In the early nineties one joke went “How do you start a small business?” The punchline “Give Warwick Fairfax a large one.” It was a reference by the privatisation and near destruction of the Fairfax media group by the twenty-something great-grandson of the founder. The culprits have changed, but the joke is quite similar, if […]
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How do you start a small business?
Tuesday, June 19th, 2012Fairfax changes good for readers, not so good for community
Monday, June 18th, 2012What Fairfax announced today was obvious 13 years ago – the traditional newspaper model has been broken for quite some time. But that doesn’t mean that the alternative model is going to fill the role of the fourth estate as well as the existing one. Not that the fourth estate has been functioning as effectively […]
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Posted by Graham at 11:36 pm |
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Freedom of speech, freedom of expression and the Bolt decision
Friday, September 30th, 2011Those in doubt that the Andrew Bolt case is about free speech need only think about the contortions of logic necessary to dismissing the proposition that it is about free speech. On his blog, my friend Mark Bahnisch says that “free speech is not at issue here” before observing that “[f]ree speech, as the judgment […]
Continue Reading...New media, new world order?
Thursday, August 4th, 2011Did you know that in the first 6 months of this year, 536 people in the US had died in tornadoes? Or that this was more than the entire previous decade? Don’t bother checking News Corp for that factoid. Rupert Murdoch has been found wanting, his imperial power over pollies now mocked amid calls for […]
Continue Reading...Waltzing Matilda
Sunday, May 30th, 2010New Matilda has announced that, all other things being equal, it will close on Friday 25 June. It is always sad to see a neighbour go, even if they are a competitor, and I was saddling-up to write a short but sympathetic note.
Continue Reading...Second as farce: Asylum seekers and Piers Akerman
Thursday, April 1st, 2010Piers Akerman has been testing his vast capacity for self-parody. His piece in Monday’s Telegraph on asylum seekers reads as if written on a bet or a dare. The frenzy whipped up over asylum seekers after the Tampa’s arrival was a tragedy for this country. Akerman seems determined to repeat it as farce. Akerman brands the government’s […]
Continue Reading...OLO is here for the next day or so
Tuesday, December 1st, 2009On Line Opinion will be publishing on this blog for the next day or so. We have a severe problem with our server which we are attending to. Ambit Gambit is on a different server and provides most of the same comment facilities available on OLO. So to honour our commitments to our authors, particularly […]
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Posted by Graham at 9:45 am |
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My minute’s silence
Wednesday, November 11th, 2009This is a Rememberance Day post with a German theme. Reader Fay Helwig of Das Helwig Haus B&B has planted a beautiful field of poppies which comes into bloom just in time for Remberance Day – the Rememberance Field. The field will feature on Channel 9 between 6:30 and 7:00 tonight. Or you could always […]
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Posted by Graham at 10:49 am |
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Point of view
Saturday, November 7th, 2009The Australian is generally skeptical of climate change and the ABC relatively accepting. So what would each choose to report from one set of tidal measurements? According to The Australian’s headline “Science is in on climate change sea-level rise: 1.7mm “. But the ABC’s headline reads “WA sea level rises doubling world average” and the […]
Continue Reading...Nothing but due process and due diligence here Lee
Friday, July 17th, 2009Taking the combination of Lee Rhiannon’s answers and non-answers together, I think I am entitled to infer bad faith on her part. Here we have an author who has been published 13 times by us and only once rejected, yet when she has a concern of political bias, particularly with me, raises it first not […]
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