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Author Archives: Michael Tanner
Tamed Estate: Facebook 1, Australian government 0 but no mainstream media mastheads ran that line
And the miserly $3.57 a day rise in JobSeeker was ‘fair and affordable’, ‘pragmatic’, and ‘fiscally responsible’. The mainstream media tripped over themselves to support the government’s line in the face of widespread condemnation from eminent economists that the huge … Continue reading
Posted in Media, Tamed Estate
3 Comments
Tamed estate: the PM has to ask his wife how to feel empathy yet Labor is on the hook?
Gladys’ cheerleader in chief at the Sydney Morning Herald finally comes out swinging – at the NSW Opposition Leader. And editorials from The Australian get oh-so-close to touching on the failures of the federal government in aged care and vaccine rollout.
Tamed Estate: IR reforms ‘dangerous’, ‘extreme’ but let’s go with Christian Porter’s description – ‘modest’
When tabling the omnibus Industrial Relations bill in early December, Christian Porter described the changes as “modest”. The mainstream media duly followed suit and in no time at all had even dropped the quotation marks.
Own goal: IPA report a ringing endorsement that Coalition policies have failed
The Institute of Public Affairs has scored an epic “own-goal” by calling out the slide in quality of life. A new report by the Liberal Party think tank identifies the drop in home ownership, high incarceration rates, the low level … Continue reading
Posted in Public Policy
6 Comments
Tamed Estate: confected outrage all in a day’s work for News
A lesson in skewing the conversation; Morrison’s gloss wearing thin?; promoting US election conspiracy theories; and kid-glove treatment for Gladys.
Tamed estate: hurrah for double standards in corporate world
Sycophancy from Joe Hockey; double standards in the corporate world; one-sided coverage of the plan to force Google and Facebook to pay for news content; quarantine confusion, again… Mainstream media serves up the usual.
Posted in Tamed Estate
8 Comments
Tamed Estate: copying and pasting government drops?
Spruiking the Coalition’s 2020 tax cuts; Australians’ ‘$200 billion’ war chest; Google’s experiments; free speech; and even a Liberal Party self-congratulatory piece on the NBN.
Tamed Estate: The ALP – the Australian Liberal-lite Party
When Labor leader Anthony Albanese dumped his party’s franking credits policy, the mainstream media duly trotted out the “retiree tax” line. “Subsidies to wealthy superannuants to continue” doesn’t have quite the same ring.
Tamed Estate: youth excoriated for their behaviour, not so senior citizens
On the journey of Covid-19 and “enemies of the state”, hotel quarantine, sycophancy, the vaccine, MPs’report cards, and Reds under the … somewhere.
Posted in Tamed Estate
2 Comments
Tamed Estate: IR changes good for workers. Really? The fine print is buried.
With workplace reform winging its way towards the Senate, the mainstream media’s coverage of the changes was predictably unbalanced.
Tamed estate: War crimes and China tweets
The biggest story in town? That all depends – it might be the Brereton Report on the killing of Afghan children by Australian soldiers. Then again, it might be a China tweet.
Tamed Estate: stop the presses; the Prime Minister took a barre class!
No holds barred? Kid-glove treatment for the Prime Minister, climate change denial, Murdoch media appears desperate and breaches of hotel quarantine.
Tamed estate: “And on the second day, he said: ‘Let it be forgotten,’ and it was.”
The federal Coalition’s PR team clearly forgot the Streisand effect: the phenomenon whereby attempts to suppress information lead to far greater exposure than the information would have generated intrinsically.
Tamed estate: Australian media conservatives applaud Trump’s ‘victory’
Two former Australian prime ministers have joined forces to speak out against the power of Rupert Murdoch’s media empire, calling for a royal commission. But why do they have so much power anyway, when they get it so spectacularly wrong, … Continue reading
Premier kept his side of the bargain but the media didn’t want to know
An easing of restrictions in Victoria was predicated on two criteria: a rolling 14-day average of fewer than five cases per day; and fewer than five mystery cases over the preceding two weeks.
Posted in Media, Politics, Tamed Estate
9 Comments
Tamed estate: ‘no holes in Gladys’ story’ … give or take 152 moments of amnesia
The Premier then went on 2GB to discuss with shock jock Kyle Sandilands her relationship. Not a sentence I thought I would ever write. This one doesn’t really require further elaboration.
Posted in Media, Politics, Tamed Estate
2 Comments
Megaphone Madness: how reckless media impeded Victoria’s Covid-19 recovery
The media we consume influences our compliance with Covid-19 recommendations. Poor media coverage in Victoria is impeding the state’s recovery.
Posted in Media, Politics
4 Comments