Don’t believe everything you read on the internet just because there’s a picture with a quote next to it. ~ Abraham Lincoln

A government big enough to give you everything you want, is a government big enough to take away everything that you have.
often attributed to Thomas Jefferson

Amongst monticello.org’s extensive listing of spurious Jeffersonian quotations they have a nice piece of sleuthery on how this quote’s purported provenance has changed over the decades of its rhetorical deployment:

Earliest known appearance in print: 1952 [1]

Earliest known appearance in print, attributed to Jefferson: 2005[2]

This particular saying seems to be getting a huge workout at the moment in anti-Obama commentary around the web, usually with the Jefferson misattribution. I expect there’s a fair bit of overuse in anti-Gillard rhetoric as well.

I’m always struck by how often the USA’s Founding Fathers get dragged into modern political debates, often with words that were never theirs in the first place.

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3. Victim-blaming by the Queensland government

(Trigger warning: “smug bastard” photo of Tony Abbott).

Does it occur to anyone else this headline is rather like “Phenomenal amount of rain didn’t fall yesterday”?

According to this poll, if somehow time were annihilated between today, Tuesday the 26th of March, and Saturday the 14th of September, the Coalition might very well win the election. Provided the only persons who voted were the people sampled in the latest Newspoll.

Does the above summation help anyone to see just how this makes the headline, and the article it accompanies, resemble someone talking earnestly about how much rain didn’t fall last night?

Poll watching is the great spectator sport among Australian journalists, and there are polls just about every week measuring how people feel about X, Y, or Z. What these polls leave out (and what they have to leave out) is due to the mechanism of our representative democracy, how we-the-voters feel about issues doesn’t matter most of the time. It only matters on one day every three years – on election day, when we get to cast our votes. The rest of the time, it’s just noise, and no amount of opinion polls showing how concerned we are by $ISSUE are going to change the fact.

Politicians could quite easily ignore polls (and I’d argue things would be a lot better for a number of them if they did) – but then, the polls aren’t being commissioned by the politicians. This is the big clue. The opinion polls are being commissioned by the media organisations, because as far as they’re concerned, opinion polls are an easy way to generate a lot of content out of the one result. They can write stories about the poll result itself. They can write stories about how the result was received by various political figures (making a huge fuss if said political figures don’t give the results the same degree of importance they do). They can write stories about what these results might “mean” for various political figures. They can make a lot of journalistic soup out of the one onion of a single poll result.

But this only works so long as they conceal the basic truth: opinion polls, as a statistical measure, aren’t measuring anything relevant. The poll that matters is going to be held on September the 14th, it’s going to have a sample size which encompasses the entire Australian voting population, and will be far more representative than any media-sponsored poll could be. All the others before then? They’re just measuring how much rain didn’t fall yesterday.

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Tony Abbott is currently doing his most energetic pork chop impression calling for a SSO in Question Time so that he can call for a vote of No Confidence in the PM.

Sigh.

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3. Media Circus: out of step

So let’s get this straight. When a Labor leader resigns under pressure from his party, he ‘gets knifed’. When a Liberal leader does the same thing, he ‘falls on his sword’. Is it just me, or is there something just a little ridiculous about that?

Double standards are so repellently fascinating to watch unfold before one’s jaded gaze, I find.

What’s piqued your media interests lately?

As usual for media circus threads, please share your bouquets and brickbats for particular items in the mass media, or highlight cogent analysis or pointed twitterstorms etc in new media. Discuss any current sociopolitical issue (the theme of each edition is merely for discussion-starter purposes – all current news items are on topic!).

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The significance of the Prime Minister’s misogyny speech was about this for women. It was about watching the most powerful woman in the country endure a type of sexism that you, yourself, have experienced. And seeing her summon the courage and the outrage to finally confront it was a powerful moment because you wanted to see that it is possible to confront sexism and survive it.  So now, watching the Prime Minister be continually ridiculed and disrespected, and on such a scale, you have to wonder, is she surviving?

As Summers says in her latest article, “PM’s critics make a mockery of political debate”:

Such is the confidence of the journalists and shock-jocks and others who peddle these opinions, that they see no need to wait for history to happen. Why bother waiting for the actual voters to actually vote when these pundits have persuaded themselves that already it’s all over? As a result, they feel no obligation to respect the person, let along the office of prime minister, since in their minds she is already gone.

So they feel free to mock her in ways that would have been inconceivable with other leaders and, as recently as a year ago, even with her.

Gillard has always had to put up with intense, often unfair and sometimes cruel commentary about her clothes, her voice, even her body shape. As I have documented, since she became Prime Minister Gillard has been subjected to vile sexual and at times pornographic vilification of a kind that is new to our political vocabulary (and which still continues).

But now there is a new element. The pundits are scoffing and mocking her every action, from her new glasses to every policy or political step she takes, as if to say: why bother, lady, it’s all over anyway.

A colleague who is proudly conservative told me the other day that he knows he’s biased but this Prime Minister is not representing my gender well. Before you say anything, he said, you’re biased too. How about how your gender is being represented, I said. Alright, I’ve got my issues with some of this government’s policies (although I still think they’re quite an effective government), but for crying out loud, I said, I’m half the fricking gender of this country and it is 2013 and this is the first time, the very first time, I’ve had a woman to represent my gender, at all, as Prime Minister. So yes, I take it personally when she is treated with such disdain and, yes, I’m a little biased, but can you fricking blame me?

Relentlessly mocking the country’s first female Prime Minister in such a dubious fashion is damaging to us as a nation. If you are participating in the mockery you need to take a moment to reflect. Maybe you’ll decide that your mockery is no less than you would give any other politician you disliked, maybe you’ll decide it’s completely absent of any sexism – fine, but in this climate of extreme hatred towards a woman in power you need to at least think about it.

Cross-posted at blue milk.

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Climate Change Is Cutting Humans’ Work Capacity – increased heat and humidity will require more work-breaks.

Giving a Gonski – Gillard unveils $1.1b school reading blitz.

What’s piqued your media interests lately?

As usual for media circus threads, please share your bouquets and brickbats for particular items in the mass media, or highlight cogent analysis or pointed twitterstorms etc in new media. Discuss any current sociopolitical issue (the theme of each edition is merely for discussion-starter purposes – all current news items are on topic!).

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Related posts:

1. Media Circus: Knife/sword edition
2. Media Circus: Pope resigns edition
3. Media Circus: Abbott’s got nothing to hide edition

My two favourite tweets last night:

• @sixthformpoet: The Pope is hardly the first person to lose interest in their real job so soon after joining Twitter.
• @RyanSheales: The Pope is going on extended hollandaise #ExBenedict

This morning there’s a whole bunch of mean-spirited ageism and ableism, which is much less amusing.

What’s piqued your media interests lately?

As usual for media circus threads, please share your bouquets and brickbats for particular items in the mass media, or highlight cogent analysis or pointed twitterstorms etc in new media. Discuss any current sociopolitical issue (the theme of each edition is merely for discussion-starter purposes – all current news items are on topic!).

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Related posts:

1. Media Circus: Knife/sword edition
2. Media Circus: Reforms and Other Changes edition
3. Media Circus: Abbott’s got nothing to hide edition

What’s piqued your media interests lately?

As usual for media circus threads, please share your bouquets and brickbats for particular items in the mass media, or highlight cogent analysis or pointed twitterstorms etc in new media. Discuss any current sociopolitical issue (the theme of each edition is merely for discussion-starter purposes – all current news items are on topic!).

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Related posts:

1. Media Circus: Knife/sword edition
2. Media Circus: Pope resigns edition
3. Media Circus: Inauguration edition