However, provided I’m not writing stuff that is related to business technology (i.e. no filter, no NBN, no Conroy, no iPads), it should be fine for me to keep this going. So I intend to begin tracking the upcoming Australian Federal election, and other random things that are not at all related to my day job.

LIZ HAYES: Homosexuality? How do you feel about that?

TONY ABBOTT: I’d probably I feel a bit threatened…

LIZ HAYES: I’m not asking if it’s a personal choice of yours.

TONY ABBOTT: ..as so many people.

LIZ HAYES: When you say ‘threatened’?

TONY ABBOTT: Again, Liz, look, it’s a fact of life and I try to treat people as people and not put them in pigeonholes.

It was a strange choice of words. It’s not clear whether he went further into what he meant, whether he was threatened by gay issues as the alternative leader of the country given his well-known views or whether this was simply a “backs against the walls, fellas” response to homosexuality in general from the Mad Monk.

He was asked about those comments on Lateline last night:

LEIGH SALES: On the 60 Minutes program last night Liz Hayes asked you how you felt about homosexuality and you said you’d probably feel a bit threatened, as so many people do. What did you mean?

TONY ABBOTT: Well, it was a spontaneous answer, but the truth is I try to take people as I find them. I’ve always tried to be that way and I hope as I get older I become better at it.

LEIGH SALES: But, I just – I didn’t understand when I was watching the program what the word “threatened” meant, though. Were you making a joke that you feel threatened that men hit onto you, or that you feel that traditional families are threatened? What was “threatened” referring to?

TONY ABBOTT: Well, there is no doubt that it challenges, if you like, orthodox notions of the right order of things, but as I also said on the program, it happens, it’s a fact of life and we have to treat people as we find them.

“Orthodox notions of the right order of things”? Being gay isn’t like getting an ear piercing or a tattoo that your parents disapprove of, Tony.

He seems to now be backpedalling and his wording has become increasingly confusing and obfuscating but it still seems he is at least unsettled by homosexuality.

There’s that old trope that straight men feel threatened by gay guys as though by even being in the same room as a gay guy, we will obviously want to sleep with you, or try to convert you. It’s one of those annoyingly schoolboy homophobic responses one generally encounters when they first come out.

Or there’s Andrew Bolt’s back-handed defense that somehow wearing speedos perpetuating the stereotype of a “predatory gay with foolish and irresponsible displays like those so often seen in the Sydney Gay and Lesbian Mardi Gras” will somehow emasculate all straight men. But gay men are okay, so long as they make music he likes.

Tony, we don’t find you appealling and we certainly don’t want to convert you. And the speedos thing? You started it.

And trust me, that sort of frightening imagery is probably doing more to convert homosexual men to the straight and narrow than you could ever dream of.

Oh and we did see the illustrious denier-in-chief Lord Monckton debate climate scientist Tim Lambert with supervision by Alan Jones (gee, that sounds fair). Lambert was calm, well reasoned and performed well. It’s just a pity the crowd was full of one world government conspiracy theory nuts.

Climategate Revisited

One of the biggest non-controversy controversies last year was Climategate. This article brings us up to date on exactly how little it actually means and also how those who seek to dismiss climate change as not being influenced by man use ignorance to their advantage in making this case.

The common factor I tend to notice in climate change deniers is that they exhibit the same closed-mindedness they say so-called “warmists” have when presented with evidence that contradicts their own proofs. Despite Monckton’s entire argument being ripped to shreds by so many many different scientists and journalists, he’s still seen by these people as the second coming. And the coverage these people get is way over the top, and yet they still scream they have not been given the time to air their views. The current Doctor Media Watch host Jonathan Holmes covered it best here.

Fruit and Loins

It really disturbs me how much the Australian governments (state and Federal) listen to the Australian Christian Lobby. The ACL’s Jim Wallace was consulted by Stephen Conroy shortly before the release of the findings on the internet filter plan but Conroy also refused to meet with opposing groups. I’m not entirely sure how Wallace’s group can claim to represent anything other than an extreme right-wing fringe of the Christian faith and still claim to represent all Christians.

The Queensland Government addressed the issue of surrogacy for same-sex couples this week, so it was only natural that Wallace have a word. According to the World of Wallace, straight parent environments are the only safe, and stable environment for children to be raised. Pity about all that anecdotal evidence otherwise.

Aco*kalypse Now: Fear of the Gay Penis

The theory that gay men would join the army just on the off-chance of seeing a bit of straight guy penis is absolutely absurd, and borders on a gay panic defense. Here’s a hint guys: chances are, if you’re straight, gay guys don’t find you attractive. And, as the video points out, clearly nothing says “lets have gay sex” like getting shot at in Afghanistan.

CBS: Support for Gays in the Military Depends on the Question

A poll out this week from CBS shows that more people in the US are in favour of “gay men and lesbians” serving in the military than “homosexuals” serving in the military. It’s an interesting case in semantics, though I wish it had been more broad to encompass other reclaimed words like the all-encompassing “queer” or the F word. The pure clinical nature of “homosexual” draws back on 50s style fear campaigns, while gay and lesbian is so desensitised.

Fox News Tea Party Survey Fail

I’m not sure this is totally a fail if they put this as an option in the first place but it’s amusing that the result is even higher after all the attention. Especially considering that they managed to get a slight jab at them removed from a Captain America comic.

As the first Australian internet meme of 2010, this really showed just how far we’ve come with these sorts of viral videos. This ill-fated Channel 7 cross to Macquarie Bank’s finance studio aired at 2:30pm, shortly after the Australian Reserve Bank had decided to keep interest rates on hold. Within a matter of an hour (if that) someone had caught frames of it, spread it via Twitter and the blogosphere and there was a poor quality video up on YouTube shortly after.

And showing how much more clued in TV news and mainstream media outlets are, both the 7PM Project and A Current Affair reveled in the schadenfreude of the clip on their shows that evening. By the next day radio and the papers had caught up. discussing whether or not this was acceptable behaviour, and in one case, highlighting that the photos (Miranda Kerr from her GQ shoot, I imagine they both love the publicity) were aimed squarely at bankers. And it also went international.

As “Dave the Banker” is keeping his job, this meme will be dead next week. As far as Australian memes go, given the previous top two were Corey Worthington and the Chk-Chk Boom girl, you’ve come a long way baby.

National Party Counting

Ahh Barnaby “Barnyard” Joyce. The accountant turned politician who pretends to be a farmer who pretends to be a Shadow Finance Minister. Oh wait, he actually is. One of the more lulz worthy appointments in the Tony Abbott shadow cabinet (and there were a few) was  Joyce to the portfolio of Shadow Finance.

This clip of the shadow minister at the National Press Club this week shows either a failed attempt by Joyce to mislead people on basic spending numbers or an incompetant politician who left his abacus at home. You decide.

Happy Birthday, Minister

I have to admit, when Yes, Minister was on the ABC when I was a kid and my parents would watch it, I would beg them to switch to The Simpsons because I didn’t get it. Now, after 30 years, it is clearly one of a growing number of British sitcoms that remain funny no matter how many times you watch it (Blackadder and Fawlty Towers being the top two).

Why Aren’t Conservatives Funny?

Apart from PJ O’Rourke, I struggle to think of any well-known conservative who is funny, so this piece is totally on the money. You only have to look at the sparring match between Bill O’Reilly and Jon Stewart this week to see a perfect example of this. Stewart is intelligent, self-deprecating and goddamn hilarious. On the other hand, O’Reilly tries really hard to be funny and comes off as condescending, bullying and really kinda lame.

PART 1 | PART 2

I’ve been trying to think of comedians who are conservative or conservatives who are funny in Australia and I really can’t think of a single example. Gerard Henderson, Miranda Devine, Andrew Bolt, they’re all just so angry and take themselves too seriously.

On the other hand, on the extremely unfunny left we have Catherine Deveny. Who by all accounts I should like and find but I find her columns like fingernails down a chalkboard as she discusses which bogans she doesn’t like this week.

Sex in the time of GPS

Grindr is one of the more interesting uses of the iPhone and its GPS capabilities. Trust the gays to think of it. I’ve yet to see much of Grindr covered in the press in Australia but I’m thinking it’s only a matter of time before some sort of moral panic comes out about the GPS semi-stalking capabilities, or just the fact that “OMG gays close to us might be having sex!”.

Westboro Baptist Church Protests Outside Twitter

Not much to add to this, I just love the counter-protest signs.

Charlie Brooker – How to Report the News

The boring intros with establishing shot, the awkward cutaways to hide editing flaws, voxpopping and the cliche ending; it’s my Video Journalism class all over again! I’d like to say I’m kidding but this is exactly how they taught us to make news for TV. Don’t go breaking that mould.

Scientists, the IPCC wants you

I find the rabble-rousing on News Limited blogs, in particular Herald Sun’s resident “expert” on the environment, Andrew Bolt’s to be particularly infuriating. My resolution this year is to only visit the site once a week, lest I have a stroke. Thankfully the boys at Pure Poison keep me up to date most of the time. I’ve only ever heard of a couple of people who have felt the wrath of angered Bolt readers (Former Media Watch host David Marr, who received homophobic threats after being “rude” to Bolt on Insiders, and UOW lecturer Jason Wilson, who has a very punchable face, apparently after this piece on Bolt at New Matilda) but reading how Bolt readers treat scientists who Bolt has deemed to be part of the Great Climate Change conspiracy is another thing entirely.

As the man himself so often puts it – What is it with the [Right] and violence?

Bunch of Phonies Mourn J.D. Salinger

I seriously <3 The Onion. And I think even Holden would be pleased with their obit effort. Many have tried to capture Holden’s voice before, but this one is the best I’ve seen in a while and it makes me wonder if The Onion had the obit prepared for a while, in the same morbid fashion TV news programs prepare showreels in advance in case people die (The Richard Wilkins/Jeff Goldblum incident springs to mind).

Research Shows Two Gay Parents Better Than A Single Straight One [well duh]

I’m of two minds about this. There is nothing wrong with single parents, and I don’t think equality should be gained in any way by pointing out that one type of family is better than another (that’s kinda what we should be fighting against, right?) but it is nice to have research to back what people have been saying quite a while: kids adapt to their environment and two gay parents? Not such a bad one.

Multiplexity

Tony Martin is by far my favourite comedian, and I’ve followed his work ever since I first snuck a few laughs at the Bargearse VHS at a friend’s place in Year 7. His column on films and cinema etiquette is Tony in his film geek element.

“‘Still, rather that than fucking Avatar,’ he added, pronouncing the ‘Ava’ to rhyme with ‘raver’, momentarily creating, in my mind, an image of Sam Worthington spending an entire movie operating a virtual Ava Gardner.”

Jon Stewart on Keith Olbermann: You’re just kinda calling people names now

I do so love that as much as Stewart rips apart Fox News in almost every episode (and rightly so), he’s still capable of pointing out when the lefty MSNBC screw up. This is his second swipe at them in two weeks (after last week criticising the lovely Rachel Maddow for her point scoring around Haiti). Comedy Central – more balanced than TWO US news cable channels.

BBC to address portrayal of gays & lesbians

This was interesting to read this week. Following the controversy over BBC posing the question of whether gays & lesbians deserve to be killed re the Uganda “kill the gays” bill, they’ve decided to provide more “positive” portrayals of GLBTI characters on TV. I’m a tad cynical about this and think it’s more about addressing the controversy than actually doing anything but only for the fact that, frankly, the BBC (and British television in general) is already light years ahead in this area. E4 gave us the original Queer As Folk and Skins and BBC has given us Captain Jack in Torchwood to say the least. Not to mention they can never seem to have enough of Stephen Fry. While these sort of token gestures can be heartening, I much prefer less of the hand waving “look at us, we’re showing diversity!” kind of project like this and more of just getting on and actually doing it.

ABC News to go 24/7

Last week ABC announced that they’d be launching a 24 hour news channel probably only comparable to Sky News on Foxtel. There has been so much discussion about what form this will take, on whether it will be a good thing, whether it’s against the ABC Charter, and whether it will be a drain on other ABC resources and ultimately reduce the quality of news provided by the ABC. I’m taking an optimistic wait-and-see approach. It could be a disaster, it could be redundant talking heads and endless repetition, they might give Andrew Bolt a show in the name of “balance” but we could see great new fresh journalism here and (I’m selfishly hoping) plenty of opportunities for new journalists to get into the ABC.

Facebook’s move ain’t about changes in privacy norms

I’m ashamed I didn’t even consider this theory about why Facebook changed their security settings recently with more focus on content being public. Zuckerberg claimed that privacy as we know it was disappearing and people naturally wanted their lives, at least online, to be more public. But this is essentially like much of the argument about paywalling at the moment in journalism, money can be made by information being more free. It’s not worthwhile for Facebook to run private communities where only those privileged enough to be friended by someone else can view their content. Plus the more I think about it, Facebook are much less liable for anything they do with your personal data if more and more of it is in the public domain.

The first entry is all about the darling of the social media circuit: Twitter.

Earlier this year, I said on this blog that I believed that journalists should not be using Twitter as a replacement for vox pops. While I stand by that original assessment, Twitter has really become much more than what I envisioned it to be over the past year. It is less something journalists have a vague curiosity about and more something that many journalists are now participating in. In the past 10 months we’ve seen it play a vital role in the reporting of events such as the Iran election, Michael Jackson’s death, and more locally the dust storm that spread over Sydney. The combination of widespread media coverage, celebrity Tweeters and through the use of hashtags and trending topics, Twitter users are now more aware of how their tweets may be seen and are able to make their tweets easier to find for people following these topics, journalists or not. Tweeters using hashtags are now actively choosing to have this information spread, meaning it has now changed from being a more passive source of information for journalists to one where the journalist is more part of the Twitter community.

We’ve seen mainstream media journalists such as Leigh Sales, Mark Colvin, Annabel Crabb and Caroline Overington all enter the Twitterverse and actively engage with other Twitter users, linking to their content and even tweeting during Question Time. All of whom were present at the Media140 conference on Thursday and at the conference, ABC Managing Director Mark Scott also announced a new set of social media guidelines for all ABC journalists and staff. These guidelines are the first in Australia (that have been published) and make it clear that,  for at least the ABC, it is important to ensure journalists are using social media ethically.

Thankfully, apart from Chris “Five Times” Ulhmann, all of the mainstream media journalists at the conference recognised the value of Twitter as a tool for journalists and none saw it as a fad. All of them believed that the use of Twitter should for sourcing should be treated no differently from how journalists would normally source information, and the same checks must be applied otherwise journalists risk, as Annabel Crabb put it, from having a “Richard Wilkins moment”. Crabb also stated she used Twitter as a means to take notes while sharing the goings-on during Question Time and often pinched the funnier replies she got on Twitter for her column (crediting where possible). Leigh Sales showed us that journalists can be personal and casual on Twitter while still maintaining their brand as a journalist through the simple slogan “if in doubt, leave it out”, meaning anything you hesitate about sharing with your followers, just don’t.

What really stood out is that none of the journalists present had a condescending view of their followers on Twitter. They saw it as a communication tool and a method of collaboration and research. One of the more frequent discussions in social media is whether Twitter will eventually kill and replace Facebook but I think the last few months have shown that both are completely different entities capable of co-existing without tearing a hole in the space-time continuum. Facebook is still much more personal and private means of communication for the vast majority of us (and thus still rather ethically grey for journalists who still trawl Facebook for the digital deathknock) but Twitter is a much more open community for sharing information.

Now that the world gotten over the initial Twitter hype, Twitter still isn’t voxpopping; it’s a conversation everyone is in on.

Much was made of Fielding’s latest gaffe where he criticised Kevin Rudd’s ‘physical’ policy and then corrected himself by spelling  it out as F-I-S-K-A-L. Fielding later came out and attempted to handwave it all by saying he had a learning disability. Naturally this led to the likes of Penbo at The Punch and Miranda Devine claiming it was brutal intellectual elitism at play and bizarrely, for Ms Devine, because Fielding is a climate change “agnostic”.

The Sandilands story barely needs rehashing. Kyle does something Kyle-like, journos listening to everything Kyle says for any sort of controversy, strike for gold and raise the rabble-rousers.  mUmBRELLA did an excellent analysis of where Kyle is now and what his future potentially holds.

The thing that struck me about both these incidents, besides the blatant attention-seeking from both involved, is that the anti-intellectualism audience that the likes of Devine and Penbo play to in defending Fielding, is exactly the sort of people that give 2DAY FM and Kyle Sandilands hit ratings (if not the sponsors).

Jason Whittaker’s  post today nailed it in highlighting the problems of this kind of anti-elitism that is the oh-so-common defence used by conservatives in defending one of their own. And something that seems to be, depressingly, standard fare in politics today. Politicians must be seen to be the everyday man, and intellectualism equated to latte-sipping elitism.

I think the epitomy of my realisation of this was seeing Kevin Rudd’s tweet today about Jarryd Haynes [sic] and the Dally M awards. Kev wouldn’t give a toss about rugby league but there’s that popularist everyday man  back again. I long for the days when we had a Prime Minister who wasn’t afraid to admit his love for the Opera, even if he did have to sit awkwardly through a rugby match or two.

But perhaps in this culture of, let’s face it, appealing to the lowest common denominator (Fielding is good at maths), politicians and the media are creating the kinds of audiences who switch off from the real news and would prefer to listen to a radio shock jock jack off on-air, question a 14 year old girl about her sex life, or make off-colour holocaust jokes. Shouldn’t we praise intelligence and encourage people seeking higher office have qualities far beyond their ability to eat a meat pie and hold some sort of tinny record with their mates?

Encouraging Kyle’s style of radio, as Austereo does, to the tune of constant ratings wins is no different to defending a man who holds a critical vote on legislation in the senate but can’t spell fiscal.

* let’s get Muphry’s Law out of the way and say there’s bound to be at least one spelling error in this article

* I blame too much West Wing for my idealistic view of intelligence and politics going hand in hand at the moment.

Long time reader, first time writer. There’s just been something plaguing my thoughts for quite a while and every day it seems to get worse.

I’m an avid reader of blogs such as Mashable and TechCruch, and I subscribe to them via RSS using Google Reader. It is always a source of amusement seeing Asher Moses, the SMH’s technology reporter, lift stories I read up to four days ago from various tech blogs and report them almost verbatim in his column.

I would consider this rather redundant reporting, and one of my colleagues suggested, and I agreed, that your paper would be much better served if Asher’s column space was converted into an RSS reader (such as Google Reader) subscribed to all the websites Mr Moses lifts his articles from. For starters, it would be much more cost effective for Fairfax in these tough economic times, and your readers would also benefit by not getting news that is usually at least a day old from blogs!

Please let me know if you need assistance in setting this up, and I will more than happily show you how to do it.

It’s a win-win situation!

Sincerely,

Josh.

The most-widely replayed media stuff-up was the reporting that actor Jeff Goldblum had fell to his death while filming in New Zealand.

It’s an old nugget that had been used before but it got a re-run on Twitter and before we knew it, the Today Show’s increasingly leather wallet-looking Richard Wilkins was reporting it as though the NZ police had confirmed it. They didn’t check the facts and it wasn’t until a viewer emailed the show that they dismissed it as a hoax.

Today on The Colbert Report, Jeff Goldblum responds to Wilkins ever-exaggerated reports of his so-called demise.