It has been an interesting couple of weeks in the media industry. Firstly the Kim Beazley hunt (and no I don’t care for either side of politics) . What interests me is how much power these companies now have. Kim mixed up a couple of names and the earth fell in, I mean really, who cares if he slips up a name or two, I would rather him do that than important things that effect the lives of every Australian!
Then some ‘political reporter’ pushed another ‘reporter’ off stage in some sort of drunken stupidity and blamed it on ‘medication’ and alcohol. Hmm, it seems like a good excuse, getting drunk is a progressive thing (from experience)
What interests me about the above two cases is how ordinary and how powerful our media industry has become. With Kim, they basically hung him out to dry over mixing up a name which caused a leadership ballot, of which I care even less about than the slip up!
With the Pudgy Drunk reporter all media outlets carried feature stories on his outburst…….of all but News Limited, as their websites featured nothing during the first few days and now we see only pathetic excuses. Yes I checked all of their websites and there was nothing written, it does make me laugh, especially when today he rolled out the ‘Journalists Code of Ethics’ in today’s Sunday Telegraph.
Code of Ethics? Hmmmm, does that include sources close to the couple? A friend? An Insider?
My point is that competition is so crucial to the information we receive, uncontrolled power gives companies that ability to charge what they like a decide what information we receive and in turn for most of the population forge opinions of people and companies.
The Internet really is our only saviour with information these days. A great example is the mix of information we can source to form our own opinions, sites that bring this information together such as news.google.com are fantastic.
I get scared when new media ownership laws are introduced and a big media company says its ‘fair’, to me that means they are rubbing their hands together with glee!
Diversity of opinion is the key!
2 Comments
John Taylor
Nice article – um, will the ACCC look into realestate.com.au if they decided to but Fairfax domain.com.au?
Peter
I actually has someone ask me this question the other day and I came back with a really good answer, which I cannot remember right now.
In a nutshell ‘maybe’ is the best I could say, but the Internet is a different beast. There are opportunities for many real estate portals in Australia, particularly in regional area or in property type specific areas.
Buying domain would be the most unlikely scenario for realestate.com.au, however they probably would purchase any other site that grew into prominence such as realmap (only an example), they would do this just to protect themselves more than anything else, whic would be understandable.