If the word “reform” implies genuine public benefit, then real reform has been in short supply for all of the 106 years of electronic media regulation in Australia.
Before media reform becomes a runaway train, we need to return to the drawing board and rethink the maps that define and guide broadcasters on reporting news for “local areas”.
Mitch Fifield has announced a shake-up of Australia’s media ownership laws. What rules are being scrapped? And what effect might their axing have on Australia’s media sector?
The fact that Communications Minister Mitch Fifield has got a package of changes to Australia’s media laws this far is remarkable considering the ill-fated recent history of attempts at media reform.
ABC managing director Mark Scott’s recent speech to the National Press Club today had the quietly confident tone of a CEO who knows he’s leaving his organisation in broadly better shape than he found it…
In a 2013 Monthly essay Eric Beecher warned of a looming “civic catastrophe” for Australia if the decline of newspapers continued as it had been in the preceding years. The Australian’s report on a Fairfax…
Tom D.C. Roberts has crafted a book full of remarkable insights into a central figure in Australian corporate and political history, a figure hitherto enveloped in family mythology: Keith Murdoch.
In a recent piece for The Guardian, environmental journalist and activist George Monbiot lamented the poor state of environmental journalism globally. He points to the massive conflagration now occurring…
Michael Thawley, surprised at finding so many closed doors – requiring swipe cards – when he became secretary of the Department of Prime Minister and Cabinet, has now opened most of the internal ones…
The trick for the jihadist recruiter is to find someone whose alienation will run the gamut to murder, usually by providing an affirmative role model that speaks to their unease.
Former prime ministers Julia Gillard, Kevin Rudd and Tony Abbott have in common highly negative views about the media, according to ABC journalist Sarah Ferguson.
It might be thought a tad ironic that Tony Abbott, having benefited so much from the cheerleading of the News Corp tabloids in his rise to the prime ministership, should now appear to blame the “febrile…
It is difficult to work out Tony Abbott’s strategy in his attacks on the ABC and Q&A. It appears to have been astonishingly cack-handed for a number of reasons.