NotW scandal steals carbon tax oxygen in Oz media

Tony Abbott up to about two-thirds of Julia Gillard’s coverage as Gillard dropped back from the wall-to-wall media presence of early last week, letting the taxpayer-funded ads take up the slack, while Abbott maintained his steady pace through radio and TV.

The polls meanwhile remain diabolical for the Government, Tony Windsor admitted the Government would probably lose the next election, but at least they’d done the right thing. I’m not sure all of the ALP caucus is feeling quite that philosophical.

The News of the World controversy certainly took some of the coverage away from the carbon price this week, and there’s been much discussion of Bob Brown’s call for an investigation into the media in Australia, with plenty of shots fired back, and not just from News Ltd. Add the increasingly strange Australia Network tender process and Stephen Conroy made a rare leap into the top ten, still beaten by his opposite number, who just loves the crisp clean air of New England — the truth flies so much faster up there.

Meanwhile the Liberal Premiers and Campbell Newman lined up to back Tony Abbott on the carbon price, Barry O’Farrell shook up the Transport bureaucracy in NSW and Joe Ludwig almost got himself out of the top 20 and back to more familiar obscurity.

It remained all about Julia Gillard on talkback, her personal integrity more and more becoming the central issue for opponents of the carbon price, an interesting development in itself. Both Abbott and Gillard continued to be called out on their many inconsistencies online, and generally the debate remains like a Kardashian, its lack of depth only matched by its ubiquity.

Most of us didn’t quite make it to 5am, but surely after midnight television hasn’t been this fascinating since the Sopranos shuffled off to Buffalo.