Friday, March 16, 2012
More Degrees Than A Thermometer
MARGARET SIMONS, hoax enabler, Crikey! correspondent and journalism professor at the Parkville Asylum, is compiling a list of leading media figures with journalism degrees, presumably in an effort to dispel any impression that media types with tertiary credentials are more likely to see false stories planted in conservative magazines, publish on no-account websites or pocket nice salaries for training youngsters to enter an industry that will hire very, very few of them.
This should be interesting. What's the bet Lin Buckfield, Media Watch's Madame Arrogance, will be amongst the anointed?
Prof, I've said this before but Melanie Phillips' "baffling incoherence of the West..."[paraphrased]
ReplyDeleteand Martin Amis' "stupified by relativism" did more for me than anything else I've read this last ten years.
The grand winner in intellectual bankruptcies might be the expression "openly gay".
"As if" some "public figure" could be openly gay?
It is among the most facile and dystopian of comments available to mankind.
Notice Prof that each and every act of Gayness of these openly Gay people is conducted entirely behind closed doors. It is a hypnotic delusion that is being propagated; that gayness involves being "just like" everyone else.
Prof insanity is a collective noun in a rhetorical sense rather than a grammatical one.
"Conservatives" [cough cough] like Andrew Bolt are like Gay people who do nothing but collect Kylie Minogue and fixate on their Village People appearances. It isn't what meets the eye that counts. It is something deeper than that which Dystopians just won't admit to. I'm perfectly happy for Andrew Bolt to call himself whatever he wants to, heterosexual, happily married and average work just fine. But conservative? No that shoe doesn't fit.
Now Prof, what is this honesty we are all aiming for?
All the best with making these "journalists" pay up with some honesty. It might be like getting one more breath out of David Carradine and Michael Hutchence.
cheers
I'll see your two coughs and raise you five chokes. But to be fair, Mr Bolt has recently taken to denying that he is a Right-Winger. A bit mealy-mouthed perhaps - as if he's not quite built up enough courage to take that final fatal step, out of the closet, into fully fledged liberalism.
DeleteJournalism used to be a profession where those who were accepted as cadets to be trained by the media that hired them, would actually learn to write stuff up that had a basis in fact without any personal bias. No one needs a diploma to become a REAL journalist if they have a natural talent for writing and are honest enough to present a factual account of their investigations. Of course not all journalists were what one may consider to be honest people, however, they were very much in the minority back then when REAL journalists strode the stage. They were also actively cognizant of their responsibility for reporting facts and not the fiction that we so often get to read about today!
ReplyDeleteHaving announced her hatred of Australia's biggest media company as part of a campaign that is destroying journalism's ethics of fairness and impartiality, Simons will now demonstrate why no parent should put an aspiring journalist anywhere near the poisonous bilge she is propagating as the 2012 version of the 1970s zombie fashion they called "new journalism", which encouraged subjectivity and opinionisation. Her academic empire-building and advocacy of government monitoring of news media are pure evil.
ReplyDeleteThe greatest benefit from the Finkelstein Inquiry (and its disgraceful, poorly reasoned, badly constructed, J-School-dictated report) is the spotlight now being played upon the role such academics and their schools have played in the attack on freedom of the press, typified by this report. I have been only one among many people to see that we would become a world laughing stock through this and the penny seems to have dropped on the report’s facilitators, boosters /authors.
ReplyDeleteWhen Rodney Tiffen heard that Naomi Wolf had called it “step one to fascism", certain J-School backsides started sucking air I presume. At least international writers clearly see it for what it is.
http://www.smh.com.au/opinion/politics/finkelstein-gets-a-bad-press-20120313-1uyac.html.
Now Margaret Simons and others seem to be desperately trying to put the toothpaste back in the tube, even to the extent of one Mark Pearson saying that he suspects it was actually all a (harmless) ruse to get a strengthened APC! So much for academic integrity in J-Schools!!
Is the Simons ‘journalists with our degrees’ list some attempt to spread the responsibility across a broader range of ‘graduates’ – many being mature-age, working students notwithstanding – or is it a distancing exercise? No matter. J-Schools are the ones to fear the justified backlash and this is all to the good for “Journalism”.
M Ryutin Sydney
Tweet, tweet, all you noisy academic birdies, just wait till some restless pouncing cat breaks your stranglehold on your meal deal and pushes you out of that comfy funded nest. Inane tweeting (she tweets, she tweets, she must be so cool) and fabricated employment lists amounting to zilch (Yes, of course occasional pieces in the Weekly Bog qualify you; and you photocopy too? Excellent. We'll add your name) - this is bantamweight stuff. Typical leftie grooming behaviour, a bad influence on young minds.
ReplyDeleteWhen they do dredge up actual practicing journalists, then no surprise, they produce all the usual Fairfax and ABC suspects.
There ought to be just over three and a half hundred on that list.
ReplyDeleteIf 360 degrees ain't the personification of the journalistic academics, I don't know what is.
Whilst on Margaret Simons…. The release of the Inquiry report into the Wivenhoe dam ‘scandal’ (I think we can call it that) puts into lights (again) Margaret Simons and the obsession of Simons and Ricketson with the Simon Overland case. The journalist who exposed the Wivenhoe misdeeds, Hedley Thomas, seems to be on the outer with certain J School academics (Simons and Ricketson) due to his persistent reporting on Overland and the Victorian Office of Police Integrity .When I say ‘outer’ I mean that no credit seems to be given to his (recognised) excellence in investigative journalism in the Haneef case nor his work in this Wivenhoe dam scandal and that no such thing as a ‘benefit of the doubt’ is extended to the possible good faith motives of Thomas in the light of his well-recognised work on the other two matters.
ReplyDeleteThe Wivenhoe dam matter was dismissed in the Finkelstein Inquiry report by adopting – in total - the words of former APC chair Professor McKinnon where he dismissed Wivenhoe work of Thomas as “obsessive attempts to influence policy by day-after-day repetition with little or no new information of news value”.
Could it be possible that due to the Hedley Thomas involvement in the Overland matter that Haneef and Wivenhoe could be mistakenly devalued by these esteemed academics? And if this is not the case and Overland was looked at dispassionately by Finkelstein and his advisers, why was the demise of Overland wrongfully categorised, as shown by Jonathan Holmes himself! What do such considerations mean to examinations of the merits of our J School academics or to the work they hand out to their media students? Are there any lessons to be learnt from this? Heaven forbid that possible bypassing/ignoring the Hedley Thomas fine investigative journalism means that his work isn’t properly taught in our universities.
M Ryutin Sydney
Looking at the surnames that repeat themselves from generation to generation, I've always thought that the best way to become a journalist was to be born the son or daughter of a journalist!
ReplyDeleteTrust no fox on its heath, and no journalist at all.
ReplyDelete