Cheng Lei, who was imprisoned in China for three years, says Australians should not overreact over every bilateral issue with Beijing. Freed Australian journalist Cheng Lei, who was imprisoned in Beijing for three years, has urged Australians to avoid taking simplistic or extreme views about China. The former anchor at Chinese state-run TV network CGTN Continue reading »
Media
Prompted by Wanning Sun (P&I June 9, 2024), I have just read Yu Yang’s excellent work Private Revolutions. Wanning observes that according to western media the Chinese population is mostly imagined as a monolith and faceless crowd: divided into those who are victims of a repressive Chinese regime, or heroic individuals who dare to defy Continue reading »
Low rating ”news” station, Sky News Australia, has dedicated the week to trying to convince Opposition leader, Peter Dutton, to stop pandering to the centre and move the party to the extremely hard right. ”Peter needs to look at what... Read More ›
A robust, well-functioning media ecosystem across the Pacific is an essential pillar of democracy and vital to good governance. If Australia is genuine about partnering with the region, it must advocate for the role of public interest media and why citizens should demand and support it. The media plays a crucial role in the Pacific Continue reading »
Melbourne tabloid The Age has done its already sagging reputation no favours by running, as an exclusive, an article that claims to detail what it calls the “denial and disinformation facing October 7 survivors” – Israelis who were attacked by Hamas – with the centrepiece of the article being an interview with an Israeli reservist Continue reading »
My copy of Iris Chang’s THE RAPE OF NANKING is missing its collection of historical photographs. Having seen them once, I could not bear to see them again, nor risk my teenage son coming across them, so I ripped them from the book. Now, every day on social media that is not controlled by the Continue reading »
Job cuts continue across the empire as the business model dies a slow death. Few things say “company in decline” louder than the now-annual round of job cuts in the troubled news media segment of global media behemoth News Corp, with last month’s annual budget meeting in Sydney revealing more cuts planned across the next Continue reading »
Biden wanders offstage or walks like a geriatric robot. Yet we are meant to believe he’s carefully navigating us through the nuclear tripwires of the West’s serial wars. We live in a world of make-believe politics, a world where strings pulled in the interests of the super-rich are ever more visible. And yet we are Continue reading »
As legacy media dies we seek its phoenix. With the new financial year comes a welcome slump in begging e-mails for newsletter subs. Not just from the spare room laptoppers but also the towering universities that pay their vice chancellors millions yet want the public to fund an editor. Appeals stress reading is free but Continue reading »
'For the media to be interviewing political leaders and not even asking the questions is shocking'