Vlad n U 2
Blue Crack Addict
- Joined
- Jul 6, 2008
- Messages
- 28,386
If I ever watch any sort of morning programming, it's the ABC's, which is by comparison very likeable and pleasant.
Jones is just peculiar, period. He's almost like a parody of a semi-disgraced-but-still-popular radio demagogue in some classic film we haven't heard of. And he picks the strangest things as causes celebre (the business about a certain Wagners quarry and the 2011 Lockyer floods for instance).
As for morning telly, I guess I'm slightly out of the loop, but it is depressing if true, how ubiquitous it all is. For reference, my parents are quite old and barely watch tv at all (the 6.00pm news maybe). And I will not have it on at all in the mornings. Fuck that. Triple J was bad enough, and I've about kicked that habit in favour of silence.
If I ever watch any sort of morning programming, it's the ABC's, which is by comparison very likeable and pleasant.
Not to sound unkind or nothin', but if if you took away Taylor Swift, Beyonce, Top Gear and Ghostbusters-The-Remake, about half The Guardian's staff would be needing to revisit their resumes.
Ok, actually I do mean it to sound unkind.
OK, this guy's written some shit columns of late but this one amused me and nails the whole "but why is nobody from the community condemning this?" bullshit we always hear: I'm sorry about Sonia Kruger's stupid, inflammatory comments
As far as I can tell I only own a telly to watch sport and the occasional thing on the ABC that I remember to watch when it airs rather than later on iView.
Oh I wouldn't say that, there's always some Tory to whinge about.
(I love a good Tory-related whinge.)
There's always Jeremy Corbyn to whinge about. Seriously, wasn't it just a matter of weeks ago that the paper's columnists were running a semi-coordinated campaign to discredit him as an anti-semite?
I don't know what you guys really want out of a "progressive" paper though, given that the vast majority of other prominent mainstream publications are further to the right (closer to the centre, in the case of the left-leaning ones), while those more to the left are generally niche publications very few people take seriously.
Certainly in Australia I'm not sure where else to look for well-resourced news with a strong opinion section that isn't in some way trying to repeat the Murdoch party line or pander to people who might be sympathetic to it. The Fairfax papers can best be described as occupying the centre, something like New Matilda is a fucking waste of time right now, anybody who reads Independent Australia needs to find something better to do, and the socialist rags are impossible to take seriously.
Just reading tonight's #qanda tweets is enough to make the blood boil. Thank christ I'm not watching.
Agreed, for the most part, about New Matilda (one or two contributors strongly excepted), and Independent Australia is like a cesspool for David Icke fans. As for The Conversation... I don't even know why that site exists. It is clickbaity blandness personified, only with a slightly upper-middle-brow twist of Grattan on top. Reminds me of those dreadful 'centrist' blogs who consistently miss the forest for the trees on every great question of the age.
Looking at news reports of Q&A and it sounds just as excruciating as I expected. I don't know how Sam Dastyari didn't storm out, but I love that Pauline Hanson somehow apparently didn't realise he's a Muslim even as he offered to take her out on election night for a halal snack pack.
I must admit this is the first time I've seen The Conversation called clickbaity. I'd say it's one best quality is how it resists being so, even at the risk of being dull.
My problem with it is that it suffers from the same problem of much of academia, or funding thereof: a delusion that the STEM disciplines are the only ones that matter. So you get heaps of articles about science and medicine but fuck-all about the humanities. To give them credit they've made an effort to improve on that front, but it seems to be largely by getting political scientists to talk about the issues of the day.
There's also the fact that in its first few months it had easily the best comments section of any halfway prominent news website, but then the anti-vaxxers and climate denialists and other cranks discovered it and the whole thing went down the shitter in that regard. I've probably said before it's a big part of why I don't submit articles there any more (and thus don't help to mitigate the STEM-centric problem about which I complain!).
And whatever the backgrounds of their contributors, they seem to make some play at commenting on the political questions of the day just like any other of these sites. Just sometimes in a vaguely clueless and technocratic way.
I think it's because of that eternal quest for "relevance", so you get political scientists encouraged to write as much as possible - despite the fact that from my experience of studying political science some of these people are really bad at checking their sources or reading historical precedents. But much of the rest of the humanities gets left out in the cold. If we can't link our research to the news of the day, forget it. Meanwhile some pop physics article with limited relevance to anything gets an easy run.