Harry Clarke

The Pew Climate Centre have shown that over the last year or so a decreased proportion of US citizens believe climate change is a serious public policy issue and a reduced number believe there is solid evidence that anthropogenic warming is occurring.   Climate change delusionists might be credited with inducing these changed opinions but the [...]

I subscribe to The Australian – I like its business sections and detest the low journalistic standards at Melbourne’s Pravda, its main Melbourne-based competitor. But I feel more than irritation at The Australian’s ongoing war against climate science.     This is an organised campaign that I have remarked on before.  The mix of scientific claims, philosophical arguments [...]

Jonathon Jarvis provides this exceedingly clear view of the global financial crisis.  One of the best I have seen.

I enjoyed this oldie from BoingBoing.

A lot of printer’s ink has been spilt on the issue of the future of newspapers.  I buy three each day (The AFR, The Australian and (on a discount offer) The Age), My wife likes the Herald-Sun.  Our families’ purchases are a ridiculous exception to the standard view that newspaper demands are collapsing.  This NYT article [...]

My paper criticising what I saw as the foolish climate change ‘denialist’ views that have been repeatedly put forward in Quadrant magazine was rejected by its editor Keith Windschuttle on the grounds that an earlier draft of the paper had been published on this blog. This seemed to me a totally spurious grounds for not publishing the [...]

During a 15 minute interval of the show Underbelly on Channel 9 last night I counted 8+9+13 = 30 advertisements over 3 successive ad-breaks. The period was between 9-15pm and 9-30pm. I noticed most of the ads were of short duration but was still astounded at their sheer volume. How anyone can question [...]

A piece in The Age yesterday (by Dvir Albramovich) listed various ways the Holocaust has been trivialised by western comedians. I agree that such humour is in poor taste (although I disagree that the movie ‘Life is Beautiful’ starring Roberto Benigni, that Albramovich criticises, trivialised the Holocaust – it was, in my view, unrelentingly anti-Nazi [...]

I am saddened by the death of The Bulletin. The current issue will be its last.
The Bulletin has been published in Australia since 1880 but its circulation now of 57,030 is well down on from over 100,000 in the 1990s and it is apparently no longer financially viable.
It originally published works by Henry Lawson and [...]

I missed the Four Corners show, last Monday, on the forthcoming election. I went to the ABC website and saw this very fair interview painting a gloomy prospect for the Coalition from the beautiful Laura Tingle who I read in the AFR. I thought George Megalogenis from The Australian was good [...]

We joke about glasses being seen as half-full or half-empty. I have a joke with a colleague each morning about how our ‘great’ newspapers in Australia – The Australian and The Age will report the main news of the day. The slant in headlining is invariably consistent.
The Australian: Bush in Warning to Rudd on Troops

GEORGE [...]

I’ve just read with pleasure Gerald Stone’s, Who Killed Channel 9? Macmillan 2007. This is an entertaining gossipy read about a key part of Kerry Packer’s empire and the people who ran it. It provides some intriguing vignettes of the big ‘silverback gorilla’ himself but is mainly concerned with the internal politics of a major [...]

Paul Krugman expresses his opposition to Rupert Murdoch’s intended purchase of the Wall Street Journal. He argues that Murdoch’s commercial motivations mean that US citizens have been misled on issues such as the war in Iraq.
‘The problem with Mr. Murdoch isn’t that he’s a right-wing ideologue. If that were all he was, he’d [...]

British PM Tony Blair gives all sections of the media – including the blogosphere – a carefully directed spray. He accuses the media of behaving like a ‘feral beast’ that ‘tears people and reputations to bits’. He is concerned with the emphasis on analysing motives (a theme I have also recently emphasised) and in critiquing [...]