For the media bashers

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You have the right to remain silent. Anything you say will can and will be misquoted and then used against you.

parodied the politics and the civil service, I enjoyed it, but it was very mainstream. Prime time viewing, spitting image was put on a less popular channel well after the adult watershed.
I used to love it, Thatcher as a whip wielding leather clad dominatrix, in the mens toilets scaring her cabinet so much they couldn't p*ss was very funny. That was just the background for a sketch.

I guess some of you may be too young (no offence intended) to be aware of some of the many GOOD things Murdoch did, beginning several decades ago.

He paid my wages for four years on the now defunct Sydney Daily Mirror. [This of course absolves him from a lot of sins].

He founded the first national newspaper in Australia, "The Australian," which ran at a loss for the first ten years and was subsidised by other publications, notably the Daily Mirror.

Eventually it started to return a profit, and remains one of the most highly respected and popular newspapers in Australia.

Perhaps he did this for his own advantage -- to give him more political power. Nonetheless I see it as a 100 per cent good thing.

He saved several British newspapers from going to the wall, literally. There was a lot of hoo-hah about cutting staff on these papers, but he saved them nevertheless.

However, as he seems to have followed the probably inevitable path of media moguls, yes, he is now noticeably more interested in profit and power than improvement.

I would have to say that from the time I entered the profession in 1960, there has been a deterioration in the quality of writing (grammar, syntax etc), but on the other hand (speaking just for Sydney) bias towards one or other political party has disappeared.

I guess you all know that Kerry Packer is Australia's richest man, but this is not because of his media ownership, but because of a great diversity of investments.

However when his father, Sir Frank Packer held the reigns, his publication the Daily Telegraph was so blatantly pro conservative (Liberal-National Coalition) that it was almost hilarious.

In those days the Sydney Morning Herald also leaned towards the right, but to a much lesser degree.

Today I am unable to find political bias in any of the Sydney media. So in that sense I would say the quality of the media has significantly improved.

As for "anti-America" -- it's just not present. The media publishes the news, and the readers/watchers/listeners are left to make up their own minds.

The media is not in the least degree anti-America, anti-Bush, anti-Iraq.

It publishes the news -- albeit the most sensational -- but with not a hint of anti-Americanism.

Naturally individual journalists in their commentary articles may express all kinds of viewpoints, but for the most part I pay little attention to these people who are paid to fill up space between advertisements.

Some individual Australians may be anti-American, but such an attitude simply does not exist in the general news coverage, or editorials.

Australia is an ally of the USA, and no doubt will remain so whichever government is in power here.

There are no longer afternoon tabloids in Sydney. I don't recall why they fizzled out, but probably it was due to declining sales as people could watch the early evening newscast on TV.

However I have worked on both the papers we did have -- The Sun and The Daily Mirror. Apart from the bikini girl on page three, they bore little resemblance to the British tabloids.

Naturally as they relied largely on impulse buying, there had to be a dramatic story on page 1, and an eye-catching banner to go with it.

However they did not resort to concocting stories, and in another posting in this discussion I have quoted an instance of a reporter being sacked for embellishing a story about a bovine in a china shop, without first checking with a superior.

But finally we have our own paparazzi. Actress Nicole Kidman has taken out restraining orders against two photographers who were invading her privacy.

During the illness of the former Labor Leader, Mark Latham, he complained of photographers "shooting" through the window of the hospital and, when he returned home, annoying the neighbours to such an extent that they had to call the police.

But please don't judge all journalists by the more offensive ones. The majority of Australian journalists still take their jobs seriously, and do their best to report the news as accurately as possible.

As in any trade/profession, not everyone is tarred with the same brush.

And it is a pretty old trade -- going back to the days of the town crier.