I’ve commented on Phelps (and Franklin’s appalling story) here. You’re not going to penny-ante your way back to government with tabloid headlines. It’s one thing to point out government waste, but if there is no overarching reason why your lot would be any different then there’s no point to all this busywork for the Opposition. The media can do their own work, or what passes for it: the Liberal Party have to be taken seriously as a party of government, and right now they can’t. Phelps assumes that a different kind of spin can make up for that - but it will only make the Liberal Party less relevant, not more so.

It’s only when the stereotypes fail that you go looking for a different way of doing things, and a different way of doing things will mean a change of government. When press-gallery journalists develop enough professional skill that they can get their own stories without recourse to a press release, and when they rise as one - not to confer over what The Story is, but to defenestrate that government adviser who’s been poring over Opposition inconsistencies, then we’ll have a media and a government worthy of one another.

The conclusion I formed back in the late eighties was that the mainstream media, just like any business, chase $$$, and nothing more.

It seems you are implying that the media (excluding you) are a beholden mob to whatever the government feeds them. Poor swill troughers, they are all!

Bernard, the view that the media are somehow controlled/dominated by Labor politicians in government is farcical. Even if true, the Labor Party are simply refining the tactics employed by the previous government. That’s not appeasement BTW. But the media are free to report whatever will rake in the $$$ - AKA business profit model 101.

So what’s new?

With nary a policy in sight or a position on anything (except opposing everything of course - how freaking Pythonesque) it doesn’t cut the mustard for me.

My main point is this ‘media cycle control’ thing you keep mentioning a lot in reference to the Rudd government.

Could you explain how the government are actually controlling the media cycle? As far as I know (notwithstanding being in the media myself) the meedja are free to report whatever stories they choose.

If you could pen an article detailing how the cycle is dominated, with a little bit of evidence, that would be cool.

And if you doubt this consider Howard Costello at Brendan ‘war for oil’ Nelson’s recent knees up and mutal backslapping. And they still don’t get it. When did monumental failure give cause for pride, go figure.

At the time a good profile encouraged flippancy, and as time went on I seriously regretted explaining ‘how to make sausages’ for this critical reason: Quite objectively the logging industry in NSW was out of control, unscientific and vandalistic in the early 90ies, and not much has changed actually. These were serious enough policy concerns which should have been enough to gain public and big media interest applied to site specifics.

It did in fact help change the NSW Govt in 1995.

But there I was selling short the intelligence of the public and and journalists by reference to stereotypes. And no doubt student reporters were being taught from the article how to see behind ‘greenie tactics’. Being the cheap lowest denominator which does sadly apply to sectors of the big media (example “illegal immigrants” howler by Michael Usher in that Sixty Minutes story last Sunday night). True enough. But no need to pander to it.