Next, rabbits will be funding myxo

Readers will perhaps forgive the Professor for going on at the length of quite a few recent posts about Arts Victoria and the money it is lavishing on people and institutions a reasonable soul might regard as antithetical to the priorities and philosophy of a conservative state government.

Well here is just one more entry in the list of aid and comforts bestowed upon the enemy:

Melbourne Writers Festival, MELBOURNE $259,000
Melbourne Writers Festival is Melbourne's annual two-week event for writers, readers and thinkers. The Festival engages over 350 international, national and local writers at over 300 events each year.

And here is the MWF's 2013 guest list:

Gay Alcorn, Cathy Alexander, Dennis Altman, Wendy Bacon, The Bedroom Philosopher, Eric Beecher, Larissa Behrendt, Sophie Black, Julian Burnside, Jennifer Byrne, Fiona Capp, Jane Caro, Michael Cathcart, Alison Croggon, Mary Crooks, Sushi Das, Catherine Deveny, Anne Deveson, Charles Firth, Morag Fraser, Anna Goldsworthy, Jonathan Green, Libbi Gorr, Wendy Harmer, Joan Kirner, Ramona Koval, Mark Latham, Benjamin Law, Antony Loewenstein, Amanda Lohrey, Miriam Lyons, Father Bob Maguire, Anne Manne, David McKnight, Peter McPhee, George Megalogenis, Tony Moore, Terry Moran, Denis Muller, Ben Pobje, Henry Reynolds, Peter Rose, Julianne Schultz, Margaret Simons, Peter Singer, Tim Soutphommasane, Jeff Sparrow, Fiona Stanley, Anne Summers, Magda Szubanski, Arnold Zable.

Go through the list. Every single one of those names is a lefty, most moving from one publicly funded trough to the next and calling that a career.

Who is handing this money out? How much is going to mates? What steps has Premier Napthine taken to reform arts funding in the Garden State?

If Napthine won't act, why should he expect decent people to vote for him in 2014?

Tame Ted's Guest List

THE upcoming Melbourne Writers Festival grows more thrilling by the day. Much more than a corroboree for pinata-whackers, self-hating Jews and mates-taking-care-of-mates, it will also provide a forum to discuss the latest trends in quality journalism. Amongst the guests, footsore climate jogger and essence of impartiality Melissa Fyfe, who will be sharing the stage with aurally gifted and university-certified public intellectual Tim Dunlop.

But wait, that's not all!

On one particular panel of inky festibators, along with Fyfe and Dunlop, audiences will find noted expert on matters media Sue Roff, whose credentials are exquisite (emphasis added at the Billabong):

Sue Roff is the Executive Director at Arts Project Australia, a centre of excellence that supports artists with intellectual disability by promoting their work and advocating for inclusion within contemporary art practice. She has an extensive career in arts management, sponsorship, fundraising, partnering and volunteering.

The MWF is always a lot of fun, but this year's conclave promises to exceed all previous efforts at selective inclusiveness. From red to green, the guest list covers all the acceptable colours in Tame Ted Baillieu's paintbox of public funding.

Victorians attending the festival should be very pleased. Victorians underwriting the events with their tax dollars and speeding fines perhaps less so.

Write Left, Left Write: The MWF's Marching Band

MANY VISITORS to this little blog, perhaps most, will already have read this week's edition of Gerard Henderson's Media Watch Dog, but tardy souls should get over there chop-chop, Victorians in particular. As Henderson notes in his lead item, the Melbourne Writers Festival is upon us once again and this year's guests make a choice lot. Here is the gabblers' chorus:

Louise Adler, Gay Alcorn, Waleed Aly, Tim Costello, Sophie Cunningham, Robert Dessaix, Tim Dunlop, Tim Flannery, Raymond Gaita, Jonathan Green, Germaine Greer, Rodney Hall, Marieke Hardy, Jenny Hocking, Tom Keneally, Marilyn Lake, David Marr, Maxine McKew, Ross McMullin, George Megalogenis, Tony Moore, Ben Pobjie, Henry Rosenbloom, John Ralston Saul, Margaret Simons, Jeff Sparrow, Laura Tingle, Don Watson, Margaret Wertheim, Arnold Zable.

The Age, a sponsor of the gathering, has a programme in today's paper, which means few Melbournians will have seen it -- certainly none outside the St Kilda-Northcote-Yarraville triangle, where remaining Age readers would not need to consult the festival's agenda in any case. If The Age is backing something -- and that does not mean putting FXJ's stock price into reverse -- residents of those precious pockets will know for a certainty that they need not fear being confronted by ideas from outside the collective comfort zone. But for others, people whose taxes Ted the Twerp insists on pouring into gatherings of those who believe Liberals are the spawn of Satan, a little background might be in order.

It is worth noting, for example, that many of the locally recruited participants move in the same small sphere, much as spawning fish swim in parallel and shower each other with sperm. Consider all the links in the following daisy chain. The names of those invited to share their wisdom with MWF audiences are in bold:

Louise Adler, publisher at Melbourne University Press and promoter of quality literature by, er, noted scholar and criminal Mick Gatto, hired as her deputy Sally Heath, who is married to Radio National's Jonathan Green, who in 2007 hosted a party at which former MUP employee and ex-Meanjin editix Sophie Cunningham joined others in whacking a John Howard pinata. Cunningham, by the way, has just been installed atop the Australia Council's Literature Board, so all her mates should reduce carbon emissions and save on postage by simply handing her their grant applications at the festivals opening cocktail party. Green is cobbers with fellow Radio National chatterbox Waleed Aly, generally regarded by ABC types and Q&A bookers as your go-to tame Muslim, even though he keeps his little woman covered up when she is outside the home and open to the gaze of hair-besotted infidels. Wally wrote for the Drum when Green was the editor and another festibator, Tim Dunlop, still does. Endlessly -- though his work is seldom seen anywhere else. Then there is Overland's editorial tyro, Geoff Sparrow, whose co-authored book Adler has just published, along with Sunday Age titanide Gay Alcorn, who worked with Heath at Fairfax and, although nothing more need be said, is also Margo Kingston's half-sister. Just for good measure, the festival's spear carriers include the Parkville Asylum's most advanced journalist Margaret Simons, who wrote for Green at Crikey, plus down-in-the-dumps Drum boy Ben Pobjie and fellow rib-tickler Marieke Hardy, who did so much on Green's watch to lift tone, eloquence and accuracy at the Drum.

Do you get the impression that, if being a lockstep luvvie was an offence, all of the bold types above would go down for consorting?

To make the local participants feel special, and to give them some hard-bound international names to drop at the next Westgarth dinner party, the organisers have filled out the bill with a spin-the-Rolodex list of have-doom-will-travel scolds and wowsers, starting with Germaine Greer (who also catches Henderson's attention), the only person known to have been willingly exposed to the Tourette's virus.

Ted Baillieu will continue to fund all this, of course, because he would not want to be mistaken for one of those nasty conservatives who believe that, if taxpayers must pay for literary festivals, those conclaves should at least represent a slightly broader range of views and backgrounds than found at the annual Drum vs. Crikey picnic cricket match.. Not our Tame Ted, never him. All the same, simple decency demands that he be warned.

Mr Premier, if you notice the intermission biscuits are just a bit, er, soggy, put them back on the plate and find a serviette.   

Blowing A Jay

SURELY there are others of a certain age who recall the days when Australia was the last resort of the desperate, especially the stars who toured because they were no longer quite so lustrous anywhere else. Tony Hancock, Lennie Bruce, Judy Garland – they came here to snaffle quick cash from easily awed provincials and, by way of bonus encores, committed suicide, were arrested or followed the yellow brick road on all fours.

We generally get a healthier sort of celebrity visitor these days, but the rapturous receptions accorded those of dubious worth are still with us, as the schlock and awe that welcomed New York University’s Jay Rosen to our shores so recently demonstrated. Feted, inflated and fellated, the few days he spent in the company of adoring antipodean admirers must have done wonders for the media maven’s ego, which one gathers was no small thing to begin with. With so much gushing and fawning going on, there must have been no time for his groupies to consider what the journalism professor actually says and what he represents.

Start with this quote from his address, Why Political Coverage Is Broken, to the Newnews forum, the text faithfully reproduced at The Dumb:

As my friend Todd Gitlin once wrote, news coverage that treats politics as an insiders' game invites the public to become "cognoscenti of their own bamboozlement," which is strange.

Strange indeed, yes it is -- and not just for the quoted Gitlin’s wankerous turn of phrase, but for the source himself. Remember, Rosen was rabbiting on about journalists’ compulsion to see themselves as political insiders, rather than objective observers and independent critics. And then he cites his cobber Gitlin, another J-school academic, who represents the very worst of the insider inclinations Rosen claims to find so distressing.

Briefly, Gitlin was a leading light in something called JournOlist, a closed-shop listserve and online discussion group consisting entirely of left-leaning reporters and editors who, quietly and out of public view, co-ordinated their slant and coverage on the vital issues of the day, the chief of these being to elevate a community organizer to the White House and impugn their favoured candidate’s foes. Here is how Rosen’s paragon of independent, outside thought described that campaign to JournOlist's fellow members:

On the question of liberals coordinating, what the hell’s wrong with some critical mass of liberal bloggers & journalists saying the following among themselves:

McCain lies about his maverick status. Routinely, cavalierly, cynically. Palin lies about her maverick status. Ditto, ditto, ditto. McCain has a wretched temperament. McCain is a warmonger. Palin belongs to a crackpot church and feels warmly about a crackpot party that trashes America.

Repeat after me:

McCain lies about his maverick status. Routinely, cavalierly, cynically. Palin lies about her maverick status. Ditto, ditto, ditto. McCain has a wretched temperament. McCain is a warmonger. Palin belongs to a crackpot church and feels warmly about a crackpot party that trashes America.

These people are cynical. These people are taking you for a ride. These people are fakes. These people love Bush.

Again. And again. Vary the details. There are plenty. Somebody on the ‘list posted a strong list of McCain lies earlier today. Hammer it. Philosophize, as Nietzsche said, with a hammer.
I don’t know about any of you, but I’m not waiting for any coordination. Get on with it!

Hot Air has more, much more (follow the links to Daily Caller), not only about Gitlin, but also of the sustained, covert buzz to get the press gang banging on in unison about, amongst other things, Sarah Palin’s uterus.

Gitlin teaches at Columbia University, so rather than tar Rosen’s NYU with a presumptive brush, fairness demanded a little checking to see if standards of ethics and scholarship are as poor at his own institution. A little googling turned up a list of the faculty stars, and a further search on a name selected at almost at random*,  “Professor Pamela Newkirk”, produced the information that she has penned several well received books. One of them “Within The Veil:  Black Journalists, White Media”, which can be examined online via googlebooks.

By page 2 of Newkirk’s introduction it was apparent that things are even worse at NYU than at Columbia. Good Lord, a journalism professor who not only believes Hitler spelled his first name with a “ph” but apparently lacks any proof-reading colleagues sufficiently savvy to notice the error.

So things have not changed so much in Australia. The touring has-beens, never-weres and second-raters keep turning up, and our very own fourth- and fifth-raters still cannot tell the difference between cant and quality.

* Newkirk seemed an appropriate choice to investigate. The surname means “new church”,  and Rosen is very much one of the leading, self-anointed high priests in academic journalism’s debased temple.  


UPDATE: Did you miss the chance to rub up against Jay Rosen? Not to worry, here's a sample of what you missed.

It costs American parents about $40,000 a year to have this wisdom imparted to their kiddies at NYU. 


(HT: The holidaying Tim Blair for sending the video link)