The politics-media death spiral

No-one, it seems, is happy with how our nation currently does politics and I'm wondering why.Let me focus on two key groups, the politicians and the political media.

These two institutions dominate the creation of the space in which we discuss politics, and whether we are directly influenced by their views or not, we all have to breath the air they exhale.

At the moment they are joined at the nose, staring at each other obsessively, almost oblivious to everything else. They are in a kind of death spiral.
Read the rest from ABC here.

R v Internet - or was it journos v lawyers, and where is the horse?

I was at the R v Internet seminar today. It appears journalists and internet people were outnumbered by legal people and public servants.

It was an interesting forum, with everyone recognising that the Internet makes name suppression of celebrities redundant, and can threaten an accused's right to a fair trial. Some such as Victoria University Professor Tony Smith, considered that many problems were to do with the unregulated blogosphere. Steven Price, himself a blogger, as well as a university lecturer with legal and journalism credentials, was more realistic about what to do when suppression is breached. In short, the genie is out of the bottle, the horse has bolted, and there's nothing you can do. However, judges should direct juries to enable fair trials by advising that information "out there" may not be reliable.

Deputy Law Commissioner Warren Young, in talking about the recent Law Commission report, Suppressing Names and Evidence [PDF] explained how the Commission wants to tighten laws around suppression, particularly those of celebrities. Young did not consider the " horse had bolted", and made an analogy between suppression and shoplifting. Namely the fact that while lots of people know the name of a certain celebrity does not mean that suppression should be done away with just as many people who shoplift does not mean that shoplifting should be decriminalised. Yet there's a distinction: Many people consider that suppression - particularly of celebrities - should not be against the law, whereas most believe shoplifting should be illegal.

Judge David Harvey spoke in the afternoon and livened things up. He thinks the Internet can be regulated, and pointed to China as an example of regulation. But when asked about sites like Facebook and Twitter, he was out of his depth. He doesn't appear to have heard of platforms such as ping.fm where you can simultaneously post an item to Facebook, Twitter, Friendfeed, blogs and other social networking sites. Rather than " the horse has bolted" he appears to think that the horse has briefly wandered out of the stable, and on a leash, but is unsure how long that leash is.

Canterbury University Associate Professor Ursula Cheer was very good on the legal side of suppression and contempt, but admittedly less clear on the tools of the Internet. She emphasised the truth that many legal people are not as clued up on social network programmes as they would like to or need to be, just as some bloggers and social networkers are ignorant of the law surrounding what they can and cannot publish. The former group don't think the horse has bolted - the latter think the horse bolted some time back. Bernard Hickey brought up what I thought was a good suggestion in that the two groups get together informally and discuss some of the issues raised, believing that the legal people and the technically savvy people, including online journalists, were "talking past each other". The question they should work towards agreement on is this: Where is the horse?

David Farrar also spoke. He was the only speaker who was not a journalist or a lawyer. He started off by discussing the prominent entertainer whose name was suppressed, and how he has seen the name on TradeMe, Yahoo Answers, and MSN NZ. I also found it on the front page of a certain Twitter search. As Farrar was talking about this suppression, and how angry he gets when people get away with breaching suppression on blogs, what did he do... he breached suppression to those with eagle eyes after telling everyone how he viewed the man's Facebook site. Oops. He also raised good points regarding what is actually a breach - a link to another site, a hint, a pointer to another site that the name is accessed. Many in the legal fraternity believed that nearly everyone under the age of 30 know who this person is, not so many over that age. I spoke to two law students during the lunch break, both were internet savvy, both were interested in Internet issues to do with suppression and contempt - both under 30 and both had no idea who this entertainer was.

The entire forum was videoed and will be available. You should be able to find it by googling it sometime.

Breaking news: Man goes out

This from Fiji Daily Post today.

It’s official: a man went out.

Neighbours reported that they saw him go out last night.

‘I thought he was just mad’, a woman opined while asking to remain anonymous.Another neighbour said he saw him open his door about ten o’clock.

‘Arreh, he went out’, he added.

When approached, the alleged man admitted to stunned reporters, ‘OK, yes, I went out’.

But he was unable to give a reason why.Asked if he would try it again, the man said, ‘yes, I think I like going out’.

Asked where he would go, the man said ‘out’.

Fijian media write stories about paint drying and getting on buses

Some great stories in the Fijian media recently. Thanks to censorship, they have to write about other things.

Paint has apparently dried on his old couch

Paint has apparently dried on his old couch, Max reports.

Given the job of painting the couch, Max was excited at the prospect of the paint drying. But when asked how it dried, he was nonplussed.

“It just went on wet, but after about four hours, it started to dry.That was when I realised, paint dries,” the young scholar observed.

Fiji Daily Post asked Max if he intended to do more painting.

“Oh yes,” he replied, “I like watching paint dry.”

Or this one:

Man gets on a bus

In what is believed to be the first reported incident of its kind, a man got on a bus yesterday.

“It was easy,” he said.“I just lifted one leg up and then the other and I was on”.

Fiji Daily Post reporters found witnesses willing to confirm the happening.

“Yes”, said one who asked to remain anonymous, “I saw him get on the bus”.

Another witness who also preferred to remain unidentified told this newspaper it was “the early morning bus”.

“I was waiting opposite the shop when I saw him run to catch the bus.”

What happened next was a remarkable feat – the man actually got on the bus, we believe. Students from a local school who had been waiting for two hours in the rain for the bus also confirmed that they saw the man board.

“We are happy for him”, one student remarked in terms reminiscent of Neil Armstrong (the first man to step onto the moon): “it may be one small step for him, but it is one giant step for the people of Fiji”

Large newspaper to shut down?

The San Francisco Chronicle is a big newspaper. Founded in 1865, it is San Francisco's main paper, employs 275 news staff and is the 12th-largest in the United States, according to the U.S. Audit Bureau of Circulations, with average weekday circulation of 339,430. It is the 19th-largest paper by Sunday circulation. It is read by more than 1.6 million people weekly. It also operates SFGate, among the nation's 10 largest news Web sites.

But it lost more than $50million last year and may be forced to shut down if there is no buyer next month. Advertising revenue has not even enabled the paper to break even for some time. Perhaps people are getting sick of all the gay marriage stories.

Where NZPA gets stories

It's interesting to see that journalists from the NZPA continue to read the DomPost every morning to get story ideas. Perhaps they should start reading a few more blogs sometime to avoid saying "the Dominion Post reported. The Dominion Post , like the Sunday Star Times, gets some of their story ideas off off the blogs, because they bother to read blogs. Even MPs are writing media releases based on what they read on blogs - Bill English comes to mind there.

I have been contacted several times by reporters regarding posts I have written on the blog. But in the most recent case, I made the initial contact through the blog and it snowballed from there to go national throughout the media and blogs and subsequently international within a few hours.

Associated Press gets heavy handed - bloggers retaliate

The blogosphere bites back. The Associated Press took offense when some poor blogger quoted a few words of an AP story in his blog and asked for some money over unfair use of article excerpts and charged $2.50 per word. Michelle Malkin, who only gets 244,000 visits a day to her blog, has noticed that the AP has nicked some of her work without paying for it. She is apparently owed $132,125 on the AP pay scale. Ka ching-ching-ching.