Word-whore. I write 'em. I talk 'em. Information, politics, media, and the cybers. I drink. I use bad words. All publication is a political act. All communication is propaganda. All art is pornography. All business is personal. All hail Eris! Vive les poissons rouges sauvages!
Last night’s piece on The 7.30 Report, Govt moves to improve porn filter, is finally online. No video of the story itself, just the transcript, but there’s “extended” video interviews with two of the talking heads, Dr Michael Flood and Professor Catharine Lumby. Commentary later.
[Update 7 March: A video of The 7.30 Report story is now online courtesy of somebodythinkofthechildren.com.]
Mark Pesce has knocked off a quick piece for the ABC on how the power of the “forward” button is changing politics. He reckons it’s a bit rushed, but I think it still has value.
I’m tempted to apply for a spot on the ABC Advisory Council. I reckon I’d have something worthwhile to contribute. But am I close enough to their ideal of a fine upstanding citizen to fit with the others? “It’s your ABC,” but only for middle-class whites, plus a token Asian who’s a member of various committees so that’s OK.
I’ve just read the first 100 pages of Whose ABC? The Australian Broadcasting Corporation 1983-2006. I’m enjoying the journey, but I’m wondering if “eminent historian” K S Inglis is talking about the same organisation where I worked from 1984 to 1991.
You see, at my ABC we used to make programs.
Inglis’ ABC is a boardroom, a managing director’s office, and the occasional brawl with politicians.
So while I half-recognise what he’s talking about — someone called Geoffrey Whitehead as MD, the re-naming of Radio Two to Radio National and all that — very little of what he’s saying seems to reflect the day-to-day reality of broadcasting.
With the ABC’s new editorial guidelines announced yesterday, it’s given the right-wingers an excuse to engage in some over-the-top rhetoric — proving that hyperbole isn’t the preserve of the left calling everyone a fascist.
Best effort so far has to be this one from Murdoch-land:
With its poor performance, entrenched ideological bias and ‘Vietcong-style’ industrial strife, surely it’s time we sold the public broadcaster, maintains Rudi Michelson.
Yes, apparently ABC staff members have been creeping through the jungle at night, slaughtering villagers and setting fire to ammunition dumps…
So did Four Corners go all tabloid over methamphetamine last night? I don’t know yet, I’m catching the repeat on Wednesday. But a friend certainly found it “really disappointing”.
“The Ice Age was ‘the usual deal’,” he says, showing the extreme cases and linking it with heroin. It left his questions unanswered.
I was really hoping for an investigation of the weekend recreational culture, which so many people seem to be able to sustain…
I don’t know many that can afford 3 grams a day…
Well, no, given that 3 grams would cost about $2000. [OK, that’s retail, but even as a low-end dealer buying wholesale that’s still a very expensive habit.]
If there are 73,000 addicts as claimed, a lot caused by no heroin, how many recreational users are there? What is the damage? How do people juggle it and what [do you] do if you’re falling?
Predictable Response
The ABC program guestbook is mostly predictable.
There’s the usual bleating from the talkback radio herd who can’t stand their hard-earned tax dollars supporting these blah blah blah kill them like Singapore why when I was a lad my dad used to whack sense into me by golly jingo. Yeah, them.
There’s the usual stream of “shocked” and “horrified” townsfolk, for whom the freak show achieved its shock-horror aim.
But occasionally, though, there is clarity.
Linthi: There is an underbelly of society that exists to which we only pay cursory attention. If these advanced addicts were offered a choice of immediately going clean or a lifetime supply of Ice, I know which they would choose. As mad as it sounds, some people like this life, it’s a culture in which they are comfortable.
This “underbelly” has always been with us, of course, and always will be. There will never be a Utopia. Some will never fit in — because they’ve slipped and fallen, or were pushed, or were defective or were damaged.
Drug Porn Exploitation
Barbara Farrelly was “disturbed” by the program’s approach.
Barbara Farrelly: struck me that you offered no hope to addicts. The rooms of Narcotics Anonymous are full of people who have overcome addictions.
I feel you also exploited people who could hardly give informed consent to being exposed in their degradation. They seemed happy enough to clown for the cameras on their highway to hell. Touting this as “rare footage” is ingenuous. Taking pictures of these guys was like taking candy from a baby…
I felt like I’d been subject to drug porn…
And while you are talking up ice as a major problem, it is estimated that every year 70,000 Australians die as a result of alcohol abuse and a further 20,000 from the effect of smoking.
You failed to present both sides of the story: Addiction isn’t pretty but recovery is beautiful.
Billing the program as showing us how the drug is affecting Australian society, but only showing those enduring the worst addictions, is like promising us a documentary on the wine industry and only talking to sherry-soaked derelicts. For shame.
That said, the special broadband edition of the program has an excellent timeline documenting the drug’s heritage and what apppear to be longer versions of the interviews. Why wait until the repeat?