Economic irrationalism at Radio National

Nine’s ‘Sunday’ program axed, Fairfax cutting staff, one university after another announcing staff cuts and cuts of subjects, the latest: La Trobe University.

It reminds me of the counterintuitive line pedalled by several of the major banks years ago when they started cutting suburban branch numbers, informing us that it was to “improve customer service.”

I am further depressed by the news that the same dead hand is hovering over important programs on Radio National, including the Media Report. Without doubt, the best current affairs commentary to be found in this country is on Radio National’s World Today, AM and particularly, PM programs.

As Andrew Dodd, the Media Report’s founding presenter, wrote in Crikey today:

The Media Report has popped up in Hansard, the indexes of books, the curricula of university courses and the ipods of listeners. It has kept on keeping on for fifteen years with informed intelligent debate about the state of the nation’s media.

Not bad for a half hour show that’s staffed by one and a half people and costs much less to produce over a year than just one episode of almost any TV program you’d care to mention.

He concludes:

We are looking for media that starts where current affairs reporters finish and which challenges us with new ways of thinking about issues or which introduces us to ideas that we’d never thought to consider. These wonderful Radio National programs did this regularly and their loss is a huge blow to the diversity of our media.

It’s rare that I agree with The Australian’s editorial writer about anything, but I concur with every sentence of today’s piece, except one:

The paradox of this media-abundant age is that the thirst for quality has never been greater, as the growing circulation of newspapers such as The Australian shows.

Yyyeeeeesssss…….

A different kind of election?

Michael Leddy’s comment to my previous post made me think that despite all the distance and the word-bites that constitute almost our entire picture of the American election, maybe it is possible to get the sense of it about right.

In what I have read and seen, I’ve been surprised and discomforted by the cynicism of the Clinton campaign, a kind of scorched earth policy that would bring the house down so no one else can live in it.

Yesterday, Guy Rundle was talking about the appearance of Hillary on Good Morning America, in which she apparently promised to “obliterate Iran”. I’m surprised I missed it actually, as it’s on at about 5.00am on our television and I’m usually up trying to get young Sweeney Payne, aged six weeks, back to sleep.

I can’t imagine what she thought she was doing saying crap like that on morning television. I can only imagine the context, but it seems to me she often rushes to occupy the vacuum the failure of neo-conservatism has opened up, something Obama seems loath to do.

Hillary is angling to make Golda Meir look like a Geelong regional office special needs coordination program conflict resolution officer and part-time reiki masseuse, with an incredible ad which appears to suggest that Bin Laden started the War in the Pacific using Hurricane Katrina against Pearl Harbour, and the only person who can stop him/them/it is a pants-suited terminatrix from the future.

I was recently surprised to hear left-leaning friends of mine all enthusiastically endorsing Hillary, including Doug, whose passion for American politics and history should not be doubted. Even amongst informed people working in politics, the feeling seemed to be almost universal. I put it down to the powerful pull of the gender question. Does it look like a woman President is a more momentous leap into a progressive future than a black one? Given the economic and (there’s no better word) moral state of America at present (I’m thinking of Iraq, Guantanamo, waterboarding etc, etc), it seems to me that Hillary the insider, behaving as she is, is not so much a step backwards but pretty much the status-quo, same-old same-old candidate.

In a comment, Michael says:

Here in the States (United, that is), the ABC moderators have been widely criticized for focusing the first half of the debate on distractions and nonsense — e.g., flag lapel pins. No one on the stage was wearing a flag lapel pin!

…And neither were most people watching the telecast! Surely that’s the problem with the supercilious question: If a flag lapel pin denotes patriotism, and the lack of a pin suggests a lack of patriotism, then patriotism is in short supply on the streets of America given the woeful lack of flag lapel pins everywhere!

We could say a lot about the strange fetishization of the American flag in that country (without it, Jasper Johns didn’t make any sense), except to note how very strange it looks to the rest of the world, if I can speak for the whole world for a moment. I’m trying to think of a flag that carries a comparable weight in the national consciousness – maybe the French? Certainly the tricolor is as symbolically loaded, but nowhere near as evident in their popular culture.

I say this as an inhabitant of a country whose flag is an image that is constantly under dispute. Statements of a Republican nature (yes we are still a nominal monarchy) always quickly lead to discussion of the flag. Personally I find the presence of the Union Jack on our flag bizarre. I’m always reminded of something my grandfather once said, that his Irish policeman father refused to acknowledge a flag that had the symbol of his enemy in the top corner.

There’s no doubt that American political commentary goes some strange places. Yesterday ‘The Australian’ reprinted an op-ed piece of puffery by P. J. O’Rourke, who has at least the benefit of being funny, even if he often mistakes flippancy for wit.

Some people say John McCain isn’t conservative enough. But there’s more to conservatism than low taxes, Jesus and waterboarding at Gitmo. Conservatism is also a matter of honour, duty, valour, patriotism, self-discipline, responsibility, good order, respect for our national institutions, reverence for the traditions of civilisation, and adherence to the political honesty upon which all principles of democracy are based.

If you got through the second sentence without feeling nauseous, you’re better than I. It follows that if you’re Liberal, you must be dishonorable, cowardly, unpatriotic, irresponsible, with no sense of duty and so on and so forth. This is civilization?

A more interesting question

I find the ill-informed commentary about the NGV’s Van Gogh revelation extremely irritating. Crikey have kept it up by taking the tabloids’ lead and referring to the painting as a ‘fake.’ This is nonsense. The painting has been found to be mis-attributed. It is not fake. There is a difference.

The piece by Geoff Maslen is called ‘Melbourne’s other big fake wasn’t a Rembrandt’ and he tells us the actually very interesting story of how the NGV handled its last attribution crisis. He is quite right to point out that Patrick McCaughey and now Gerard Vaughan chose to spin the story differently.

In his characteristically flamboyant style, in 1984 Patrick McCaughey was showing newspaper and television reporters around a newly refurbished section of the gallery when he stopped before the gallery’s only self-portrait by Rembrandt and admitted it was not actually by Rembrandt and was probably done by someone else.

McCaughey assured everyone that the NGV still had two genuine Rembrandts: “Two indispensable masterpieces. The real things.”

Yet he made the self-portrait still seem like a significant gallery asset, which it was.

Roughly a year ago, the NGV was in the headlines again over claims in the London Sunday Times that the gallery’s only painting by Vincent van Gogh, then on loan to an Edinburgh exhibition, was not by him.

Last Friday, current director Dr Gerard Vaughan called the media in and announced that extensive testing by the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam had proved ‘Head of a Man’ to have been painted by someone else. It had been in the NGV collection since 1940 and labled as a Van Gogh since then.

There is no evidence that anyone ever attempted to pass it off as a work by van Gogh, except perhaps those who sold it. As he pointed out, Van Gogh had been largely ignored in his lifetime and only became famous long after his suicide. Although it might not be a forgery, Vaughan admitted the news made the picture almost worthless in money terms.

Maslen says:

“It is uncertain whether another crowd of sticky-beaks will turn up to marvel at it and ponder how simply changing the artist’s name could drive its value down from $20 million to a few dollars.”

This is the almost dumbest thing he could have said. Imagine this: I hand you a pistol and say this is an old target pistol my grandfather gave me. What are your feelings after you learn this information? Imagine how different they would be if I handed you the same pistol and said this is the gun that John Wilkes Booth used to kill Abraham Lincoln. What are your feelings now? Are they changed? Of course they are. The context has changed and context alters meaning.

This also ignores one of the central reasons why the picture was so valuable as a Van Gogh. As a Van Gogh, it was unique (and now we know why). There simply wasn’t anything else around like it.

The horizontal format was not found elsewhere in his portraits, and various people speculated that it might have been cut down from a larger work. The colours were more in the earlier, earthy social-realist style he favoured, but the brush strokes are broader, the impression more like the later work. It is rare three-quarter profile and so on and so on.

We now know the decision on the attribution: these qualities were so rare (or unique) in Van Gogh, that it has come down on the other side of the ledger.

But where I think Vaughan slipped up, is in the obvious question to asked now. If Vincent didn’t paint it, then who did? When was it painted, if the previous date is not accurate? Is it indeed a ‘fake’, or is there some other fascinating reason why someone was making pictures like this in 1885?

Mad Mal

My favourite Australian blog is certainly Barista by David Tiley.

If I may quote a wonderful paragraph from a recent entry:

Every time I think the Howard government has gone too far, the whole creaky ship sails through the roiling ocean of political outrage into some lagoon of public indifference.

I was put in mind of the same principal when looking at ‘The Australian’ newspaper this morning.

A favourite recent habit of theirs is to place an outrageous scream headline above the masthead, visible to anyone walking past any news-stand at any train station, shop or street stall, lodging in the mind as a disembodied thought for the rest of the day, like some horrible piece of viral marketing.

Something like “Hijabs Hide Bombs” or “Paul Keating, Kiddie-fiddler”. You feverishly turn the pages looking for the sensational story, only to find that it is in fact a small opinion piece reprinted from a conservative American journal or rightwing think-tank, holding up the bottom of page 214.

Today’s example is a classic of the genre: “Mad Mal: Accuses ABC host of doing Howard’s bidding.” This is accompanied by photos of former Prime Minister Malcolm Fraser and ABC broadcaster Virginia Trioli.

For those not in the know, Virginia Trioli is the ABC Melbourne drive-time announcer and author poached by a station in Sydney earlier this year. She is universally reviled across the rightwing spectrum for being some sort of lefty harridan, an accusation which can only be maintained by those who don’t read her columns, listen to her programs or watch her TV spots. It seems her major offence was making a goose of Peter Reith on air by questioning his assertions that photographs proved refugees threw their children in the water a few years ago.

‘Mad Mal’ is of course the second longest serving Liberal Prime Minister, whose chief offence seems to be that he has remained a genuine Liberal while all around him in the Party have turned to the dark side. Which is why he is ‘mad’. See, simple really.

The central trope of this bit of journalistic thuggery is the sheer perversity of the headline, implying that Mal is such a lefty these days that he thinks even a hairy-legged feminazi like Virginia is too close to Howard.

Who is making the imputation? Why the newspaper is, of course!

Dissent has its limits at Quadrant

In an example of obscene hypocrisy, a crowd of hand-picked Howard lickspittles lined up at a dinner last night to toast the 50th anniversary of Quadrant magazine, claiming that it was celebration of non-conformity and eccentricity.

Apparently though, non-conformism has its limits, as Quadrant’s most successful editor Robert Manne, a man who was forced from his position when his humanist views proved too much for the reactionary editorial board, was not invited.

Without irony, the whale-like Paddy McGuinness claimed:

This is our mission: to defend the great tradition of free and open debate, to make possible dissent, while at the same time insisting on both civilised discourse and rational argument.

This was probably greeted with self-congratulatory applause at this point, when instead the words should have provoked a long embarrassed silence, perhaps the odd cough, as the wind blew a lonely tumble weed across the floor.

Robert Manne was the editor of Quadrant from 1989 to 1997. I may be wrong, but I suspect the magazine achieved its greatest circulation under his editorship.

The magazine was the organ of choice for the anti-communist right in Australia for the entire length of the Cold War. Indeed, it was initiated by something called the Congress of Cultural Freedom in 1956 with funding from the American CIA by Richard Krygier and James McAuley, the man who, with Douglas Stewart, concocted Ern Malley and his accidentally great body of poetry.

Cassandra Pybus recounts the story very well in Jacket magazine. Apparently no one at the dinner, or in The Australian’s report of it, thought it notable enough to mention that one of the longest running of our cultural journals was set up by the CIA.

It’s certainly the journal with the ugliest cover in the rack, which shows how little regard it has for visual, as opposed to written, expression.

The UnAustralian, part 2

I have had a soft spot for ABC journalist and political commentator Barrie Cassidy ever since I overheard him in a Canberra pub telling someone his family were from Chiltern in north-eastern Victoria. I spoke to him briefly about it because my mother’s mother’s family were settlers in Chiltern Valley, just outside the small historic town. Meaningless in itself, it just reinforced my warm feelings for the man, who manages to dispense useful insights into the Australian political scene while remaining genuinely non-partisan.

My mistake, apparently. According to The Australian’s editorial writer, he is a Leftist.

The piece on the editorial page today is called ‘The Punters Speak: Left-wing spin won’t put Labor in the Lodge’.

It begins by making the point that Labor is routinely behind in opinion polls. Then this sentence, which must be read in the context of the headline at the beginning:

About the only way to put a happy face on the ALP’s present predicament is to blame not the message, but the messenger. Which is exactly what Barry Cassidy did on the ABC’s Insiders yesterday, suggesting that the news media has been manipulating opinion polls to make Kim Beazley look bad.

This of course implies that what Cassidy was attempting to do when he made the point that the news media have been misreporting polls was spin the message in the ALP’s favour. This is no small insinuation to make. I don’t know how long Cassidy has been a journalist, but as a political commentator, his reputation for impartiality is central to his worth. For the national paper to imply otherwise is a slur.

There’s more. Later in the piece, they ask “If Newspoll’s numbers are not enough for Cassidy, perhaps he should do what Australia’s Left rarely deigns to and consider the collective wisdom of the country’s punters.”

Looking at the sentence carefully, it is clear that Cassidy is not being included in the group ‘Australia’s Left’, but the implication that he is a member of that group is not excluded. The reader is meant to make the connection.

The final sentence makes the rhetorical strategy clear: “Until the ALP stops blaming the media and recognises what everyone else can see – namely, that all the good ideas in the world won’t work without leadership – the Opposition will remain just that.”

Who’s blaming the media? The ALP. Not Barrie Cassidy but the Party. Get it?

This is the sort of logical approach that now dominates right-wing commentary in this country: if you are not an active proselytiser of the right’s pet causes, like the war in Iraq for example, then you are a leftist. Simple as that.

This explains why a blogger like Phil Gomes on Larvatus Prodeo can see a quite reasonable question by Barrie Cassidy to the Prime Minister, phrased in inverted commas as it were, as if one is trying to trace an opposing argument and gauge one’s subject’s response, as actively hostile to the Prime Minister:

BARRIE CASSIDY: The argument is there are laws that haven’t been used so there is no need for them.

JOHN HOWARD: Hang on. No, no, no with great respect, Barrie, the implication being touted and the implication left in the minds of anybody following this debate is that we are introducing these new draconian laws for the first time. And if, in fact, they are laws, and if your question acknowledges, they are laws that in substance have been there for years, and haven’t caused a problem, what is all the fuss about? See, I have yet to see – let’s talk about the substance of the issue, as distinct from the rhetoric. Where, in the drafting of the sedition provisions, where are they in substance different, in substance, not in language, but in substance, different from what is already in the crimes act?

Howard is a tough old bird. He is not above confecting frustration in response to an interviewer’s question in order to leave the impression in the mind of viewers that the interviewer is hostile. That’s where “Hang on. No, no, no with great respect, Barrie” comes from. Obviously it worked where Phil Gomes was concerned.

The Australian lurches ever rightward

‘Bias’ is an over-used word in relation to Australian media. It is, as we all know, in the eye of the beholder. However, when a media institution shows evidence of a consistent and long-running habit of slanting news coverage with inflammatory headlines, unflattering juxtapositions of articles on the same page, or printing news articles consisting entirely of opinion, I think the judgement can be justified.

In this light, I claim that The Australian newspaper, the proud possession of Rupert Murdoch, has shown a marked lurch to the right in recent years. This bias is in evidence on a daily basis and gets more outrageous by the day.

For example, today’s target of the sub-editor’s hatchet is the federal Labor Party, and in particular its leader Kim Beazley. The first headline on the front page is “Beazley leaves voters in marginal seats dissatisfied: poll”. At the bottom of the page, we see by contrast “PM into battle to save Kokoda from goldmine”. Turning the page, we find nine articles in total, five of which are anti-Labor, and one supportive of the Prime Minister. One of the five is also highly misleading.

The headlines:

1. “Beazley avoids risk, says Jones.” This is code for “Beazley lacks ‘ticker’”, reinforcing one of the Prime Minister’s oldest lines of attack against the Opposition Leader.

2. “Voters in marginal seats dissatisfied”. So-called marginal seats are what any party has to win in order to achieve government in the Australian system. Are they dissatisfied with their representation by their government in the nation’s parliament? Of course not, the dissatisfaction is entirely with Labor’s leadership.

3. “Labor ‘employer’ not real deal”. (see more below).

4. “ALP fails to attract women”

5. “Company offers peace talks to illegal strikers”

6. “PM into battle to save Kokoda from miners”. The Kokoda Track is of course, one of the graven images of Australian nationalism, a tropical battlefield in New Guinea which has about as much resonance in the national psyche as Gettysburg has for Americans.

Article 3, by Matthew Franklin, is worth looking at more closely. The first paragraph reads:

“LABOR has cited the views of a Melbourne pharmacist, a Gladstone engineer and a Launceston hire car company manager to back its claim that big business is not wedded to the Howard Government’s Work Choices program.”

There is already a problem. Labor is not claiming “big business” has a problem with Work Choices, but small business, as we shall see.

“But the Launceston company manager told The Australian yesterday that while he opposed Work Choices, he was not an employer.”

Hang on, who said he was an employer?

“Federal Labor leader Kim Beazley said on Wednesday that businesspeople had told him they did not press the Government to implement Work Choices, which encourages greater use of workplace contracts.”

Notice it is “businesspeople”, not big business. There is a difference.

“Asked yesterday to put The Australian in touch with businesspeople to back the claims, Mr Beazley’s spokesman nominated three small-businessmen who gave evidence to a Labor backbench taskforce earlier this year.”

Notice it’s “small-businessmen” now.

“… and Hertz car rental employee Andrew Lovitt all told the inquiry they had reservations about Work Choices. … But Mr Lovitt also said as Launceston operations and marketing manager he was ‘not technically an employer’”.

Again, who said he was an employer? Looking at the headline, one might think it was Labor who is claiming he was an employer. Yet Beazley never said anything of the sort. The rest of the article is taken up with statements by the head of the Australian Chamber of Commerce and Industry Peter Hendy, who was formerly a Government staff member. He says things like: “I don’t know which individuals he’s been talking to who haven’t been arguing for industrial relations reform”. Yet the article itself already names the very individuals!

The contrast between 1 and 6 is clear, in terms entirely flattering to the government, and uncannily reinforcing two of its most persistent campaign slogans: Howard defends Australian values, while Beazley dithers.

I am waiting for the day when they replace the sub-heading ‘Keeping the Nation Informed’ with ‘Fair and Balanced’. It can’t be too far off.

Parliament to debate prosecution of Hun journalists

Next Monday the House of Representatives will debate the pursuit of Herald Sun journalists Harvey and McManus for exposing its intention to largely ignore the Clarke review of veteran’s entitlements.

The motion by Martin Ferguson and Craig Emerson reaffirms the right of journalists, as provided by their code of ethics, not to reveal their sources.

Rather than a vendetta against a public servant and the pursuit of journalists, the Howard Government should apologise for attempting to deny $500 million in extra pensions to veterans and war widows.

The Howard Government should expedite law reform to protect journalists professional confidences and withdraw the vindictive pursuit of a public servant so as to avoid the potential imprisonment of journalists for printing a story that was clearly in the public interest.

Medcraft and local media

It looks like we’ve entered the era of local government by press release here in Sunbury, as one of our councilors has given up contributing to the online forum after it became too damaging for him to continue, and taken to using his media pull with local journalists by feeding them juicy content directly where he can’t be openly debated.

There’s no other explanation for two unsigned pieces appearing in the Sunbury Leader last week, one of which was essentially an unsubstantiated statement by the councilor, who alleges that there is a conspiracy by political opponents to silence him.

The very opposite is true, as those who are regularly entertained by some councilor Medcraft’s more outrageous statements hope that he continues to alienate voters by exposing his opinions to the cold light of debate.

For those not familiar with the workings of the Hume City Council, Jack Medcraft, who is known as Steve Medcraft when he’s fulminating on tabloid television against criminals, Labor politicians and other sundry scumbags, is looking down the barrel of council elections in November. His re-election strategy so far seems to be to avoid having to air his opinions in public in any forum which he cannot control or apparently threaten with legal action.

This method managed to shut down the ‘Local Politics’ section of Sunbury Online recently, after they gradually watered down the conditions of submission so much that any comment vaguely critical of the incumbent councilor was blocked or otherwise censored. There is now a war of spin being fought, after Medcraft (again) announced he was leaving the forum because the terrible bullies had made life impossible for him and he couldn’t bear it any more. He was going back to catching butterflies and making dry flower arrangements for a quieter life.

It was difficult to take this latest pronouncement terribly seriously, as, like Dame Nellie Melba in her twilight years, he had announced retirment once or twice before, only return almost immediately, unable to cope with the loss of his adoring public.

Presently, various members of his cheer squad (known colloquially as the banana-munchers) compete to both condemn the terrible treatment the councilor received at the hands of his own constituents, and out-do each other in expressions of love and appreciation ‘for all that he has done for Sunbury’. None of them actually say what this might be, however.

I would be happy to link to appropriate bits of business on Sunbury Online, but the powers behind the online forum have been frightened enough, not just to shut down the forum to further contributions, but make it impossible even for voters to see what their local representative has had to say on subjects that might interest them. Given that a few of these statements by Medcraft are actually under investigation by authorities, I would have thought the moderator of the forum was doing us a public service by allowing us to read what was said in a public place.

Dark mutterings are still made in other sections of the forum about ‘legal advice’ against critics. No one, however, is able or willing to say what this advice might be or even give us a ballpark idea of its content. It’s enough to give readers, who might be ignorant of the law, the idea that defamatory statements have been made against this councillor, without once ever having to say which statements are defamatory, or in what way.

The most offensive aspect to this whole non-story, is that we are talking about a local government representative who systematically blustered and bullied his way all over the forum for the better part of a year against anyone who found his statements wanting. If political debate can be likened to a street brawl, then Medcraft goes in with the rhetorical equivalent of a broken bottle.

His favorite tactic, when he didn’t like someone’s contribution, was to make allegations about their identity. Many times unsuspecting people had contributed briefly to the forum, only to be frightened off by his hectoring and frequently abusive tone.

On one occasion, after I had posted a statement on the forum, he demanded that I answer questions he was putting to me personally that were irrelevant to the subject being discussed. Nevertheless, I answered them. Not happy with my apparent ability to answer his question directly, he changed the subject and asked a number of other irrelevant questions, and continued to do so over several different subjects under discussion.

After I had not answered to his satisfaction after a week, he demanded to know why I hadn’t, asking where I was and even making insinuations about my place of employment. As it happened, I was on holidays! Instances of this kind proliferate all over Sunbury Online.

These tactics got him in a spot of bother when he began alleging that people were not actually residents of Sunbury, and were posting under assumed names, which was perfectly allowable under the terms of use. He managed to offend several women who were conributing under their maiden names this way.

He came a cropper when he alleged (during a non-political discussion by the way), that I did not live in Sunbury and was not on the electoral roll. I did, and do, live in Sunbury and I am on the electoral roll. This lie has been repeated in the Sunbury Leader, without correction. Did I get a retraction by my local councillor then or again last week? You can guess the answer to that one.

I call on our local journalists to put their thinking caps back on when talking to this man, and understand that a politician is seeking to use them to his electoral gain. I don’t have a problem with this, actually. Any politician wants to get his or her view out there, but journalists do their readers and the political process no favours by allowing deadlines to get in the way of properly investigated reporting.

Local papers showed absolutely no interest when a local government representative in their town was regularly making public statements about everything except local government matters, which is what he actually has responsibility for. They allowed him to blame ‘the council’ whenever things didn’t go his way, or when his failings as a representative were on show. Where were Medcraft and Ogilvie when the Ardcloney stables were being pulled down by an apparently unscrupulous developer? Why do they continually abuse the state Member of Parliament because a bridge is not built when they say it should be, while the beautiful Ardcloney House moulders on Macedon Street for the lack of a good idea what to do with it?

There may be good reasons for these things, but I haven’t heard them from these two.

Why did the local press not think it newsworthy when Medcraft repeatedly called for the death penalty for drug traffickers including Schapelle Corby, before her Indonesian trial had even convicted her?

Why did the papers not explore offensive remarks Medcraft made about Muslim Australians, and connect this with his refusal to stand or even stay in the room when a Muslim prayer was given at the commencement of a council meeting?

Are the papers going to do anything with the rumour that he has written to the Minister asking her to exercise her power to sack the council twelve weeks out from elections? On what grounds?

I will gladly be corrected when local press reverse the lack of care and objectivity shown in their recent reporting of most things to do with this councilor.

AFR ‘Re/view’ section

In the first issue of the excellent new magazine ‘The Monthly’, Mungo MacCallum surveyed the graveyard of dead journals he had worked for over a long career; many of them burning very brightly before succumbing to the lack of sustaining oxygen that seems to be an consequence of our small population, or our traditional anti-intellectualism, or maybe a combination of both. Still, titles like ‘Oz’ and ‘The National Times’, ‘The Nation Review’ and ‘The Independent Monthly’ did manage to make their telling impression before snuffing out.

On the basis of two good issues, I hope ‘The Monthly’ goes on to join those ranks and keeps its nostrils above the water line long enough to count. In the meantime though, us elitists have got to take our kicks where we can find them, and I’m here to tell you that a moist oasis has sprung from the pages of that august journal of record, the Australian Financial Review, whose pages are usually as dry as a nun’s nasty, economically speaking.

Yes, pilgrims, I’m talking of the ‘Re/view’ section, which appears on Fridays, nestled in those cold dead pages somewhere near the stock market report and the lifestyle section. Don’t be put off by the dated backslash in the middle of the word thing, which I think is some elderly sub-editor’s idea of funky and postmodern. It has enough substance across its twelve tabloid pages to keep most of us chewing through even the longest of long weekends.

It arrived with uncanny timing in my bored and disillusioned consciousness. I had recently given up the habit of my entire adulthood and ceased even trying with the ‘Saturday Age’, which has increased in weight and girth in exactly inverse proportion to its mass, if you see what I mean. I was beginning to suspect that Fairfax publishers had created a secret monopoly by buying up a huge share in paper recycling interests.

The only thing stopping ‘Re/view’ from getting more attention as a journal in its own right, is that the major part of its content is reprinted from other sources, with original pieces from Australian writers making up maybe a quarter of its column inches. What it does have, however, are delicious samples of truly excellent essay writing from journals like ‘New Statesman’, ‘Prospect’, ‘The New Yorker’, ‘Washington Post Book World’, and ‘The Atlantic Monthly.’

The topics covered can be literally anything from the secret maladies of Samuel Johnson, the nuclear industry’s PR campaign, Jean-Paul Sartre, art on television, Charles Bukowski, the acting of Robert Mitchum, Indonesian politics, the campaign to end poverty, classical music in America, and the idea of sin, just to name a few recent articles that caught my interest. There’s a lot more where that came from.

Its reach is wider then, than just about anything in this country. You will find more rigorous academic discourse elsewhere, more learned foreign policy comment, more penetrating literary criticism, but you will not find all of these things discussed in the one place, in such a liberal and unpretentious way, in a newspaper.

With my brain softened by acres of right-wing opinionizing in the rest of the Murdoch press, and the regurgitated press agent’s fluff dressed up as celebrity feature articles that accounts for most of the weekend papers, I was beginning to despair that good writing with a generalist, civilised spirit could be found in Australian newspapers.

Often I skim over articles that don’t appear to hold much interest, and find that I’m riveted by the first paragraph and continue reading despite myself. Every so often certain paragraphs ignite something in my head and I find myself compelled to go back over them again. Like this one. It’s in an article by Matthew Sweet on the history of Batman in the context of his latest manifestation at the movies, with a stunning digression on William Shatner’s acting style:

“The Batman I knew best was the television one: Adam West, a burly American leading man, straining inside a battleship-grey body stocking and leather bat mask. His body looked as corseted as William Shatner’s. Indeed, he shared something of Shatner’s peculiar acting style – quivery yet rhetorical, with a fast-slow-fast pace that made him sound like a man at a lectern attempting to prevent his big moment being ruined by an inconvenient orgasm.”

Damn, that’s funny.