It ain't easy being Devine

Much as it pains me to say this (and this is an area in which I am not able to maintain a veneer of bipartisanship), Miranda Devine (Miranda Devine!) understands the internet better than Jonathan Green could ever hope to.

“Frannie and friends removed the video from the 10:10 website when complaints started, but it was too late. She has let the cat out of the bag.”

Devine is cognizant of the fact that nothing on the internet ever dies, which is why I’m able to link you to this absolutely abhorrent piece that she wrote in 2007 conflating The History Boys with pedophilia.

That aside, it’s time to actually address her premiere blog post in her new home on the Herald Sun blogs, “What it really means to be Green”. Devine starts with an easy target, Richard Curtis’ “10:10 No Pressure” video:

The problem is that Devine has chosen to take this ill-advised (and, more offensively, boring) video as a serious indication of the actual leanings of environmentally minded people: she sincerely believes that Greens are determined to kill everyone. This is not even paraphrasing her and twisting her words: she has literally referred to greens as a “totalitarian death cult”, and makes repeated references to Nazism. She takes everything to such extremes that it’s difficult to take her seriously, but she absolutely wants you to.

Devine’s work is actually a perfect piece of opinion writing, online or off. It is tempting to simply quote the entire thing because, regardless of what you actually think of her opinions, she is a master craftswoman of the form. She writes polemics, and people can’t help but be inflamed by them (or, somehow, agree with them).

Miranda Devine earns her money, and she is clearly more at home in her new News Limited digs than she ever was at Fairfax. Godspeed, Miranda. Never stop doing what you do.

Pure Poison infiltrates the Battleship Australian

Pure Poison is a sub-blog of Crikey, positioning itself as a sort of textual and online counterpart to the ABC’s Media Watch. In recent times, The Australian has come under fire for going to “war” against the Greens and Pure Poison stands as one of several outlets that have objected.

The Australian’s defence to criticism of its war on Greens: stop oppressing us! stands as Pure Poison’s response to The Australian’s response to general media response to The Australian’s partisan coverage of many aspects of politics in the lead up to the election and the aftermath. That sentence may seem convoluted but so, too, do The Australian’s defences for their actions.

Author Jeremy Sear makes a great deal of the fact that The Australian has failed to delineate its reportage from its editorials. The most satisfying quote that one can pull from the article is “News Ltd has acted not as a trustworthy broker of information but as an advocate for the Coalition” – emphasizing specifically what responsible journalism is supposed to be about. If one cannot tell the difference between the editorial and news sections of a newspaper, then that newspaper has not done its job correctly according to the largely unwritten charter of professional journalism; it’s like journalism’s collective unconscious is uniformly failing to be tapped into by News Ltd.

Sear’s article is relatively brief but savage nonetheless. It pointedly mentions that The Australian wants to “destroy” the Greens and has ignored the meat of its criticism. It suggests that The Australian has undermined its own credibility in all future coverage of the Greens and the new minority government.

Pure Poison is the sort of thing that exists precisely because outlets like News Ltd and people like Andrew Bolt exist. Sear’s work will remain a sad necessity as long as news outlets like The Australian treat their readers with contempt.

Racist with an S

How do you spell racist?

Marieke Hardy describes herself as “your favourite ABC investigative reporter”. Addressing a lesser-known (that is, Victorian) political scandal, Hardy has chosen to go behind the scenes of Labor MP Don Nardella’s “spelling slur”.

Constituent Fiona Peterson wrote to Nardella, "You seem to not want to help anyone except the immagration people". Nardella’s reply read simply: "My advice to you stands from my initial email reply. Learn how to spell 'immigration' before using the word again"

The only outlets that appear to carry the story in a quick Google search are the Herald Sun and News.com.au, both owned by News Ltd. The stories are identical, and while Nardella’s quote contains the implication that this was not the extent of his correspondence with Peterson, the item itself suggests that Nardella did nothing but dismiss Peterson.

To Hardy herself: she covers the other side of the story, that of defending Nardella and identifying an endemic problem: racists can’t spell. Hardy has taken a non-story and transformed it into a comedy piece that also exposes a disturbing (and disturbed) subset of the internet. In so doing she reveals the more pressing issue: that racism and ignorance remain unremarked upon in society while politicians are the frequently cast as villains, particularly if their ideology is diametrically opposite that of the publishing outlet’s.

Hardy is guilty of this in that she presents Pauline Hanson as a punchline without comment – and this is where reader bias comes in, because I thought that was funny. By making a direct correlation between hate speech, racist ideas and diminished intellectual capacity, Hardy has informed, entertained and demystified a subset of “the other”.

No one could confuse Hardy’s investigative reportage with actual investigation and reportage, but she has produced an admirable piece of work nonetheless.

Gillard and Abbott nearly let The Punch have a knock out

The Punch is supposed to be News Ltd's answer to ABC’s The Drum, and similar sites such as Crikey and its spin off Pure Poison. Coming from a News Ltd funded operation, “Julia and Tony learning the art of limited overs politics” is presented surprisingly without much in the way of spin – especially in the context of it being published a mere eight hours after the somewhat dismissive “Bob Brown is feeling lucky”.

Paul Colgan approaches his subject, the second people’s forum of the election campaign, in an informative but folksy way. Colgan almost immediately admits that the cricket analogy that he is using is tenuous at best – and it was already wholly lost on me, regardless. I’m not “down home” enough for this sort of talk but undoubtedly a lot of The Punch’s readers would understand.

This recount of the forum is remarkably balanced, with Tony Abbott and Julia Gillard both coming across as flawed individuals receiving mixed reactions from their shared audience. Colgan is critical of the responses of both of them, but seems to pay particular attention to the perceived ridiculousness of Abbott’s answers in regards to peak oil and the Global Financial Crisis. It is definitely not something that I would reasonably have expected to ever read on The Punch, and certainly not on something run by News Ltd.

Colgan’s article was apparently composed in haste with a minimum of editing applied: several sentences are missing key words, meaning that the reader has to deal with a couple of stumbling blocks. Still, despite its flaws, Colgan has produced one of the more readable items on The Punch website. Damning with faint praise, perhaps, but true nonetheless.