitable triumph of the will of Tony Abbott. And just two policies eh? Over 500 pieces of legislation through a parliament in which the government is out numbered. A record for any government I think, even ones with strong majorities. Yet Ms Taylor provides no context for the two policies.

There are one or two interesting and new things in the interview. The comments on abortion, for example, and her obvious hurt at being betrayed by Simon Crean. The main piece ends with the comment that John Howard said he was likely to retire if he won on 2007. I assume this is included in an attempt to justify the gotcha heading. But the Howard thing was in the context of the political reality of the Howard-Costello “wracked with leadership tension” Liberal Party of 2007 and earlier, and the Labor meme that a vote for Howard was a vote for Costello. A question as to Howard’s intentions then was good journalism in the way that a question of Gillard’s intentions are not.

The Guardian adds a couple of elements to the main story, but does so in separate pieces. One is the PM’s discovery of “Game of Thrones” and becoming something of an addict. Fair enough, a bit of colour. But it has to be turned into symbolism about how the series represents the Labor Party, and her favourite character represents her. The sort of tabloid/women’s magazine frippery we don’t want from the Guardian.

And the other part is twenty questions from twenty leading Australians. I thought this was an original approach, although the questions, necessarily, were a somewhat odd mixture, but they provoked some interesting responses, and this does seem to me an approach that could help fragment the usual narratives. We shall see.

But then, quite beyond my expectations, as I settled down to write this post, came an addition (big advantage of an online newspaper) to the story. The PM’s office had decided to answer the gotcha question, for once taking the initiative before the media gets up a head of steam. “But after the story was published, Gillard’s office said in a statement: “The PM is focused on securing a Labor majority government at the next election and will serve a full term.”"

If the Guardian hasn’t yet convinced me they will live up to the high expectations of them I developed 40 years ago, perhaps the PM’s office is beginning to exceed the very low expectations I have of them based on their performance over the last three years.

Hopefully the Guardian will come, like Pip, to heed the warning of Mr Jaggers, to “Take nothing on its looks; take everything on evidence. There’s no better rule”.

In journalism as in life.

But the problem is much worse than mere market share. Mr Murdoch, no fool whatever his other failings, realised very early on that, just like a large share holding in a company leads to control of the company, 70% media saturation can be turned into 100% control of political discourse.

Works like this. Murdoch or his editors (but I repeat myself) decide on the format for the latest government attack. Doesn’t matter what it is, some fabricated and dishonest attack on the PM’s integrity, or a policy proposal, some poll result, some disagreement between Labor Party members, some union “scandal”, the latest fake leadership challenge. Whatever. The very act of launching the attack, in 70% of Australia’s newspapers, makes the attack itself “news”. The truthfulness, accuracy, of the attack is irrelevant (Rupert understood), its mere existence becomes news and is consequently repeated by other media outlets. Not to repeat it (notably in the case of Fairfax and the ABC, there is no question of not repeating it in the other media) would be evidence of pro-government bias. And that failure to repeat would itself feed into the next News Ltd media cycle, and so on.

Conversely, and this is just as important, when 70% of the country’s newspapers decide simultaneously, by pure coincidence, to NOT cover an event that might impact badly on the political Right, then the rest of the media will ignore it too. Covering it, when News Ltd is not, would be another clear indication of bias of course. So it is left alone. If a Right Wing scandal falls in the forest and is not covered by Murdoch’s minions does it really fall? No, of course it doesn’t, are you not paying attention? Consequently while Labor and the PM (and her staff) were massively attacked for months throughout the media, following News Ltd’s lead, on AWU, Slipper, Thomson, Australia Day “Riot”, and so on, subsequent stories on Abbott’s history, Ashby, the HSU, Abbott’s staffers, etc, quickly became non-stories, barely mentioned, if at all, then dropped within hours.

Accentuating this power has been the recent cross-fertilisation of different media. Suddenly radio shock jocks began featuring in regular segments on tv breakfast shows. Suddenly News Ltd columnists began appearing regularly on tv current affairs shows. Suddenly tv breakfast shows began “reviewing” the morning newspapers, which meant reading out headlines from the News Ltd papers and the others who had copied them. Suddenly “Our Political Correspondent” became a regular part of news bulletins, again repeating (because it was of course now “news”) whatever hares the Murdoch Hunt Masters had set running that day.

To complete the cycle, Right Wing politicians, gratefully accepting the Murdoch talking points each day about the “bad government”, began doing press conferences in which they merely repeated them, thus strengthening the perception that they were actually “news”, and keeping them running through each news cycle.

Once upon a time our national broadcaster, the ABC, would have kept outside this Murdochian Circle. Had reporters who created news themselves, not just parroted the news agenda of News Ltd. Had programs that set the political agenda not copied someone else’s. Conducted interviews with questions they had researched, not simply repeating political spin from the Right. So it provided a circuit breaker, an alternative.

Now, not only does it not provide an alternative but it has been locked into the Murdoch circle, behaving in exactly the same way as other media outlets. But it is even worse than that. The ABC, retaining the air of authority, of credibility, of objectivity, built up carefully over decades by good people, is providing legitimacy in turn to News Ltd. The procession of News Ltd journalists, columnists, the reviewing of the papers, the breathless presentation of Murdoch Memes, all replace the original good journalism of the ABC with propaganda.

And similar processes seem to have happened in America and Britain. Everywhere Murdoch thrives, bad journalism drives out good.

Then I could begin constructing narratives about how the bones had been broken, whether they were burnt, how far they had moved, what species were present (two halves of a jaw reassembled being easier to identify than the two separate halves), and so on. A narrative that helped make sense of the lives of the people who had once lived in that place.

I don’t do that work any more, haven’t for a long time. But now I work in social media and similar skills are once again in play. Firstly because of the way I work I suppose. Once I used to hastily jot down ideas while stopped at traffic lights on the car, jot them on any rubbish I could find like supermarket receipts, car park vouchers, paper bags, and then try to put fragments, bulging out of my pockets, together into a narrative when I got home.

One narrative I was trying to construct was my own family history/autobiography one (see under tab marked “Dream”) for publication on this blog. Lives are fragmentary, both as they are lived and more so in recollection. We take a childhood memory here, an object there, a photograph of a friend, and shape it together to form a coherent fragment of a life. Or at least a narrative of a fragment, because memoirs are nothing if not unreliable, to lesser and greater extents. But as an autobiographer you get to construct your own narrative, before your biographer comes along later and reconstructs it with his or her own narrative of your life.

These days fragments of ideas, internet links, quotes, photos, headings, half written posts, are jotted down on computer documents, and bulge out of computer folders cunningly labelled things like “Blog Ideas”. Every so often I go through them, remembering an idea from here, a link from there, a quote from someone, and suddenly realise that a narrative can be constructed.

And the material from which these fragments are derived is itself fragmented. Every day stories come pouring in from all over the world, important, frivolous, happy, sad, serious, trivial, fact, fiction. Long, short, stark, expanded, checked, unchecked, information, disinformation. All grist to the social media mill. Problem is though that it all comes through the filter of the mainstream media and is converted into their narratives before it reaches us. We’d like the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth, and decide the narrative, having seen patterns, put two and two together, for ourselves.

So we need to deconstruct what we get. If I was looking at a table full of bones that someone else had stuck together, using their own criteria for best fit, and their own filter for narrative construction, I wouldn’t accept it. Instead I would dissolve the glue, separate the bones back to their original state, and start again from scratch. Much the same with the media narratives. We need to see what they are made from, and how and why they have been constructed. Then deconstruct them and make up our own minds.

The environment we all live in is often seen as fragments. Sometimes in a positive way “one might begin to write a book about a hedgerow when a boy and find it incomplete in old age” (from my lovely Ricard Jefferies). A realisation of the enormous complexity of the world we evolved in. Sometimes in a negative way, when politicians, developers, farmers, fishermen, think that destroying one fragment of woodland, driving one species to extinction, polluting one waterway, won’t matter because it is just a small thing.

But just as in our own lives, and in the social and political worlds, the environmental fragments are all inter-connected, and we need to reassemble those fragments to understand all of the narratives.

Have we got the skills?

An essential safeguard for people who were generally hated by the 99% of the population who weren’t benefiting from their rule, and who were unable to see sophisticated poisons arriving at their dinner table in the way that they would observe an assassin equipped with sword, knife or spear. Pretty successful survival technique.

It’s a profession that went out of fashion for some reason, but it could do with a revival. Oh, not for emperors and kings and dictators, but, for, well me. I think I’d like someone who could check out the rubbish food from take-away outlets, see if it was safe for me to eat. Same with supermarket food. I mean I’m guessing there must be items of actual unharmful food in both places, but I’d rather not damage myself trying to find them. Perhaps Morgan Spurlock (of “Super Size Me” fame) would like the job. But it would go well beyond Big Macs or apples sprayed with pesticides.

I’d like my taster (employed from “Tasters ‘R’ Us”) to walk ahead of me in shopping centres, sampling the air before I breathe it, drink from water taps before I slake my thirst, oh and test the decibel level of muzak and store announcements and their IQ (irritation quotient) before I even enter the front door.

Speaking of announcements there’s another service I’d like performed, perhaps by a different branch of “Tasters ‘R’ Us” called “Listeners ‘R’ Us”. This would involve some brave soul checking out any news/current affairs media I was likely to come into contact with – radio shock jocks, News Ltd newspaper columnists, IPA staff seminars on the ABC, blogs by right wing nut jobs, tweets from conservative tweetbots, speeches by neocon politicians, books by former Labor politicians determined to bite the hand that once preselected them, the whole horrible mix of colourless, odourless, and certainly tasteless but audible poisons spewing out into the world every minute of every hour of every day. Poisons not of the body but of the mind, the job of the taster to preserve not my life but my sanity, at the cost of his own. When he rolled over screaming and kicking, throwing bricks at tv, pulling radio out of socket, burning newspapers in the backyard, I would know that his mind had been poisoned beyond endurance and I should stay clear of the responsible media. And call for a new taster. These days it would be a much shorter job occupancy than the taster for a Roman Emperor.

But, like the Emperor, it would give me peace of mind. Anyone else want to give “Listeners ‘R’ Us” a call? I might buy shares in their company. Oh and “Tasters ‘R’ Us” of course, bet you’d like them to walk in front of you too.