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Monday, 14 December 2009

The NSW papers prepare their terrorist manifestos

As life gets tougher for newspapers, there’s an even greater temptation to wield the egg-beater as a means of generating attention. Which is the only plausible explanation for the bizarre campaigns being waged simultaneously by The Sydney Morning Herald and Daily Telegraph to blow up parliamentary democracy in NSW.

The SMH’s terrorist manifesto comes in the form of a petition for its readers to demand “a mechanism to call an early election” fifteen months ahead of the four-year fixed-term date. It begins with the admonition “We, the people, believe the State of NSW is being neglected” and concludes with the words “I support the right of the people of NSW to call an early election”.

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The Tele’s petition is even more pompous in tone — “We the people call on Her Excellency Professor Marie Roslyn Bashir AC CVO, the 37th Governor of NSW, to dissolve Parliament and bring on an early election” — and even more ridiculous in logic.

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In the days when they had muscle, newspapers used to run campaigns that sometimes achieved genuine and important reform. That’s because they were based on intellectual rigor and built on editorial credibility, not merely created as “look at me” gimmicks.

Today, as they grasp for relevance in their dotage, the Herald and Tele are running campaigns to demolish constitutional democracy in NSW that are absurd and positively embarrassing.

3 Comments

  1. Mark Duffett
    Posted Monday, 14 December 2009 at 1:51 pm | Permalink

    “Terrorist manifesto”?

    Terrorist manifesto?

    Crikey, get a grip. Seriously, your employment of ‘terrorist’ in this instance is a debasement of grievous magnitude, and an insult to victims of terrorism everywhere.

  2. daveliberts
    Posted Monday, 14 December 2009 at 4:11 pm | Permalink

    Mark Duffett is right. There is nothing terrorist about a petition or a newspaper editorial. Such things are simple freedom of speech - and the right to be wrong is simply a fundamental reality of freedom of speech in action. Crikey’s error is particularly unfortunate because it debases a very sound point. The SMH is seriously wrong to blame the NSW Government for being the problem. The issues it identifies are probably completely correct - but these same issues were no different at the time of the last NSW state election. Was the voting public in NSW wrong to re-elect the government at that election? No, it was not. Whatever criticism can be made of NSW Labor, the same is only truer for the NSW Liberals. The point that the SMH should have made was that NSW political culture is a disaster, and that the Governor’s time would be better spent addressing the overly macho, aggressive culture of NSW politics than replacing the current rabble with a rabble of at least equal proportions.

  3. Tamo
    Posted Monday, 14 December 2009 at 4:38 pm | Permalink

    Whatever became of newspapers, particularly those that once claimed to be journals of record?

    Arguably the major NSW newspapers are of the same quality as the NSW major political parties.

    Should I suspect that being a player and inventing the news is cheaper than employing the reporting resources to report happenings with some degree of accuracy and objectivity?