More evidence of the gormlessness of Australia’s media on the Mohammed cartoons is coming to light. This NYT article outlines how the cartoon issue pits Muslim against Muslim. It also indirectly poses a really strong question to Al Jazeera (one of the media organs criticising the cartoons): What brings more prejudice against Islam, these caricatures […]

I may regret this later, but I’ve decided to reproduce one of the Mohammed cartoons. This is an act of solidarity with a number of journalists in Muslim countries who have been jailed for republishing the cartoons. According to Reporters sans frontières seven journalists have been thrown into jail in Yemen, Syria and Algeria for […]

Yet more material offensive to Islam has been published – by SBS. In this case the publication is of photos from Abu Ghraib jail and shows Islamic prisoners being physically and sexually abused. You can see the photos by clicking here. I can’t see how these could be less offensive, although not for exactly the […]

Janet Albrechtsen appears to get some of her news from OLO. Or at least that’s what I infer from her latest article where she quotes Greg Barns. Albrechtsen writes “Other critics include one Greg Barns, once a Liberal, then a Democrat, now politically homeless, who last week wrote that Australia had become a pigsty under […]

Do they block On Line Opinion in China, and if not, will I be in breach of Chinese law if anyone reads OLO there? This thought has been prompted by this quote sent to me from a business partner, and my non-business partner’s desire to go to China for the Olympic games. China bans foreign […]

In this blog post I predicted that Michael Jackson should get off. That was two months ago. Now I’m waiting for the stories probing the litigation industry, asking how the matter could have got to court, and putting the media coverage on trial. I hope they come, but I’m not willing to predict that they […]

It’s fashionable to complain about bias in media coverage. John Howard does it. David Flint does it. Paul Keating does it. Media Watch does it. I do it. You can probably even do a university major in it. But often what we complain about is the linguistic equivalent of having one tyre on the inside […]

Last night’s Media Watch explored a campaign by radio shock jocks Steve Price on 2UE and Chris Smith on 2GB to give the ABC a touch-up for their coverage of the burial of the Nias helicopter crash victims. What I found most interesting about the story was not the stuff-up by the ABC in handling […]

Good question, and one I’ve always answered in the affirmative after reading work by Cass Sunstein on group polarisation. That’s why On Line Opinion has a determinedly multi-partisan point of view – the last thing we need is more intellectual ghettos, and someone needs to look after the architecture to stop them developing. But while […]

Eric Beecher, publisher of The Reader has skinned Stephen Mayne, publisher of www.crikey.com.au by buying effective control of the zine for $200,000 paid in instalments over the course of 2005. This would appear to bring to an end one of the chapters in independent online media in Australia, as well as signalling that there is […]