QAV with Alan Kohler

Check out our interview with one of Australia’s most respected finance journalists, Alan Kohler. Alan gave us his thoughts on the economy, unemployment, internet stocks, lying CEOs, and his role with the Australian Indigenous Education Foundation. 

QAV podcast with Alan Kohler

QAV looks at Stanmore Coal

On episode #12 of QAV, we’re talking about ethical investing, Bob Hawke, and, in our QAV Club episode, drilling down into the financials of Stanmore Coal. Stanmore Coal operates the Isaac Plains coking coal mine in Queensland’s prime Bowen Basin region.

News Corp’s unconstrained anti-Labor bias

Following on from my recent post about needing to control the media in order to have influence over the electoral process:

According to Denis Muller, Senior Research Fellow in the Centre for Advancing Journalism, University of Melbourne, via The Conversation:

An audit of metropolitan newspaper front pages by Media Watch showed a heavy anti-Labor bias by News Corp papers, and a roughly equivalent – but less strident – pro-Labor bias by the old Fairfax (now Nine) newspapers, The Sydney Morning Herald and The Age. The New Daily analysed three nights of Sky News coverage – April 30, May 1 and 2 – and found gross anti-Labor bias: 


The New DailyCC BY-ND


News Corp’s unconstrained anti-Labor bias cannot account entirely for Labor’s disastrous showing, but common sense says it accounts for some. For example, the company has a daily newspaper monopoly in Brisbane through The Courier-Mail. It was virulently anti-Labor and Labor did astonishingly badly in Queensland. Coincidence? Possibly, but unlikely.

Note that neither newspaper empire showed a bias towards The Greens or Socialist Alliance. So don’t tell me Fairfax is “left-leaning”. The ALP hasn’t been left since Hawke and Keating. They are pro-corporate, just in a less virulent form. You won’t find Fairfax or the ALP arguing for the dismantling of capitalism.

The conclusion for me is that we either need more media regulation in this country – enforcing neutrality, at least in terms of political reporting and opinion – or we need to replace the old media with new media. But doing the latter has proven difficult over the last 20 years. Very few new media businesses have been able to build a sustainable business model that doesn’t rely on venture capital (which usually means putting rich white guys in control of your business) or advertising (corporate control over your revenue stream).

The only solution I can see for new media is to have user-funded models. Find blogs, podcasts, authors that you like and support them. And yes, I have a vested interest in saying that, but can you see another way forward? How do we stop the old media from determining the result of future elections?

The Original Type

The very neat, legible handwriting of Poggio Bracciolini, Renaissance hunter of ancient manuscripts, became the basis of the first types used in the printing machines in Italy. It was easier to read and faster to write than the Gothic styles which were in vogue in the 14th century. We’re starting a series about Poggio on our Renaissance Times podcast this week.

Poggio’s friend, the Florentine humanist Niccolò de’ Niccoli, developed his own style, based on Poggio’s. It was a neat, sloping, cursive, essentially a rapid version of the same script. It became very popular and early printers adopted it, too. They called it “italic”, because it was Italian. And that is what we still call it today on computers.

Media Is Politics

I’ve been saying it for 20 years. If you want political influence in a democracy, you need to control the media. That’s why I started TPN. That’s why Murdoch is king. Don’t blame the voters. They get their opinions from the media. Don’t blame the politicians. They were chosen by the media to do a particular job. It’s the media. If we want change, we need to control the media. We need to invest in independent media. Not the ABC. Truly independent media. That’s why you don’t want advertising to find your podcasts. That’s why you don’t want VC firms to invest in New Media. That’s why you don’t want Facebook to be the new publishing platform. Those things just subvert the opportunity to wrest control of the future from the rich white psychopaths.

What can you do? You can make the media. Make podcasts. Write blog posts. Write books. Make documentaries. Make comics.

TAKE CONTROL.