Leslie Nassar 1973-2016

No one has a bad word to say about Leslie Nassar, now that he is dead. (See Helen Razer at Crikey for a more traditional obituary.) He is a man made famous for saying bad words about other people, so this is unusual. Those who were lucky enough to know him, work with him or follow him on social media through his long and storied career know that when he cut you, it's because you deserved to be cut. For everyone else, the word I'm seeing most often to describe him and how he acted towards others is "lovely", which brings to mind the way Paul McDermott calls someone a "lovely feller" in a soft voice, like he's reciting The Sentimental Bloke. That is perfect.

I got to know him in the year 2001, when I joined the community of an epochal computer games forum called PlanetCrap. He went by the nickname of szcx back then, IIRC because he preferred those keys to the usual wasd configuration when playing shooter games with a keyboard. Most of the denizens of that forum were European or American, with szcx and I just about the only regular Aussies. I first met him in 2002, which is where I took the above picture. In that community, he was always an intelligent and nice influence, but could take the fight up to trolls and villains as much as anyone when the need arose.

Even back then Leslie was liable to get into trouble. He went to Portland, Oregon for work on a visa sponsored by his employer, but went over the border to Canada to try to renew it after his employer lied to him about his status... only for the Canadian authorities to dob him in to the US Department of Homeland Security for overstaying his visa, and get him shipped to a detention centre in Seattle. After three weeks of incarceration and what amounted to torture, he was deported to Sydney. Hopes that he might emigrate to the US to join his American partner were dashed for a long time.

As a man to meet and talk to, you wouldn't meet a more agreeable conversationalist. He was always interested in what you were doing, empathetic to your life's trials and tribulations, and obviously had a mind as quick as the latest computer chip, and sharp as the blades he shaved his head with. He was very well connected, though of course later he burned some of those bridges with the @fakeStephenConroy controversy that saw him gain his first taste of instant public notoriety but then get blackballed nearly out of the digital industry when certain Telstra executives held a grudge against him. Thankfully, he landed on his feet with a contract with Victoria Police, which meant he had to move down to Melbourne where he lived a stone's throw from my place in Brunswick.

We hung out more in those times. By that stage his first daughter had arrived, who turned out to have a one-in-a-million syndrome similar in some ways to Downs, meaning his family needed lots of quality medical help which at the time would have been outrageously expensive in America in the pre-Obamacare era. Even if he could get a visa and/or citizenship, the cost of supporting his child made the thought of moving to America out of reach.

America's loss was Australia's gain. Many other people know more about his work at the ABC setting up podcasting, at Q&A with TweeVee TV and the viral sensation that was @DeptOfAustralia and I'm sure that history will be well documented elsewhere. I knew him by that point as a friend and business mentor, at a time when I really needed both. As such, he was a constant source of positivity and a perfect foil for radical ideas, even when his own family was under threat from external forces and the danger of his professional radicalism was so present in his personal life. His fearlessness was not false bravado. He could speak with authority on how to construct a life as an anti-Telstra tech terrorist, something I shared with him in my business.

Leslie's death hits me particularly hard because he was a fellow traveller in life. He is the same age as me, and we both built young families later in life after long periods as lone wolves. I only wish I was nearly as talented has he was, in both a technological and comedic sense. I am only pretending to be an ubergeek, really, and when I try to run some of the same sort of funny material as he does, I tend to come off as a nasty smartarse whereas he could always make it sound like it was from the heart (because it was). He may have been a boy from the working class suburbs of Adelaide, but he always had more class than most of the rest of us put together.

It sounds like Leslie's latest project, Wrangling Cats, was more of a lifestyle business. He had finally got to move back to America, in Idaho where his in-laws lived, and it seemed like he had figured out his life and what made him happy and secure. That is what makes it all the more tragic, that his life was taken away so senselessly by a 20-year-old kid driving home drunk on a Saturday morning (whose life has also been ruined now, BTW). There were more than 30,000 road deaths in America last year, about 10 deaths per 100,000 of population. The equivalent figure for Victoria, where we have spent so much energy minimising deaths like these, is around 3.5 per 100,000. Leslie had so much more to give, primarily as a father and husband. What a waste of human potential.

He is survived by his wife and three daughters of eight, three and one years. If you would like to donate to a fund for his family, his most recent business partner set up a GoFundMe page. It's the least any of us can do.

#Gamergate, #cuckservative and racism against Adam Goodes

View image | gettyimages.com

There is a line that can be drawn, a lineage that can be traced, between a number of recent primal screams emanating originally from shadowy ranks of white male recidivism.

• The #gamergate movement, which is a reaction by openly misogynist males against what they see as attacks against the identity of white male gamers, started by a cadre of hardcore drongos on sites like Reddit, gaining momentum as it gathers up tenuously related non-sexist criticisms of game industry and media elites, gradually building into a mob where the majority are not sexist, but the masses give credence to the movement started by a vocal and unrepresentative minority.
• The #cuckservative movement, which is a reaction by openly white supremacist males against what they see as attacks against the identity of white male American conservatives, started by a cadre of hardcore drongos on sites like 8chan, gaining momentum as it gathers up tenuously related non-racist criticisms of conservative political and media elites, gradually building into a mob where the majority are not racist, but the masses give credence to the movement started by a vocal and unrepresentative minority.
• The mass booing of Adam Goodes, which is a reaction by openly racist males against what they see as attacks against the identity of white male Australians, started by a cadre of hardcore drongos at AFL games, gaining momentum as it gathers up tenuously related non-racist criticisms of sporting and media elites, gradually building into a mob where the majority are not racist, but the masses give credence to the movement started by a vocal and unrepresentative minority.

In all three cases, there is a core of horrible people who perform anti-social acts with stated justifications that any reasonable person would find abhorrent, but the majority of participants in this anti-social behaviour use the argument that they don't share the horrible beliefs of the fringe members of the group, thus they shouldn't be tarred with the same brush.

In any large political grouping, there are going to be fringe elements inside the "big tent". Nationalist skinheads vote Liberal, feral communists vote Labor, and these actions are perfectly acceptable and do not invalidate the party's platform as long as the minority doesn't dictate policy. In the case of these extra-institutional movements, however, the actions that the majority take are the same as the hardcore. How are we to tell the difference between those with criminally anti-social motivations and those who have "normal" reasons for acting like morons?

Unfortunately, this dilemma doesn't seem to worry many of those in the majority who are acting as useful idiots providing cover for the extremists. I have been involved in some very heated discussions trying to argue such people around in the case of the Goodes crisis, and I am sure the same kinds of conversations have been happening all over, both on and off the Internet, in the past week. It's a smorgasbord of bad arguments defending the indefensible, as Russell Jackson only skimmed the surface of the other day.

One of the many ways we are lucky to have been born in the Lucky Country is that despite all the talk of multiculturalism, we are largely still a very monoculturally Anglo-Celtic society, and aren't forced very often to confront our own prejudices like this. You only have to look at America where hatred towards Hispanic immigrants and black urban youth is dominating mainstream political discussion, or in England where UKIP only grows in popularity, or Europe where a member country like Hungary can fall under the grip of an openly fascist regime and barely an eyelid is blinked. In comparison, we lost our minds for weeks on end when a man asked a question on a TV program. Our privilege as Australians, let alone white Australians, is almost too massive to comprehend.

The glue binding all these movements together is identity politics. The extremists are white, male and western, and the people they are trying to recruit to their thinly veiled anti-social reactionary causes share much of their identity - this demographic has been labelled in various countries as "frat", "bro", "lad", "chav" and "bogan". While the majority may not profess to share the extremists' politics, the functional differences between them and the fringe are blurred if they take part of the same activities.

In this context, it is supremely difficult to educate a certain type of young white man about the nature of his privilege, because so much of his self image is bound up in believing he is right about everything, even those things he actually knows very little about. Hopefully it's not going to take a tragedy for these otherwise intelligent, empathetic and compassionate citizens to see the light.

To engage or diss engagement

Every night as I'm going to bed I grab my tablet and go through a supper list of American poliblogs, in what has now become a firm order. First comes Booman Tribune and No More Mr Nice Blog for a bit of leftist ranting, followed by Hullabaloo as the (relative) voice of reason by main blogger Heather "digby" Parton, then Balloon Juice and Lawyers, Guns and Money for the policy/law wonk substance. Afterwards for dessert, I read Paul Krugman and then maybe Brad Delong, then if I'm still awake a bit of Daily Kos. Of these, I probably enjoy LGM the most as it's got the meatiest material, and Hullabaloo can seem a bit like the vegetables you have to endure for your own fibrous good. Nevertheless, digby comes up with some crackers now and then that remind me of why I read her, and this one on the journey of Joe Klein is one such.

Are there any Australian journos who have embarked on the Joe Klein experience, where through the needs of the new digital age they have been forced to engage with online agitants and been browbeaten into changing their own tune as a consequence? People like Andrew Elder are crying out to be listened to by such people, and he has much the same sort of message to be delivered to the closed workshop of the mainstream media. His entreaties seem to go on deaf ears, unfortunately. Whoever it is behind the Dorothy Parker pseudonym at Loon Pond comes at the same problem from the angle of lampoonery, which can have a similar effect if anyone was reading him, which it appears few are. But it only takes one.

If there are two mainstream journos who I think may have already had the humility and intelligence to see where the wind is blowing and take on the concerns of the online community, they are Katherine Murphy and Lenore Taylor. They weren't ever really part of The Machine like Klein was, though, as they were not really spruikers for the political class and its increasingly bipartisan neoliberal hegemony. The equivalent here would be someone like Peter Hartcher or Barry Cassidy, veteran "insiders" who sorely need a dose of non-Canberra reality to jolt them out of the cosiness of their relationships with the elite apparatchiks.

I'm not necessarily blaming the journos themselves for being so unapproachable. It's a long way from Davos to Damascus, especially if you're stuck in Canberra stuffing the constantly ravenous political news hole with "content". Someone like Murphy is flat out trying to produce enough to satisfy her employer, let alone waste time feeding the social media maw.

The smallness of the Australian market, and its lack of competition, mean that many journos don't have to pay all that much direct attention to the "punters", never mind the online left, such as it is. It's not only the ABC which lacks a commercial imperative, but also News Ltd which is allowed to lose money hand over fist if it stays true to its proprietors' ideology. For the Joe Klein scenario to happen in Australia, it would probably take a cataclysmic collapse of Fairfax and/or News for their journos to be forced into much less well paid jobs at new media startups where contact with the hoi polloi was much more a function of the business model. I'm not holding my breath for that eventuality.

Millennials' response to this situation has been to turn off from the mainstream media almost completely, and it's hard not to agree with their conclusion. The media don't talk to them or speak their truth to power, so why should they donate their precious eyeballs? This is where I have immense respect for Elder and Parker, but I couldn't do what they do in fisking entire MSM articles line by line. To me, it seems better not to play their game, because it's rigged and you always lose.

UPDATE: Taylor and Murphy respond, like the professionals they are.

@m0nty @awelder @murpharoo you're right about the daily demands, but I did read your post and we seem to read a lot of the same people
— Lenore Taylor (@lenoretaylor) February 4, 2015

@m0nty @awelder @lenoretaylor Thanks for the compliment. Appreciated. I am flat out, but engagement is part of the task & a great pleasure.
— Katharine Murphy (@murpharoo) February 4, 2015

The abject failure of the Institute of Public Affairs

Following on from Alan Moran's sacking from the Institute of Public Affairs for anti-Islam tweets, John Quiggin sticks the knife in by comparing the IPA to their American counterparts, the Heartland Institute.

Finally, there’s the question of how long the IPA can avoid the fate of Heartland, which has lost most of its corporate sponsors (except for a few diehards from the fossil fuel sector) and is a shell of its former self. the IPA has already gone a fair way down the same track, and is now, in large measure, a private plaything of Gina Rinehart. In return for her bounty, she has demanded the most humiliating obeisances, most notably support for Northern dam projects like the Ord River scheme. Until recently the IPA was a reliable critic of such boondoggles.

Similarly, Andrew Elder details the flimsiness of Dick Warburton's review into the Renewable Energy Target, and how the agenda from the right is to abandon economic rationalism in favour of killing off entrepreneurialism and disruptive innovation of companies like Silex and ARENA, and handing money over to established monopolists.

The government's anti-RET position means that current electricity provider(s) will be able to buy the intellectual and other property rights for the proposed solar facility at a fraction of the cost that it would have been worth as a going concern. This means that the incumbency of existing providers will be maintained without them having to do the hard work and take the risk that Silex/ARENA took, while reaping the rewards properly due to Silex/ARENA. 

Are we starting to see a pattern yet? How about the cost-benefit analysis of the National Broadband Network, yet another rubbish report prepared by expensive external consultants to produce exactly what the government wants to hear: specifically, that the Internet doesn't have exponentially expanding bandwidth demand and Australians aren't going to want any more bandwidth in ten years than they already do now. This is patently stupid, but nothing more than can be expected from the Minister for Ill Communication, Malcolm Turnbull.

David Walker at Club Troppo runs interference for Turnbull, which is understandable because Turnbull pushes all the buttons of a high-level wonk. The Minister sounds like he's well briefed and in command of all the facts; a cursory glance at the Delimiter story stream on Turnbull - culminating in an apology by Renai Lemay for ever thinking Turnbull was on the level - shows that his position is a Potemkin village that only impresses those who don't know the hollowness of the Liberal policy platform. Just as Henry Ergas believes his economics credentials qualify him to blog about politics without justification, David Walker thinks that as a journalist, consultant and policy wonk that he can grok broadband technology just like that, and wave through Turnbull's cunningly constructed consultancy conclusions.

Now, allow me to set out my credentials in this one: I was originally a technology journalist, starting in 1997 on weekly newspapers and then moving to bi-monthlies including Internet World Australia where I covered a lot of ISP and Internet industry stories during the dot com boom. Additionally, I spent a year or two in the mid 2000s doing sales for Neighborhood Cable, so I have some direct knowledge of what regular customers want out of their broadband connections.

Walker's justification for agreeing with Turnbull is that we don't need broadband for anything other than pirating video content.

Trouble is, most of the innovations we have come up with recently don’t use all that much bandwidth. Facebook and LinkedIn and Instagram are only medium-bandwidth even at their most intensive. Twitter and smart electricity grids are low-bandwidth. Networked games like Halo 3 use surprisingly little bandwidth too, with local hardware doing most of the work. And beyond a certain point, the speed with which you see Web pages has little to do with bandwidth; it’s mostly about server responsiveness and network latency.
Most projected e-health applications, including your latest x-rays, won’t use that much bandwidth either. Even fairly decent video-conferencing for education and medical consultations and business meetings uses perhaps 2 megabits per second, according to the demand document. To the extent that something is limiting growth in the use of such technologies, that something is generally not bandwidth.
The real policy problem with the NBN is that high-speed broadband just isn’t that much of a revolution. And to justify the cost of universal provision, it needs to be.

There are all sorts of things wrong with this mode of thinking. Correlation does not imply causation; perhaps the applications recently developed are low-bandwidth because they have to deal with crappy networks that don't enable innovation of more bandwidth-heavy content?

The assumptions in the demand document are slanted towards broadcast media. For instance, the 2Mbps quoted for videoconferencing is just for one-on-one calls, yet videoconferencing is made for more than two callers at a time, for collaboration in business and family or party calls in private usage. The one-on-one model is a relic of the broadcast media era, and that's the revolution that the NBN promises: the disruption of the one-to-one or one-to-many modes of communication, and the enabling of many-to-many modes.

With these things, it's always instructive to follow the money. Who stands to lose the most from the rise of the Internet and its disruption of existing businesses? If you look at the bandwidth usage, it's video content that eats up a lot of it. Foxtel is the major provider of paid video content in Australia. News Corp is the entity most at risk if the Internet is used to bypass its paywall to access content-that-wants-to-be-free. (In previous years I would have included Telstra in this part of the rant, though they don't really care as much as they used to about this stuff, since they have started to give up on owning content and focus on getting paid to operate the networks no matter what runs over it.)

I got questioned recently on why I don't join much of the rest of the left in bemoaning the supposed dominance of the IPA, its ubiquity on ABC platforms, its frequent appearances at The Conversation, its infection of Liberal Party processes, etc etc. My contention is that the original aims of the IPA - to be the intellectual arm of the Liberal Party and guide its policy development along ideological lines - have comprehensively failed. These days, as Quiggin rightly notes, the IPA is a cheerleading outfit for Gina Rinehart, Rupert Murdoch and the tobacco lobby, at the expense of any policy credibility they might once have enjoyed. As Elder goes through, the IPA is no longer a defender of entrepreneurialism, but a paid shill of crony capitalists. They actively lobby against Schumpeterian creative destruction, because they are paid by the people whose businesses' destruction would be caused by healthy capitalist competition. They have almost completely abandoned Menzies' founding principles, as evidenced by their recent dabbling with anti-Islam bigotry.

The reason I am ambivalent about this situation - the IPA's continued success of getting their message out to the public, combined with the poisonous nature of that message - is summed up by Harry Clarke in a comment on the Quiggin piece:

The IPA has been spectacularly successful at getting its extremist message across. I congratulate them. The difficulty is that people don’t like their message. I think the great Australian descriptor “ratbag” describes them well. Fundamentalist economics that perverts what economic theory instructs. I agree with you – the CIS relies more on reason.

In the words of John Williamson, Australians revel in our ability to "tell our leaders to go jump in the lake (but we'll never knock Australia, you make no mistake)". Yeah, we're fair dinkum in this country about recognising galahs when we see them. I believe in democracy, and the capability of the Australian public to work out who is on their side. The more the IPA's message is disseminated, the more Australians jeer and laugh at it. I know enough about the IPA to conclude that it is a failure, a folly, a flailing flinger of falderol, a figure of fun... the rest of the nation is just catching up on the news.

By the by, it should be pointed out that Moran's "sacking" from the IPA hasn't stopped him from posting on Catallaxy Files. This suggests a schism developing between John Roskam, still lurking about in the race for preselection for the Victorian seat of Hawthorn being vacated by Ted Baillieu, and Sinclair Davidson, who runs Catallaxy Files and has done nothing to stop its strong shift to becoming a secular freak show of anti-Islamic hatred, to the extent where Davidson ran a guest post this week tying a possible Australian conspiracy by public servants around a Rotherham-style Muslim child sex ring to the abandonment of the repeal push for s18C of the Racial Discrimination Act. The cognitive dissonance of holding the belief that the appalling Rotherham case presages a global epidemic of Muslim-on-white-teen rape after having defended the Catholic Church against allegations of a global epidemic of organised Catholic-priest-on-white-teen rape does not seem to bother anyone there. It is at the point right now where many Cat commenters would be welcome to speak at a Catch The Fire Ministries event, since their ideologies are functionally identical. With the abandonment of ideological principle, the IPA and its blog Catallaxy Files don't have much left to talk about, so they are in danger of descent into contagious conservative fear.

Short Kicks: The People's Hamstring

- ASADA have convinced Cronulla Sharks players to take a plea deal to admit guilt over the Stephen Dank drug saga, which means they only miss the remaining few weeks of the current NRL season. The amount of games they will miss is equivalent to that if they all injured a hamstring. On one hand, ASADA gets to claim a victory and focus on the club giving them most resistance, in Essendon. On the other hand, the "win" is about as hollow as the head of an average Sharks player. Unfortunately for Essendon fans, the EFC hierarchy are unlikely to be offered such a deal because of their intransigence. Even if such a deal was put forward, they most likely wouldn't accept it because it would mean the sainted James Hird would have to be rubbed out for life, and captain Jobe Watson would have to lose his Brownlow Medal. The sideshow of the current Essendon court battle is only a distraction before we get to the third act in that tragedy.

- Bill Shorten has addressed all the rumours about being the Senior Labour Figure at the centre of rape allegations, which have now been confirmed as never going to go anywhere. While the media are asking questions of every Labor politician who bobs his or her head up today, the only real remaining question is whether the media is going to pursue the story well beyond its nominal shelf life, in particular by airing the allegations directly from the woman herself. Who am I kidding? After the Gillard era, nothing is too grubby for the "mainstream" media to run with.

- Liberal Party failure John Hewson is now advocating for a Tax Commission, to remove powers to set fiscal policy just as the RBA was created to stop the National Party dictating monetary policy from Cabinet. This would be a complete abrogation of responsibility by the Australian political class, an admission of incompetence on a grand scale. Just because Hewson can't explain GST on a birthday cake doesn't mean we should abandon the ongoing search for a politician who can build consensus for reform. It is all too easy to look at the gradual degradation of the skill level of our politicians at a federal level and conclude that economics should be left to the wonks. Even if the Tax Commission was a paragon of Keynesian orthodoxy, that ideology must be leavened with healthy doses of democracy lest it become just another tool of unaccountable elites.

Smoke lobby should be ashen-faced

Plain packaging is only the latest in a series of "nanny state" measures started in 1973 to curb the prevalence of tobacco smoking. The Department of Health today put out a fact sheet to celebrate the success of this bipartisan policy - the star of which is the above graph - which comprehensively debunks the ridiculous stance of tobacco denialism which is splashed across the Australian newspaper today.

The raft of articles, attacking Stephen Koukoulas as he details here, is much the same sort of group bullying tactics as the Murdoch press used against Margaret Simons for her comments regarding the Finkelstein inquiry into the media in 2012. In both cases, the attacks include an accusation that the target failed to disclose their previous work for ALP in government - attacks that are for a large part made by those who fail to similarly disclose their affiliations with the Liberal Party. Sinclair Davidson joins in the Koukpile, which is de rigueur for mavens of the Institute of Public Affairs who have a history of funding by Big Tobacco.

Media Watch ran the theory on Monday that the real agenda from the tobacco lobby was not in Australia, where the battle has been lost, but in Britain and Ireland where plain packaging is still being debated. This argument is quoted from Mike Daube, who makes a habit of trolling Big Tobacco for justice.

I have a lot of time for News Corp Australia, and many people within it. They employ a lot of good people who do fine work on a daily basis, the nitty gritty of journalism which is a thankless and low-margin task. I get that the Australian prides itself on being a campaigning paper, and there is nothing wrong with that in principle. In practice, however, the mob mentality that is unleashed when people like Simons and Koukoulas are singled out for rough treatment undermines the credibility of not only News but all of journalism, and contributes to the distinct unpopularity of the journalism profession in the minds of a public who is largely ignored at times like this.

If you're going to campaign, do it on behalf of your readers please, not corporate interests.

UPDATE: Sinclair responds to the above graph:

There is a long-term downward trend in tobacco usage in Australia. We all know and understand this to be the case. But look at the impact policy has had on usage. Nothing. The downward trend doesn't seem to respond much to ever increasing regulation.

This is rank stupidity in the form of a logical fallacy, deliberately ignoring cause and effect. I have taken the liberty of preparing a graph from the ABS figures since 1959 on chain trend per capita in dollar terms, along with labels as to pre-1990 policy changes.

For Sinclair to say that policy has had no impact on usage is ludicrous. Usage had been flat for more than a decade before the policy changed, and usage changed with it.

Randsformers versus Establicons

It seems everybody hates Tony Abbott these days... well, almost everybody. Mike Seccombe makes the case in the Saturday Paper for the Institute of Public Affairs being Abbott's only friend, with some quotes from the IPA's John Roskam. Yet Seccombe's argument falls down at the first hurdle, as he has to acknowledge that Abbott has not been doing the IPA's bidding on (to them) key policies like repeal of s18C of the Racial Discrimination Act.

The repeal of section 18C of the RDA became number four on the IPA’s policy wish list, and before you knew it, Attorney-General George Brandis had personally drafted changes to protect, as he memorably put it, the right to be a bigot. Alas, the public debate has run overwhelmingly against them. Roskam fears “we’ll lose that one”.

Similarly, Quadrant calls Abbott and Brandis cowards and quislings for failing to stand up for the rights of old white guys like Andrew Bolt to be racist. The paleoconservatives at the Sydney Traditionalist Forum, who at least are open and honest about their nationalist strain of white power politics, characterise this as "establicons" turning away from the Coalition.

Meanwhile, the Ayn Rand acolytes of the libertarian movement are in even more disarray. David Leyonhjelm got smashed from pillar to post on a recent proposal to sell Australian citizenship for $50,000 a pop by the Establicons, with the Randsformers powerless to defend the silliness of the LDP's egghead Pollyannaism. Open the front door, says David? Shut the front door, say the Cat's resident tories.

So, libertarians hate him for failing to defend freedom or lower taxes, while conservatives hate him for reindexing pensions and disrespecting diggers... is there anyone left on Tony Abbott's side? One has to turn to the News Limited papers to find them - some of whom are connected to the IPA, to be sure. Murdoch's continued support is not about ideology, though, but about media ownership laws. As Jason Clare said yesterday:

“Media reform is a well-trodden minefield and Malcolm Turnbull is welcome to it.”

Turnbull can't even have lunch without causing a national incident, so if Murdoch thinks the Liberals are going to be able to finesse a bill through the Senate past Clive Palmer to enable him to take over the Ten Network for which he has been angling for years, he's going to be sorely disappointed.

Two cigars, a wink and a princess

Fairfax editorial bod Michael Short has a plea for the left today:

please, everyone: you might not like the PM's budget, policies, behavior. fair enough. but keep his children out of it. #auspol #abbott
— Michael Short (@shortmsgs) May 23, 2014

This is in reference to the stories about the scholarship awarded to Frances Abbott as broken by The Guardian, followed up with style by a leak from an insider to New Matilda, and now percolating as far as the Murdoch press. Fairfax's newsroom has reported the story normally, but its op-ed section ran a defence of young Abbott today, probably commissioned by Short since that is his job. (Short is editor of The Zone, which is separate to op-ed - my bad).

It is easy to chip Fairfax for not acknowledging the breakers of the story in its pieces (even News.com.au namechecked its competitors), and it is also easy (and lazy) to conclude that Short's view has an element of sour grapes to it. Had their journos been tipped off but refused to print it as such was beneath them to score scoops on such tawdry material, as they did with the AWU stuff?

Nevertheless, there is a valid line of propriety that Short identifies, but I would argue that the difference between what the Prime Minister says and what he does is very much in the national interest at the moment. If Abbott is slashing university funding and asking students (and their parents) to fork out much higher fees on one hand, and accepting a meritless secret kickback from a rich donor for the higher education of his own child on the other hand... that is completely within the bounds of political conversation.

John Quiggin, Ross Gittins and Alan Kohler do fine work, but dry economic screeds don't cut through like vision of two ministers enjoying cigars at Parliament House after a long day of raising taxes, or a Prime Minister winking merrily as one of Howard's battlers pours out a sob story, or the PM's photogenic daughter being revealed as a member of a gilded aristocracy. In a country where it is now possible to become a knight once again, after more than 20 years since the move away from such trappings of imperial rule, the optics of the progeny of the leader being coddled like a princess by his political cronies are too powerful to ignore.

Hippie-punching with the three card monte budget

The 2014 budget has been and gone, and the strategy from the government has been simple, albeit it seems to have fooled the craven mainstream media.The three-card monte is all about misdirection, and the media was an easy mark.

The con was to leak the deficit levy before the budget so that the media thought that was the central fight, only to water it down to the point where it doesn't fix the imaginary budget emergency problem it was supposed to address, and only when the budget hit was the true agenda unveiled. This agenda was not to "cut cut cut" as the hard right wanted, but to cut just enough to fund Abbott's pet projects in his role as a big government conservative who is interested in (a) benefiting his corporate mates by investing in roads for their trucks and (b) nudging the populace towards his Tory worldview of nuclear families and working poor by slashing benefits for single mothers and the young unemployed.

It will be interesting to see if Abbott's War On Youth has an effect on voting blocs, similar to how the ongoing war in America by the Republican Party on minorities has seen their vote in racial blocs other than white plummet to near-unrecoverable levels. Via Steve from Brisbane comes a link to the Whitlam Institute project Young People Imagining a New Democracy, which published an age bloc poll series for federal voting intentions last August based on Newspoll. The 2010 election was the last time that the 18-24 bloc preferred Labor with the gap opening out to a consistent five points for the Coalition in recent times, while the 50+ split stays at a solid 15-20 points. It appears the younger a demographic is, the more swing it shows in its vote depending on the issues of the day.

So why would the Liberals hippie-punch the young so hard? Probably because the mainstream media will reward them for it. The media is made up of 35-49s and 50+s who are in that $80,000-$150,000 bracket that Abbott "saved" from the depredations of the deficit levy, but very few of them would be hit by the changes to Newstart or family tax benefits at this stage of their lives. These are the Tory elites, collaborating with the government to minimise the electoral impact like any another special interest group.

Aunty ABC vs Uncle Rupert in the Asian theatre

Old mate Duncan Riley - a former Liberal Party apparatchik, but I try not to hold that against him - blogs from Thailand about why he thinks the Abbott government's decision to bone the Australia Network is wrong.

The tl;dr version is that nearly everyone in South East Asia who has some form of pay TV has Australia Network.
Oh, and if you’ve never left Australia: you can walk around the worst slum in Bangkok and see each house with a pay tv dish.
I’m not going to pretend to understand the subtleties of “soft diplomacy” but I do have a degree that includes Marketing: The Australia Network must, at some level promote Australia in the region.
[...]
$270m roughly over 10 years or $27m a year isn't a lot of money to broadcast Australian TV shows and culture across Asia.
It really isn’t.

Of course the reason that Abbott is doing this is to appease his old mate Rupert Murdoch, who have had AN in their sights since Sky News lost a (questionably run) tender on the contract under Gillard. Murdoch has long sought to get footholds in Asian pay TV markets, and the AN has evidently been an easy option for Asian providers to get a bit of cheap English language content from the region without having to pay Murdoch for the privilege. Boning the AN would give Murdoch a much better negotiating position.

If there is anyone whom Tony Abbott owes big time for his seat in the big chair at Parliament House, it is Uncle Rupert. You only have to look at Terry McCrann's recent stuff defending the deficit levy, or the Daily Telegraph's blaring headline today attacking Howard's middle class welfare, to know how much in lockstep the News Ltd papers are with Cabinet messaging. (As an aside: I am perfectly fine with that... I have faith that the vast majority of the Australian public are smart enough to twig exactly what is going on, and adjust their reactions to News Ltd journalism accordingly, and all is well.)

The falderol over the debt levy - which, in its new watered-down form where it only kicks in at $150,000 earnings rather than the original $80,000, is in typical Abbott administration fashion a near-complete waste of time and effort for all concerned - hides a number of these sort of minor but still important pennies that are being pinched for reasons other than straight budget propriety. Look for more of these sops to special interests to dribble out in the days ahead, and the government's credibility to crumble as a result.

538 problems and a fox ain't one

FiveThirtyEight has relaunched as the first of the New New Media wave, and the Old New Media has reacted with a range of emotions from disappointment, outrage, bemusement and exasperation. Jay Rosen reminds us that 538 is merely a startup, so of course it's going to be crap at first, but it deserves time to react to user feedback and iterate its way out of early missteps.

Like mistermix at Balloon Juice, I tend to think that while the trolly hires are bad and many of the launch articles are worse, Silver deserves a honeymoon period longer than one day. mistermix would be happy with a 538-minus-NYT and a Wonkbook-minus-WaPo in the case of Vox, but I disagree on that point because I think there is the potential there to actually accomplish extraordinary goals.

The now-infamous NYMag interview where Silver lays down the jazz about foxes and hedgehogs sounds to me like any other startup founder who has spent a lot of time inside his own head thinking about how things should be, and is about to find out from his target audience that the world works a lot differently. Battle plans never survive engagement with the enemy, as that old dog Sun Tzu used to say. This is a direct nut punch to the ego, but just about every startup founder goes through this sobering experience (and those who don't are insufferable arseholes!). I toiled through this rite of passage myself, and came out of it the other side as a much better entrepreneur, and a better person.

Data journalism itself is a sound concept at its root, if implemented intelligently. Like sabermetrics which sought to correct inefficiencies in baseball analysis, opinion journalism contains many inefficiencies based on prejudices, deliberate obfuscation and unseen power dynamics which data journalism should seek to counter. The fact checking model was an attempt to counter this, but it has run into an intractable problem that Silver himself is flirting with as well: the problem of being seen to be impartial, but also living within a media industry which is built in part on bullshit. Setting yourself up as the ultimate arbiter of truth means you have to attack the bullshit and reject it within your own organisation, which is a very difficult thing to do psychologically for a small team of people who presumably rub shoulders with those they are scything into. Undermining the basis of someone else's employment by pointing out the lack of clothes on their own private emperor is a lot harder than giving in to the temptation of "both sides do it" equivocation so that you have someone to talk to at parties.

If Silver wants to discover the correct solution to the dilemma of the moral high ground, he need look no further than the next stable over where Bill Simmons and his army of Sports Guys™ ply their trade at Grantland, free of the yoke of outdated striving for lilywhite objectivity. Simmons stands for his rooting interest without pretense of fairmindedness, and his audience knows that and consumes the products of him and his acolytes anyway. Simmons does a fair bit of data journalism himself so one wonders what Silver and Simmons talk about, seeing as Silver seems determined to do the opposite of Simmons.

Silver is a smart guy, he will work it out. Hopefully he has the emotional intelligence to sift out the useful feedback and incorporate it into a new business strategy/worldview which will lead to 538's success under the ESPN umbrella. Talk of foxes and hedgehogs is not helpful, but being a lone wolf is not good either. Embracing change in all aspects, particularly in your own mind, is the key to entrepreneurial nirvana.

Short Kicks: Is everybody happy?

- On one hand, we have the right saying that the market will decide so we don't need anti-discrimination laws to prevent gays having weddings in Arizona from being denied service by cake bakers. On the other hand, we have the market deciding that anti-gay discrimination is bad in Boston as the beer industry sides with its customers in gay bars, yet the right is up in arms in horror at the supposed misuse of market power. Which is it, wingnuts?

- The backlash of snark (snarklash? backsnark?) against the New New Media continues, with Wonkette making fun of Vox.com's launch video featuring Matt Yglesias in an admittedly terrible Happy Hammond style tartan blazer, Ezra Klein slammed for hiring a self-hating gay columnist clickbaiter, and Balloon Juice fact checking Nate Silver's allegorical use of a fox as FiveThirtyEight's new logo. The unresolved sexual tension is getting rather steamy in the Web media industry in America at the moment, leading up to the launch of these new titles. Pity we don't have anything like that happening in Australia - chatter about the Saturday Paper since its launch seems to have disappeared.

- Stephen Koukoulas is still swinging the cudgel lustily on behalf of his prediction that the economy is going to turn around and rate cuts will happen this year, maybe as early as May, and he's had plenty of material to work with from recent economic data. His prediction is that in 12 months' time, interest rates will be a full point higher and the Aussie dollar back at parity. That set of numbers would have major implications for the Australian economy as our manufacturing base would continue to be hollowed out, which would blow out budget expenditures. Would revenue bounce back, though? Only if Joe Hockey raises taxes, and/or closes loopholes like the Double Dutch/Irish lurk used by Google, Apple and other multinationals. Given that this government's policy is evidently to do absolutely nothing until they get a mandate after the next election, I would advise not holding one's breath.

Fellowship of the Wrong: The Game

The Lawyers Guns & Money blog has been posting a bit the last few days on what they are calling the Fantasy New York Times Columnist game.

So what if we could fire everyone at the Times and start over? Let’s play that game. What would it look like? Who would you keep? I want to establish a vague metric, Value over Replacement Columnist. I’m assuming what one wants in a Times columnist is an original thinker with consistently interesting things to say who also works hard at their job. You want someone people are going to talk about, brands that are interesting and provide added value to the paper. You want high VORC from your columnists.

This is a fun game, one that would be interesting to play in Australia. I would be interested to see Andrew Elder have a lash at this one, for instance. For those not into fantasy sports, VORC is a piss-take on VORP (Value Over Replacement Player), the iconic statistic that defines the relatively new field of sabermetrics that has revolutionised baseball and was popularised in the book/movie Moneyball. Are there any generalist columnists at the Fairfax, News, Text Media, ABC etc who are more valuable to keep than replacing them with other candidates who are more qualified in their chosen fields? I doubt it, especially in the political arena. What is the metric similar to On-Base Percentage, which underpinned Moneyball, that could be dreamed up to measure Aussie columnist output? I bet Andrew would have a field day with this concept.

But seriously, I'm with David Watkins of LGM in questioning the structure of the game in the first place. The problem with all these papers' editorial cadres is that they have this policy of tenure which is completely out of sync with the rest of modern society. It is pretty bloody hard to get struck off the register of Very Serious People who say very serious things in major newspapers, no matter how stupid the things you say get. There is no marking to market, as economists would say, by either the columnists or their bosses. You have to be carted out of the Fellowship of the Wrong in a pine box, effectively - and no, Glenn Milne wasn't pushed out, he left of his own accord. You can expand slightly the roster of VSPs, but the market has spoken on this issue and found the whole idea of op-ed pages in newspapers to be boring and useless, which is part of why newspapers are dying.

Meanwhile in Australia, this game that Erik Loomis and the LGM crew are playing has already been run and "won" by Morrie Schwarz with the launch of the Saturday Paper, as Margaret Simons details in the Guardian.

Only now, he says, with the media business in crisis, does he spy the opportunity. First, many of the best Australian journalists have been made redundant from the mainstream publishers and are eager for work. Second, the decline of the big publishers has, he believes, left a hole in the market for the intelligent, committed reader.

“I have thought long and hard about what a newspaper is actually for, its core purpose” he says. “We will ditch anything extraneous.”

There will be no cats up trees, no minor crime and very little sport in the Saturday Paper. Rather, each week about 30,000 words of serious, polished writing on politics and culture will be printed and delivered to newsagents and the homes of subscribers in Sydney, Melbourne and Canberra. 

[...]

He has organised a stable of about 20 freelancers – a list heavy with the recently redundant senior Fairfax journalists – to write for him.
The paper is also employing four full-time journalists, including one in Canberra.

I have not read the Saturday Paper nor even held one in my hands, so this is not a review of the finished product. My thoughts do not just lead back to the decision by Schwarz to even contemplate launching a newspaper in the first place: this is understandable, he has the money (made in boring real estate) to burn a la Graeme Wood and wants to feel like a Big Manly Man as is the trend these days. Whatever VORC-like metrics he used to pick his roster - I suspect it was just "who has Fairfax fired in the last 12 months and will work cheap" - it is still just the same old same old from where I'm sitting, in terms of personnel and format. Just as Wood ultimately got sick of the fish John B. Fairfax rejected at The Global Mail, Schwarz's patience will only last as long as (a) his money, and (b) his acceptance of the fact that he is funding the retirement packages of unimaginative employees who don't need it and arguably don't deserve it.

What I have been wondering is what the hell these journalists think they are doing in exchanging one doomed father figure for another. Are none of them the least bit entrepreneurial? Do none of them see the same opportunity that Schwarz sees, and have the contacts to get funding to launch something themselves so that they have power over their own destiny? I will link again now to my article from 2012 beseeching these spurned lizards to emulate Alan Kohler and devour the rotting corpse which used to feed them - a piece which I believed in at the time but is looking more and more Pollyanna-ish as regards the Fairfax journo mindset as time goes on.

As someone said to me on Twitter during the week (can't find the tweet), it probably has something to do with the Chinese wall between advertising and editorial at Fairfax. I can say from watching various of them over the years (and then becoming one) that it takes a particular type of journo to make the transition from lilywhite lizard to capitalism-tainted publisher. You have to have a vision of creating something out of nothing, a vehicle that you are driving to great heights, whereas most journos are happy to sit safely in the passenger seat and enjoy the scenery from inside the brand jalopy. It took a group of business journos in Kohler, Gottliebsen and Bartholomeusz to take the chance in starting Business Spectator and business journo Stephen Mayne to found Crikey, though you could point to Mia Freedman or Eric Beecher as others who didn't require direct exposure to naked capitalism to fuel their ambitions.

This is getting rather long, but please stay with me as I return to the topic of the Schwarz-o-jigger. I suppose my main problem with the Saturday Paper is that it is not disruptive in any way. There is not actually a market opportunity here for this model, much as Schwarz might claim there is. Stripping out everything but the op-ed pages leaves you with opinion, and everyone has got one of those already. If you want to have your own opinion validated, there is an entire Internet for free out there which can do that.

To make money out of publishing opinion or long-form reporting, you have to have multiple revenue streams or engage in the cult of personality. As in the discussion over at LGM about the NYT, part of the appeal of having a relatively small stable of op-ed writers is syndication, an option which is not open to Schwarz. The other interesting (to me) element of that discussion is the statement that the reason the likes of David Brooks, Tom Friedman, Ross Douthat et al keep their jobs despite arguably low quality of output is that they have name recognition and their own demographic. Which name brand journalists are writing for the Saturday Paper? Perhaps more importantly, who actually has a big enough name to make it worth Schwarz's money to poach? I'd reckon you could only talk about Andrew Bolt and perhaps Tim Blair who fit that description, with maybe Laurie Oakes for gravitas. Bolt and Blair are trolls, of course, but that is a valuable role in itself because you need a constant flow of new and returning traffic for a new publishing venture to succeed.

On that note: where, I ask in vain, are the leftwing trollumnists who might actually fit in at a leftist rag and make commercial sense to pay big bucks, or even any bucks at all? A progressive version of Bolt is something this country sorely needs. Leftism in the mass media can be so priggish in these grey-suited times. Less Tony Jones, more Doug Anthony All Stars is what I'm talking about. There is more than enough material for someone like that to work with under an Abbott government. Such a beast would have to have the stomach to actually take on the likes of Bolt and Blair head on, occasionally. This is something that lilywhite journalists in this country are traditionally loath to do, as they don't like being soiled with the grime of close combat. Someone will have to emerge from some online fight club to fight those battles, as they will be dirty.

I see your Schwartz is smaller than mine

Big media news day today. Lucky we've still got some media left to report it. Graeme Wood has boned The Global Mail, with the obvious link between its demise and the rise late last year of The Guardian Australia, which Wood has also funded, easy to make.

The Global Mail example shows that it is entirely possible for ex-mainstream journos to be completely unsuited to the rigours and pressures of startup life [...]
That's the problem with the Global Mail experience: it's folly to pretend that the commercial imperative doesn't matter to journalism. The commercial imperative draws you closer to your audience. Of course there has to be a wall between advertising and editorial, but the two sides are both trying to connect with consumers of their content. Journos at the Global Mail were guilty of the sin of creating a job which fulfilled all their needs, not necessarily the needs of the audience. I'm sure that's not what Graeme intended, but the lack of urgency which his obligation-free funding encouraged has led to the evident problems. Journalism startups are just like any other startup, they will fail if they are not instantly responsive to user feedback. So there won't be any journalism - investigative, pure, or otherwise - if there is a disconnect between journalist and audience.

No, that analysis wasn't from today, but me about a year ago on my Tinfinger blog. TGM was not a startup native. Its overheads were massive, its design was not responsive, its business model was non-existent, its ownership structure was not sustainable. It was a valiant attempt, but wrong-headed. Hopefully it will be a signature lesson for all those ex-MSM journos staring at pink slips not to expect to parachute into a sinecure lifestyle at a startup.

Meanwhile, Schwartz Media has picked a fight with News Corp and Fairfax causing an intra-industry stoush, all in the cheerful attempt to drum up buzz for the launch of the Saturday Paper to compete with the broadsheet cash cows. One wonders whether oxygen in specialist media would be as sweet as in the regular press, but those cows are bleeding so the jackals were always going to circle.

Fairfax editorial boss Garry Linnell rejected comments by Schwartz Media’s CEO Rebecca Costello who yesterday told Mumbrella that circulation falls were the result of a decline in the "quality of the content" of Australia’s other weekend newspapers.
"Costello must be living in another reality to the rest of us. What is this so called decline in quality?" said Linnell, the director of news media at Fairfax.
"The last time I looked we’d won a record number of Walkley awards for breaking news and stylish writing. Our journalism has never been more courageous and willing to expose wrongs and stand up for our audience."

Walkleys are not a valid metric. There are a fixed number of these that are awarded each year. They have to be awarded to somebody. It is entirely possible that the slashing of journalist numbers at broadsheets (or soon to be ex-broadsheets) has lowered quality across the board, which is what the Schwartz mob are saying. And if what Linnell was saying is true: why did they employ so many more journos in the past, if they didn't improve quality?

Mind you, the Saturday Paper is also most likely doomed before it starts. Sure, Fairfax and News rags have dropped in quality as they shed staff, but their skeleton newsrooms will still produce better copy than a startup at this stage. There's just not much meat left on those bones.

So many dumb ways to lie

I am not a fan of the advent of fact-checking sites we have seen in this election campaign. This is not because fact checking is not needed: in the modern age of slowly dying mass media, retreating to its partisan past, an independent source of fact checking is a necessary part of the post-MSM journalism landscape. My objection to the likes of Politifact, ABC Fact Check, and The Conversation FactCheck is the granularity of the rating systems.

Bronwen Clune's article on this subject for the Guardian was illustrated by a big image of a green tick and a red cross, and that sums up my problem with fact checking sites: that there is not enough nuance in the ratings allowable. Politifact has five possible ratings: false, mostly false, half true, mostly true and true. This leads it to conclude that the ALP line that the Coalition will cut 20,000 public sector jobs is false. The reality is more complex than that, however. If you just concentrate on what the Coalition has said, then you can't find much evidence of the 20,000 number. Labor's argument, however, is that the confirmation of the higher figure is implied by the sums in the Coalition's budget plan, based in part on Treasury analysis which has been running in the media for the last day or two.

For Politifact to look narrowly at whether the Coalition said it would cut 20,000 jobs misses the point, and allows the Coalition to sail by unscrutinised on the implications of its announced policies. Where is the analysis by Politifact on whether the Coalition can actually save the amount of money it claims will be saved by cutting only 12,000 jobs? That is a job for an economist, and Saul Eslake did that job, which earned him the opprobrium of the Coalition.

Politifact's concentration on the words, not the numbers, means that they are now setting themselves up in opposition to what Eslake said. We have duelling fact checkers, one checking the words which describe the numbers, and one checking the numbers which underpin the words. Who is right? They could both be right within the confines of the tasks they set themselves, but they both miss the broader picture.

In the new world of journalism after the giants fall, some will fall victim to the tendency not to tell the whole story. Journalism will become fragmented, an ecology of disparate parts instead of the omnibus juggernauts of yore. If you are setting yourself up as a beacon of truth, however, you should tell the whole truth, not just a part of it. The sin of omission will allow your words to be used by partisans in ways you do not intend. Be effusive in your ratings, please.

I am not talking about the ever-so-slightly better descriptors used by the ABC, like "outdated", or "checks out". These are just synonyms for wrong and right. Loosen it up a bit. Inject some entertainment. I was a fan of Australian writer Paul-Michael Agapow's Postviews back in the day when newsgroups were still a meaningful thing, which used in its movie reviews a Sid and Nancy scale to bring a non-linear element into end-of-review scoring. Thus, the 1996 movie Jude was scored as:

 [*/misfire] and a ski holiday without snow on the Sid and Nancy scale.

And the 1987 movie Mr India was:

[***/interesting] and Sauerkraut westerns on the Sid and Nancy scale

Not so difficult, is it? One other weakness of fact check sites is that they can be painfully earnest. Entertain while you educate! The funny bit may be the takeaway that is most memorable. Get that stick out of where it's lodged, stop pretending that you are cyborg high priests of truth, and add some personality back into these things.