Summer’s football transfer rumour season is in full swing; an annual activity as predictable as strawberries and cream at Wimbledon or suntans and sports cars at the Monaco F1 Grand Prix. World Cup years…
“The swinging voter is often very disengaged [and] very hard to get to.” - Former ALP campaign adviser Neil Lawrence, ABC TV’s Q&A, 1 July. There are two parts to this statement from Neil Lawrence…
For many of us who have long read The Guardian online or, in my case, had the print edition delivered once a week, the Australian edition - launched earlier this week - is disappointing. But there is also…
Women now outnumber men in the Australian media, but they are typically younger, earn less and have less powerful positions than male colleagues. A new national survey shows women now make up 55.5% of…
Cricket Australia’s Supreme Court legal action against its host broadcaster of the past 36 years, Channel Nine, is the manifestation of an identifiable pattern. It continues a time-honoured practice in…
Last week’s Boston Marathon bombings and the manhunt that followed showed all too starkly the challenges government agencies faced as they responded to the attack and sought to identify the perpetrators…
The Climate Commission’s latest report, released recently, and some of the media that arose from it are excellent examples of science and journalists working together to talk about climate change and extreme…
Stigma can take a heavy toll on people who suffer from mental illness. Being shunned, feared, devalued and discriminated against can impair recovery and deepen social isolation and distress. Many sufferers…
There are at least two points of convergence in this week’s parliamentary deliberations on media freedom in Australia and the UK. Both are driven by reports – Finkelstein and Leveson respectively – responding…
For the past 12 months we’ve been warned on an almost daily basis that the sky is about to fall in on media freedoms in Australia, but what does the legislation before parliament this week actually propose…
We live in an era of expanded media and accelerated news cycles, in which citizens have access to more information, and more opportunities to participate in the public sphere, than ever before in human…
If there’s one thing that could be observed from Fairfax’s move to publish its first tabloid-sized broadsheets it was a surprising level of neuro-illiteracy. Fairfax’s head of advertising, Sarah Keith…
One of the key factors in Ted Baillieu’s losing the support of his parliamentary colleagues on Wednesday night was that he failed to manage the media effectively. Did he? To find the answers, it is necessary…
When sport and drugs are involved, often hyperbole is not far away. “This is not a black day in Australian sport, this is the blackest day,” opined the former head of the Australian Sports Anti-Doping…
This year has already seen a flurry of media commentary regarding the “sugar daddy” phenomenon, much of it self-generated for publicity reasons by sites such as SeekingArrangement.com. Sugar daddies (and…
Once upon a time, there was something beseeching about a public mea culpa. Once upon a time, if you found yourself soliciting sex in a toilet block, in bed with a prostitute or having fathered an illegitimate…
A woman hacks her ex-boyfriend’s Facebook account to post a picture of herself in hospital after he attacked her with a baseball bat. A teenager protests against the lenient sentence given to her rapists…
Britain’s newspaper editors met in a London hotel last week in a bid to fend off statutory regulation of their activities. Warned by prime minister David Cameron on Tuesday that unless they accepted all…
When you make money by being infamous, as 2DAY FM does, the odds are that eventually your infamous behaviour will land you in serious trouble. That has now happened with the hoax phone call to the King…
This past weekend, we saw the media – old, new, and social – trying to digest the indigestible. The death of Jacintha Saldanha, the British nurse who apparently took her own life after being caught up…