Showing posts with label The Age. Show all posts
Showing posts with label The Age. Show all posts

Wednesday 10 February 2021

Truth telling matter to everyone - journalists, commentators, tweeters and most especially readers - and every misstep by anyone lowers trust

 

In February 2021 journalist Tom Cowrie wrote an article titled Living for the weekend: infected hotel quarantine worker’s busy itinerary which was published in The Age on Thursday 4 February.


It discussed in great detail the weekend travel of a man who had left his place of work for a three-day break after showing a negative result to a workplace COVID-19 test and had gone about his daily life on days off.


He was doing nothing wrong or unlawful in those three days. However he reportedly became a person of interest because sometime after he returned to work on the Tuesday he began to feel unwell and tested positive for COVID-19 on the Wednesday.


I did not see the alleged responses to this particular article in The Age as I barely registered the piece at the time.


However, it seems that The Age Editor Gay Alcorn and Tom Cowie were very upset by readers’ responses.


Normally I would be most sympathetic to editors and journalists caught up in a sustained negative reaction. Especailly one which allegedly carried death threats.


However, something doesn’t quite compute and the two articles set out below rather explain why.


The first short two paragraph article states that the journalist was taking a short break and implies that the editor is leaving Twitter for good.


Alice Coster writing in the Herald Sun on 6 February 2021 at Page 19:


Age editor GAY ALCORN and reporter TOM COWIE have been badly mauled on Twitter for detailing the travels of the innocent 26-year-old hotel quarantine worker who tested positive for the mutant strain of the virus that could have shut down the city.


Mauled as in a shark attack. Trolls called Alcorn and Cowie “racists and bigots” bent on “going after the working class”. Cowie’s Twitter page says he’s “taking a break” from Twitter and Alcorn says she’s “baffled” and “reluctantly, I’m out of here”.


The reality is that The Age editor’s Twitter account remained active as of 2:27pm on 8 February 2021 and only the journalist has taken a break from his account.




The second longer article implies that The Age editor is removing the newspaper’s Twitter account. 


This was Nick Tabakoff writing in The Australian online on 8 February 2021:


Death threats’: Age editor snaps


Who would have thought a story about a worker visiting a kebab store and Kmart could cause such dramas?


The Age editor Gay Alcorn has stormed off Twitter after she revealed to Diary the paper received “death threats” over its much-debated feature about a Melbourne COVID-19 quarantine worker’s weekend moves.


The story traced every after-hours footstep of the COVID-positive quarantine hotel worker through Spencer Street institution Kebab Kingz (even publishing its “4.5 star” reviews on Google), Kmart, Bunnings and other locations.


But after Alcorn tweeted out the story on Thursday, along with a tongue-in-cheek message about the worker’s “busy” social schedule, Twitter erupted into furious criticism and in many cases, abuse.


Some of the milder tweets accused The Age of both “snobbery” towards the worker, and of blaming him for the outbreak. One that we can print came from ABC News Breakfast host Michael Rowland, who asked: “What are you trying to get at with this story?”. Meanwhile, author and former Age columnist Marieke Hardy sarcastically tweeted: “Fantastic. Great move. Well done Gay.”


After other much less printable messages, Alcorn — in two late-night tweets the same day — finally had enough. She dramatically announced her break-up with Twitter: “(I) am out of here.”


Speaking to Diary on Sunday, Alcorn said her Twitter exit was not an over-reaction, but a response to the fact that the author of the controversial story, Tom Cowie, had received death threats.


People don’t have to like an article,” she tells us. “They can say it was awful or lacked nuance or could have been done better. But the frenzied and increasingly enraged Twitter reaction was totally disproportionate, ending with vile private messages threatening violence against a reporter, threats we take seriously.”


Alcorn says she had tried since becoming The Age’s editor last year to embrace Twitter, and adopted a philosophy that “we must engage with our audiences and think deeply” about criticism.


But in the past few years, Twitter has become so abusive and furious it is all but impossible to have those conversations. The usual response that: ‘It’s only a few people, most Twitter users are great’, no longer feels true.


People have told me that they wanted to respond to the fury but were too nervous to do so for fear of being abused themselves.”


Alcorn is now turning to “ways to speak with our readers and subscribers” that don’t involve Twitter.


They won’t always be comfortable conversations, but hopefully they won’t end with death threats,” she says.


As of 4:51pm on Monday 8 February – four days after the reaction to Cowrie’s article began – the newspaper's Twitter account was still active.



Quite frankly, given the misstatements of fact in the latter two articles and the tenor of the original story it is hard to call The Age editor’s decision to promote the original article in the manner she did on Twitter. Neither were done in the best of taste as the man involved had done nothing to deserve ridicule.


As for the Herald Sun and The Australian – I have to wonder if before they went to print with this story the newspapers even checked whether these alleged death threats and “vile private messages threatening violence” were reported to the police.


A verified complaint made to police would give readers some confidence that parts of these two articles were indeed truthful.


Tuesday 9 June 2020

This Is Not Journalism or How A 165 Year Old Australian Masthead Finally Lost Its Good Name


The Age newspaper has been read in Melbourne since October 1854.

Over the years it grew in circulation until it was read across the state of Victoria and elsewhere in Australia.

It has survived the vagaries of the print newspaper business, until the Fairfax-Nine Entertainment merger when it became part of a media group whose chairman was a former Liberal MP and onetime Australian federal treasurer Peter Costello and its CEO began courting the Liberal Party by hosting a $10,000 dollar a head party fundraiser at its headquarters in 2019 raising at least $700,000 for the party.

It is no secret that the current Federal Liberal-Nationals Coalition Government dislikes the Victorian Labor Government and is out to criticize and undermine it at every opportunity.

So when this front page headline appeared in The Age on 5 June 2020, "Activists 'planning trouble' at protest: Exclusive", under the bylines of the newspaper's State Political Editor and a general news journalist, it came as no surprise.

The opening paragraphs ran thus:

Activists have threatened police with spitting, inflammatory chanting and other forms of physical abuse during tomorrow's "Black Lives Matter" protest in Melbourne in an attempt to provoke use-of-force responses from officers. 

A senior government source told The Age police were preparing for tactics from some protesters tomorrow designed to provoke physical confrontation and produce images of police brutality. [my yellow highlighting]

The newspaper amplified this message on social media:



The online copy of the original article in question has since been removed. With the current online article now having a different headline and and text much altered from the original.

The apology issued by The Age and published on 6 June on the second page of the print newspaper, contains a meas culpa for its lapse in "editorial standards and values". However, this creates another issue surrounding these values.

It completely omitted mention of the "senior government source". Instead the apology states "one unnamed source".

The Age, 6 June 2020, p.2:

Apology 

On June 5, The Age published a story headlined: "Activists 'planning trouble' at Protest". 


This story reported concerns within the Victorian government about the potential for physical confrontation during planned protests. 

The story fell short of The Age's editorial values and standards and caused understandable offence to many members of the community. 

The claim that activists had threatened police with spitting and abuse was not backed up beyond one unnamed source

The story put undue emphasis on these claims. The main organisers of the rally, the Warriors of the Aboriginal Resistance, clearly stated that they had no knowledge of any threats to police. The Age apologises. [my yellow highlighting]

It certainly differed from the "clarification" displayed under the current online article posted at 11:45pm the night before:



One has to wonder if, between the publication of that original inflammatory article and the final print apology, management began to hedge its bets because the "source" cited appeared highly suspect and may not have been a source in government or even close to government and that there was a possibility that The Age's journalists had been played.

Tuesday 11 February 2014

Talk about un-Australian!


Putting the heat on

It is not just the ABC that needs to have a long hard look at its inherent anti-government bias. Recently, another taxpayer-funded agency, also with a three-letter acronym, has been guilty of politically motivated bias. You can tell just by its name that "the BOM" (the Bureau of Meteorology) is a doubtful organisation with anti-establishment tendencies. Its preoccupation with storms and freak weather events is unbalanced. For example, how often do you hear talk of "an unusually pleasant string of Sunday afternoons"? This may well have happened, but oh no, you won't see that on the BOM website.

The BOM finally went too far this January. Allegedly the temperature in Melbourne was 41, 42, 44, and 45 degrees on four consecutive days. This is so biased it is laughable. For example, in my airconditioned living room it was under 30 the whole time, until the power failed, and even then it only reached 39 degrees. It is time the BOM was broken up and privatised, so instead of just one narrow view that serves only the anti-economic interests of greens and other looney-tunes, mainstream voices can be heard. We need choice, not depressing and frankly un-Australian weather "facts".

Paul Johnson, Clifton Hill

Source: The Age, 10/2/14

Monday 19 August 2013

Leaders Debate 11 August 2013: Did Fairfax media massage the facts with not one but two dodgy montages?


Here are two photographs attributed to Andrew Meares and published by Fairfax media outlets which purport to show Opposition Leader Tony Abbott discovering  that Australian Prime Minister Rudd had notes on his lectern at the National Press Club on 11 August 2013.



Here is a third photograph of Rudd and Abbott shaking hands on the night.


Who else is somewhat suspicious of the similarities in Abbott’s posture and his position on the stage in all three images.

Could it possibly be that the first two photographs are in fact montages created for dramatic effect?

Sunday 15 January 2012

Wednesday 22 October 2008

Finding a place for right-wing think tanks

Are you sick and tired of reading or hearing what seems like an endless stream of drivel from right-wing think tanks, especially the one that parades under the banner of the Institute of Public Affairs?

Well, you're not Pat Malone!

A correspondent in the letters section of The Age who, it would seem, has also had a gutful of the IPA has come up with a solution that would relieve readers of the tediously repetitive and sickening task of reading the IPA's regurgitated rubbish in The Age.

Hopefully, other Australian newspapers will recognise the merit in the reader's suggestion and implement it pronto.

Leaping ahead

HERE'S a plan to keep readers of The Age up to date on all the big issues. On social issues, a weekly column by Tim Costello would be great. On the environment, a weekly column by Tim Flannery might give us some hope for our future.

On the economic meltdown, an article by the Institute of Public Affairs every second February 29 should be more than sufficient.

Peter Bainbridge, Maiden Gully