Victoria Rollison's Blog, page 25
December 29, 2012
Living on Bullshit Mountain
When you’re having a debate with someone and they start to abandon facts, you can almost guarantee you’re right. Or if they respond to your evidence with a personal insult, you can also be fairly assured that you are, in fact, correct. This is never more so than in political debate. It seems that the [...]
December 21, 2012
Why the Left love Twitter
On December 14, this article by Peter Hartcher was on the front page of the Sydney Morning Herald newspaper. The article is a lazy effort. Hartcher begins with the conclusion from Sentia Media that: “Twitter users lean to the political left and talkback radio callers to the right, but both form part of the mainstream [...]
December 14, 2012
When did Watergate come off the front page?
The Watergate scandal was, apparently, rather big news at the time. People went to prison, the President of the USA was forced to resign and investigative reporters, Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein became household names. Nixon’s Republican party came undone through a conspiracy to find dirt on their rivals in the Democratic Party. Dirt that [...]
When the going gets tough
Purely by a freak of timing, of course, the SMH today published an opinion piece by Danae Bosler called ‘Labor abandoned me, so I quit’. I think a better title for it would have been ‘When the going got tough, I gave up’. My political ideology is simple. I have always done my best to [...]
December 7, 2012
Doomed by the market
This morning I woke up to the news that 2DayFM prank phone call victim, Jacintha Saldanha, has committed suicide. The nurse was obviously so humiliated (and possibly scared of losing her job) because of the actions of the radio presenters, Mel Greig and Michael Christian, that she took her own life. This is an awful [...]
November 22, 2012
Questions to Answer
I like to use the intensity of the The Australian’s smear campaign against our Prime Minister as a yard stick for how successful she is. When she became the first female Prime Minister of this country, there’s no doubt she ruffled some conservative feathers. When she formed a minority government by negotiating with the Independents, [...]
Is there life after neoliberalism?
You might have recently read my mum’s guest post about Hugh Stretton’s book – Australia Fair. That post received some great feedback. Here is the follow up post: Is there life after neoliberalism? Yes there can be, says Hugh Stretton in his unfairly neglected book, Australia Fair (UNSW Press, 2005). I recently wrote about the general [...]
November 14, 2012
@LatikaMBourke’s Epic Social Media #Fail
Two of my recent posts – Outrage Brigade and Screening out facts – have focused on the failure of our mainstream press to understand and embrace the opportunities that social media presents. One of the journalists I mentioned in this analysis was the ABC’s Latika Bourke; I noted her propensity for ‘blocking’ Twitter followers. For [...]
November 9, 2012
Screening out facts?
Can the mainstream press fix their online business model? I have a lot of respect for Mark Colvin. He nailed it in the Andrew Olle lecture last week when he said the mainstream media is facing three major crises: authority, credibility and finance. I agree with Colvin that the mainstream press have bungled their business [...]
Australia Fair, by Hugh Stretton
This is another guest post by my mum, Kay Rollison. Mum writes a book blog and this review of Hugh Stretton’s book, Australia Fair, is a great edition to my blog. You can find more book reviews at What Book to Read (www.whatbooktoread.com). This book came out in 2005, and as far as I can [...]
