Category: Journalism

The Listener and The Discerning Reader

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One of my research assistants asked this week if I wanted his back issues of The Listener. I’m now regretting my luke-warm response, given that it is barely two months since the owner, Bauer Media, closed down New Zealand’s 81-year-old current affairs magazine. German-owned Bauer Media had been trying to sell its magazines in Australasia for a while. Things came to a head with COVID-19, as magazines were not considered “essential” under NZ’s strict level…

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Fifty years of Cabinet secrets and media leaks

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The Australian Federal Police ‘raids’ on the ABC and a lone News Ltd journalist have been taken to signal a new era of scrutiny when confidential government files are leaked to the media. The media has gone overboard on the ‘journalism is not a crime’ front. As a former journo, I have adopted the Media, Entertainment and Arts Alliance (MEAA) Facebook frame in solidarity. But it is interesting to learn that that on June 5,…

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Media bias and quality news

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A couple of years ago I wrote an essay called ‘In search of quality news” which many people told me they found educational. The piece was sparked by a media bias infographic invented by US patent attorney Vanessa Otero. Vanessa supplied an updated media bias chart for today’s main picture. It is self-explanatory in that the quality news outlets are clustered around the middle. The worst of the fake news and extreme right (or left-wing)…

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I’m not dead yet

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The world’s media has a poor track record when it comes to reporting the deaths of celebrities, going early often enough to invoke the classic Python-esque protest, “I’m not dead yet”. Singer and actress Olivia Newton-John was the latest victim of tabloid hyperbole, when reports described her as ‘clinging on to life’. The star of Grease took to Facebook to cheerily confirm her existence, even though it is known she is ‘battling cancer’ for the…

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