Month: July 2009

It’s been an interesting experience so far following the fortunes of the England cricket team from deep in enemy territory.

On the one hand, I will get to see far more of this Ashes series than I would have done had I been in the UK, as the time difference turns something that would otherwise have happened while I was at work into prime evening viewing–the 11AM start for the first test translates to 8PM over here. Much to Sal’s chagrin I can watch the first two sessions right up to the tea break and I only need to stay up until half past midnight, which isn’t difficult at all given that I’ve done far worse since we’ve been here in my attempts to keep up with the Everton.

Even better, the TV coverage is the same as I’d be watching back home, as neither SBS nor Fox Sports, the Free to Air and Pay TV broadcasters with the rights to show the games, have bothered to send over any commentators. Thanks presumably to the Global Financial Crisis (TM) we only have to put up with about 5 minutes of pre-match Stuart MacGill awkwardly stumbling over his words while chatting to a couple of ex-Aussie players in a studio that I assume is in Sydney before the action cuts across to David Lloyd, Ian Botham, Mike Atherton, Nasser Hussain and the rest over in their commentary box. I’m surprised that the Australian Cricket loving public are happy to put up with this state of affairs, but it certainly works for me.

On the other hand, I do have to put up with lashings of (generally good natured) abuse from the locals…

At least this time, when my boss brought up the subject on Monday morning, I was able to turn around and say: “hey, I thought we were supposed to be the whingers?” as the post-match newspaper reports over here have predictably concentrated not on the game itself but on the allegations of time wasting. Funny how there’s always some kind of excuse whenever the aussies fail in some way: no matter that they had plenty of time–40 minutes–to get that vital final wicket, or that they had the whole day to bowl us out and failed to do so, the real reason for Australia’s failure to win the test match was because the physio and the 12th man were out on the pitch holding things up for maybe all of 5 minutes. The way Ricky Ponting calls it, you’d think it had been a five hour pitch invasion.

So roll on Lords. And hopefully this won’t be the only opportunity I’ll have this year to laugh at Australian cricketers desperately making excuses for the result…

Flicking through the TV guide that came with the Herald Sun (that would be Rupert Mudroch’s Melbourne tabloid) this weekend, I was amused to see that the final episode of Australia’s Next Top Model on cable channel Fox 8 (that would be one of Rupert Murdoch’s TV channels, on Rupert Murdoch’s pay TV network) listed as this week’s “Must See TV”.

Apparently:

The shining light of the show this season has been [host Sarah] Murdoch. A model of composure in the hosting role. There’s no chance she’ll suffer the same fate as her predecessor, Jodhi Meares, who lost the gig after succumbing to stage fright.

Hmm. Sarah Murdoch. Yeah, I reckon her job is probably fairly secure…

So I’m about half way through Nick Davies’ Flat Earth News at the moment. It’s engrossing and depressing in equal measure to read Davies’ detailed insider account of everything that’s wrong with the 21st century mass media–an industry so dominated by commercial pressures to fill space as quickly and cheaply as possible that its journalists are reduced to what Davies calls “churnalism”: the regurgitating of press releases and stuff copied from the internet and the wires, with neither the time nor resources to fact check.

Of course I knew that this sort of thing went on, but I never really noticed just how widespread a practice it is. Now I see it everywhere. I can’t read anything on the news websites without looking between the lines for the source and the vested interest that planted it there.

And yes, I expect that if I pick up a copy of the shabby freesheet Mx, our local evening version of Metro, that it will be mostly recycled PR, stuff they’ve copied off Twitter and very little in the way of actual journalism, but I didn’t expect to start to notice so much of this stuff in the pages of supposedly reputable news sources like the Beeb and the Grauniad. Davies quotes research into the UK quality papers over a 2 week period that showed at least 60% of all stories in the “quality press” “consisted wholly or mainly of wire copy and or/PR material”. Adding on articles where the researchers weren’t sure of the source (another 8%), and those where some original content had been added to the PR/wire copy (another 20%), they were left with just 12% of stories where all the material had been generated by the reporters themselves.

Those are some depressing statistics.

In the middle of all this, just after reading the bit of the book where Davies describes how time-poor journos sometimes just mass email out to PRs asking for content, I arrived into work to find an email asking me to prepare a couple of hundred words on one of our new products for a New Zealand technology magazine, and one asking for the same for an Australian industry publication. I fully expect both my replies to run largely unaltered in the respective forthcoming issues.

On a lighter note, on the subject of not checking your facts, I was highly amused to see some quality Australian journalism escaping onto the airwaves of Channel 9 last week, via Stephen Colbert. (The ABC’s ever excellent Media Watch had this to say on the matter.)