I missed this yesterday, but it’s worth revisiting. The Australian composed a whining editorial without peer:
REGARDLESS of what he is writing about…Paul Kelly, brings his penetrating insight and peerless authority.
The Australian is blessed with writers such as Dennis Shanahan on politics, Greg Sheridan on foreign affairs, John Durie on business and Judith Sloan and David Uren on economics, and many others in the top rank, who have lived through the big moments in the nation’s history and are able to provide readers with a sense of perspective, knowledge and balance on the issues of the day…
Yet that can’t be said of all media outlets, especially when seasoned journalists are being traded for ones unable to see beyond the dazzle of the instantaneous fix of Twitter or web-first publishing…We can see the crude results in the way the Abbott government is being portrayed as bad, mad and chaotic by the baby faces in the press gallery and beyond.
You wonder if anyone’s really in charge at Pyrmont, Docklands and Ultimo and how long this idiocy can last.
This is correct, desperate and ignorant in equal measure. I agree that the shallowness of coverage in other outlets is an issue. But it’s always been an issue and certainly isn’t being made worse by new media which is increasingly providing much deeper coverage on vertical subjects than the horribly biased News stable can manage.
It’s ignorant because if The Australian thinks it can sustain the fading media model of placing biased and self-important old farts on a pedestal where they lecture the public about monolithic values then it’s even more haplessly lost in new media than is Fairfax. News used to be the king of occupying vertical markets but it seems unable to make the leap to dialogic media in which the reader has as much power as the writer, and knowledge is the winner. One is tempted to conclude that News has control phobia.
And how desperate is Holt St? Both its support of the Abbott Government and its own business model are damaged by public hissy fits. It reeks of a clique turning inwards, fortifying against the world, and losing touch in a final act of self-immolation.
