Two failed bids for the presidency notwithstanding, it looks very much like Hillary Clinton is intent on making a bid to be the Democrat candidate for president in 2020.
That is possibly the only reason why she continues to scour the world for opportunities to gain publicity, instead of accepting that she was beaten fair and square in the 2016 elections and retiring from public life.
The Australian Financial Review claims to be one of the better newspapers in the country. But as is apparent from what follows, the paper lacks sub-editors who can spell or who have any knowledge of grammar.
Fairfax Media has an almighty big style guide, but the AFR seems to have thrown it out, along with any competent sub-editors.
One of the many big-noters in India has announced her return to the literary scene with a novel about the uprising in Kashmir. Coming 20 years after her only other effort, Arundhati Roy’s 2017 publication has already received enough hype to make one puke.
Since her book The God of Small Things was surprisingly awarded the Man Booker Prize in 1997, Roy has been involved in activism, written essays and numerous articles.
It is difficult to think that a company like Comedy Central, which has been so successful in commissioning comedy shows that satirise the news, could make a mistake like it did in 2015 when it let Jon Stewart go with an election around the corner.
It is impossible to believe that the company could not have persuaded Stewart to stick on and go after the November 8 voting took place this year. Perhaps it thought that its choice of replacement, South African Trevor Noah, would be able to find his groove after a few months.
In media outlets here and there, the reason advanced for bringing in a younger host is said to be the need to attract a younger audience; the argument made is that Stewart’s audience was mostly a 45+ demographic while Noah, just 31 at the time he took over, would pull in the crowd below 40, a group that the management deems to be a wealthier demographic and what it needs as it looks to the future. Continue reading “Comedy Central screwed up badly by appointing Trevor Noah”
The moment a Western journalist is treated in the Middle East in a manner that is deemed to be different to that in his own country, the West does tend to get rather heavy on the moralising and judgemental pronouncements.
Peter Greste, a journalist for Al Jazeera, the TV network that has revolutionised coverage of the Arab world, was given a sentence of seven years jail on what seem to be trumped up charges of supporting the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt.
THE explosion of online publishing has seen a breed that knows little or nothing about journalism assume posts as editors, writers, and so on.
But when one comes to such positions without understanding the finer points of the craft – as those who have either worked for, or been trained in, full-time publishing ventures do – the danger of overstepping one’s bounds is very real.
CRIKEY is a digital publication from Melbourne in Australia which has pretensions aplenty. It often claims to be the last — and correct — word on things. But oft times, it shows its ignorance. It shows its insularity.
Crikey sends a daily email to its subscribers five days a week. Its content also goes on its website, though only subscribers can access it. And this is a site which preaches a lot about things like freedom.
When Nelson Mandela died, Crikey ran an article by Guy Rundle, a writer who has a tendency to be unduly verbose. He revels in literary masturbation, using multi-syllable words here and there. He can never say anything in 600 words, hence most of his essays are continued off the daily newsletter. But Rundle, who delights in correcting other people, can screw up himself. And when he does it, he goes big.
While the rest of the world was correctly referring to Mandela by his tribal name, Madiba, Crikey called him Mandiba in an article right on top of its website. The mistake — and that’s an understatement — was there in the daily newsletter on December 6. The website was corrected shortly thereafter.
But it took quite a while before this paragon of virtue decided to come clean.
On December 10, a full 96 hours after the screw-up, the staff at Crikey realised that someone may have seen this glorious screw-up before it was changed. And so, a small apology was added in the newsletter on December 10.
THE Australian Broadcasting Corporation is a government-funded entity which operates on the lines of the BBC. It provides some of the better media content in the country, but this is not surprising since the standards of the rest are abysmally low. Murdoch-owned media constitute about 70 per cent of the country’s industry – that should say it all.
Given that it lives off the taxpayer, the ABC has many rules and regulations that govern its operations. It is meant to be accountable. But, then politicians are also meant to be accountable. And both often get away with blue murder.
The ABC’s arrogance is visible on occasion, though for the most part it hides behind the weasel words that are so much a part of public life today. The following incident will illustrate the level of contempt the corporation — living off the public teat, in case one has forgotten — shows.
On Friday, the local morning programme on the ABC in Melbourne has a segment called The Friday Wrap. It is a lazy attempt to consume time — after all, this means one does not have to think up a fresh idea to fill half an hour of a three-hour program — and, in the manner of a dog returning to its vomit, attempts to look at politics during the week that has gone by.
WHEN journalists criticise something repeatedly, those who read their offerings tend to conclude that the journalist in question has a dislike of the person or people at the heart of that issue – and that is the reason for the criticism.
But that is often not the case.
Irish journalist David Walsh was probably the only one of his tribe to be critical of Lance Armstrong when the American, on his return to professional racing after recovering from testicular cancer, won the Tour de France in 1999.
