Forgive me readers, it has been a while since my last media spin tactics thread. Mea culpa, mea maxima culpa.
- BoltA (not linking) sticks his bully pulpit oar into a supposedly grassroots vote for questions to ask the PM, then gets shirty when a US blog decides to do the same (at least the US blog has a history of doing this in order to make (or at least openly and ironically exploit) the point that online polls are spurious and shouldn’t be relied upon). The question recommended for upvoting by BoltA is essentially JuLiar-eleventy!!!!, while the question recommended for upvoting by PZ is about the school chaplaincy program.
- ArndtB (not linking) sticks her oar into the global-but-mostly-USA skeptic/atheist Deep Rift over anti-harassment policies with her usual flair for overlooking salient facts in order to blame feminism for Doin It Rong™
- I don’t have to talk about PyneC, do I? #donotwant
What else has caught your eye recently?
As usual for media circus threads, please share your bouquets and brickbats for particular items in the mass media, or highlight cogent analysis elsewhere, on any current sociopolitical issue.
Why am I not surprised ArndtB is a Chill Girl(™), or at least an ally?
Meh is right. Actually Brickbat for the listener who rang in this morning to the radio station in Canberra saying there should be a tax on politicians for every asylum seeker who illegally seeks asylum in Australia. I would have hoped that in the Nation’s Capital the commetariat would have known that seeking asylum isn’t illegal but apparently not. It was during a session on ridiculous taxes something to do with traffic poles in NZ and new taxes.
My annoyance this morning is at this: http://www.abc.net.au/news/2012-07-19/greens-attack-misleading-church-letter/4140032 and reporting it as though it hasn’t happened before ALL of the last few elections. This attack is now as predictable as the ‘free gay heroin for your babies’ one used to be.
Bluntshovels, the Greens Party’s education policy clearly says “18.schools funding to be placed on an equitable footing by reversing the excessive increases in Commonwealth funding to non-government schools in recent years.”
(emphasis added)
So it’s not exactly a scare campaign for non-government schools to point out the Greens Party’s policy is to take away some of their funding, is it? It might be a predictable attack, but it’s also a factually correct attack (unlike the free gay heroin for babies thing).
Thanks Rebekka. I don’t want this to be a hijack of tigtog’s thread on media tactics (shades of LP threads past), but my point was that the attacks are routine and predictable and hence should be reported as such, not on the merits or not of the policy itself.
Feel free to get into a debate with me on the policy via email or Twitter.
If it comes to that, all political attacks are routine and predictable, aren’t they?
I don’t think anyone expects a journo to start a report with “In a predictable political attack today, the Prime Minister said…” or “In a predictable political attack today, the Leader of the Opposition said…” It’s a given that people in politics launch political attacks against their opponents.
As the case in point – policy merits aside – was a group that represents the Catholic education sector writing a letter pointing out the policy in question, and they don’t have a long history of attacking the Greens party, even if you did take the position that predictable political attacks need to be prefaced as such,I don’t see how that would apply in this case.
In fact, from the point of view of coverage, I would have preferred to see links to the text of the letter, and the Greens Party policy it refers to, so I could look at both and decide for myself whether it’s fair or not, but I don’t think it was spin or particularly unfair reporting.
Apparently AlbrechtsenJ (you guessed it, not linking) also felt the need to remind the world that Feminists R Doin It Rong, although she was behind Mindy in jumping on the 50 Shades of Grey bandwagon.
According to a source on FB whose opinion I trust, it sounds like AlbrechtsenJ hadn’t bothered to read the book before opining that some reviewers were big meanyheads because of their feminist sex-hating blinders, because obviously there couldn’t be any other reason for anybody to dislike the book.
Ugh Fox News Ugh George Zimmerman ugh “God’s plan” for him to kill Trayvon Martin – Regrets Nothing
More obstreperation fodder (maybe I need a separate just-exasperation thread, there’s no real media spin in the reporting of either of these events):
* Pussy Riot members detained for another 6 months
* lots of politicians and pundits jumping into the spotlight to blame the mass murder in Colorado on their favourite hell-in-a-handbasket hobby-horse (no specific links, since the number will only continue to grow)