SOURLIB
Young Mr. Murdoch is like James Packer: call them matched bookends. They speak from positions of privilege, money and power and this generation threatens to be worse than the last and that was bad enough because I heard old Rupert having a go himself the other night. The son of a bitch was trying to justify paying for reading his damned newspapers on the Internet. They won’t get a red cent out of me. If newspapers publish on the net, then I believe only specialist journals should charge and this is one time where governments should stand firm.
The demise of the newspaper in its present form has been predicted for years. Who has carried out the predictions? Answer, the publishers and so-called representatives of stockholders. Good newspapers have been reduced to tabloids and although the Mercury was a bastard size, it was a cold day in hell when that miserable Scotsman cut it down to a tabloid. The trouble is tabloid thinking begets tabloid thinking and the Australian press even at its best very rarely carries articles of any real substance. The comparison with the US or the UK is quite dispiriting and some of the Asian papers now publish in English and they are pretty good, especially with their analyses.
So-called independence of the press and media is a moot point. I agree with some of what Mr. Colquhoun has to say above but the problem there is that government broadcasters in the UK and Australia are the domain of cardigan wearing left-wing quasi-socialists. If they were real socialists they would have to work. The ABC has become just another TV station and some of the crap put to air is unbelievable and now, like the commercial stations, they put so many promos on air, radio and TV that it grates on the nerves because they lie. How many times have you tuned in to a show because the promo sounded good only to find you’ve wasted your time.
Young Mr. Murdoch and his mates obviously never studied history. When newspapers were of low quality, pamphleteers rushed in and filled the breach. They may well have given the mob what they wanted but least it was an alternative. Nowadays, with the Internet, we don’t have to be reliant on megacorporations unless we are compelled by government. I am waiting for Canberra to say something about this verbal atrocity and tell Mr. Murdoch to go on play on a railway line, preferably one that runs trains.
If you don’t believe in the power of the Internet consider the part it played at the time of the Communist counterrevolution in Moscow in 1991 and in the Orange Revolution in the Ukraine. They were far more oppressive societies than our own but time spent on the Internet can give you a very good idea of quality material that is available at no cost. Try it, read the Tasmanian Times!
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