Spin takes a wrong turn

Blowing the whistle on a spin king. Amanda Meade in her always very readable Monday media column in the Oz gave an interesting illustration of how the political news we read is subject to the controls of the government’s PR apparatus. On Friday, when the government was handing out material relating to its decision to backflip on its 2008 decision to exclude temporary residents from scrutiny under the Foreign Investment Review Board, wrote Meade, federal Treasurer Wayne Swan’s media adviser told newspaper reporters it was being given only to print media and that one of the conditions was “no third-party comment”. As Meade noted: “Sorry? There’s nothing wrong with embargoes but trying restrict reporters seeking outside comment is not exactly the stuff of robust democracies. It takes spin to a new level.”

Nor, Meade might have added, is the acceptance by journalists of such a condition the stuff of which a robust free press is made. Yet the “New curbs on foreign home buyers” story that appeared in Saturday’s Australian based on the government news release contained none of the third-party comment the Treasurer’s media adviser was so keen to avoid. The paper’s “chief political correspondent” Matthew Franklin did, however, give a very good run to assistant treasurer Nick Sherry’s claim that “the Rudd government is acting to make sure that investment in Australian real estate by temporary residents and foreign non-residents is within the law, meets community expectations and doesn’t place pressure on housing availability for Australians.” The very friendly story did the government spinner proud.

Presumably the Franklin approach of doing a simple rewrite of an official press release is an example of the “highly successful worldwide organisation that actually digs for and finds news, then publishes it fearlessly” that The Australian’s media pontificator Mark Day wrote of on Monday and this comment of mine no doubt fits in to his category that “all Crikey can manage is to cast its jaundiced eye over and comment on the crumbs”.

Murdoch coverage goes under the cover — London’s News of the World took election coverage in a new direction at the weekend with this exclusive report featuring the wife of Liberal Democrat leader Nick Clegg:

Six slinky silk numbers indeed! That’s the political stuff of which a great Murdoch subscription news site will soon be made and another example of Mark Day’s “highly successful worldwide organisation that actually digs for and finds news, then publishes it fearlessly”.

Quotation for the day: From an article titled: For more control, stop thinking it’s possible —

Life is partly skill and partly luck. Chance plays a substantial and irreducible role in our fate. Thus the first step towards wisdom is to disabuse ourselves of the illusion of control, to accept that much of our fate is beyond our control. The second step is to assess our chances of success or failure in a realistic way.

Ross Gittins in the Sydney Morning Herald

Photo of the day. Every picture tells a story and this one of British Conservative Party leader David Cameron shows that for politicians the background can be just as important as the foreground.

A gradual improvement. Slowly, ever so slowly, it looks as if the coalition is narrowing the gap with the Labor Party but there is still a big, big distance to make up if Tony Abbott is going to become Prime Minister. The Morgan poll on Friday had the coalition two-party preferred vote improving by two percentage points to 44% with Labor on 56%.

Using a four-week moving average of the Morgan face-to-face poll figures to smooth out some of the fluctuations, including those inevitable when sometimes Morgan reports figures for a weekly sample half the size of the normal fortnightly one, does show a rising trend for the coalition but it is still well short of the 47.3% gained at the last election.

Proper negative campaigning. Producing a bogus psychiatric report on an opponent and then fabricating a fake epilepsy attack for him are the latest examples of the dark discipline of negative election campaigning in the Philippines. Liberal Party presidential candidate Benigno “Noy Noy” Aquino III was recently subjected to these tactics by opponents in the Nacionalista Party but the latest opinion poll published in the Philippine National Inquirier shows that so far they have been spectacularly unsuccessful with Aquino increasing his lead over Nacionalista candidate Manuel “Manny” Villar Jr with the election itself now just three weeks away.

Britain’s Greens are actually a favourite. Only in one seat mind you — Brighton Pavilion where prediction markets have the party’s leader Caroline Lucas slightly better than a 50% chance to beat the Conservatives into second place with Labour coming in third. Lucas, who has been representing the Greens as a British Member of the European Parliament, would become the first  Green member of the House of Commons if she succeeds.