Less spin and more substance, perhaps?

FROM MY CORNER .. with Ann Brunswick


Many respected and influential media organisation, such as The Indie, regularly complain about the “spin” politicians put on the facts in an effort to ensure stories are published that cast them, their party or government in a favourable light. But is the practice confined only to our pollies? Of course not.

Take for instance a story that appeared recently in our own dearly beloved morning tabloid, Rupert Murdoch’s The Courier-Mail and other News Limited publications. The story centred on the fact that some federal MPs who were critical of the industrial relations tactics employed by Qantas had also previously accepted gifts and hospitality from the airline. The article cited seating upgrades, wine, tickets to AFL games, and even laptop computers.
The thrust of the story seemed to be that the MPs in question were hypocrites by accepting the airline’s give-aways, and then turning around and bagging it. But to my mind the story simply proved that those MPs who had legally accepted and declared gifts from the airline had not been influenced by such goodies.
Surely if the offering and receipt of freebies was a key point, then the real story would have been about those MPs who accepted them and stayed silent about Qantas or lauded their behaviour. Yet The Courier-Mail chose to “spin” the facts in the opposite direction.
All the pollies listed happened to be Labor or Greens MPs. But any suggestion that the story was yet another example of pro-Coalition bias within the News Limited stable is a discussion for another time and column. Now as readers would know, since the days of the Wright brothers, no journo anywhere on the planet has ever sought or accepted any such freebies even if offered. So the reporter was on safe ground in putting pen to paper, or finger to keyboard on the subject.
Surely if the basis of the story was to expose hypocrisy, then it could have been written and published only by a media organisation that had never itself fallen victim to such corporate entreaties.

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Speaking of The Courier-Mail, those of you among its ever-dwindling readership base may have noticed the series of “red tape” and extra costs imposed on small business in our state.

Certainly there is room for all governments to cut the cost of doing business, and certainly we do seem to have a lot of public servants whose productivity does, shall we say, offer room for improvement. But big business itself can help those in small business too, not just leave it to governments.
For instance, maybe major metropolitan newspapers should tie their ad rates to circulation figures. If that had happened, then in the past few years small business operators would have seen the cost of advertising their goods and services in The Courier-Mail drop considerably. Instead, rates invariably go up each year across the entire Murdoch stable.
I also recall that some years ago TheIndie ran a yarn on the inflated rates applied to adverts The Courier-Mail runs for a specific class of legal business –licensed brothels. The exact figures escape me, but at that stage legal brothels were charged well above standard rates for their classified ads and with little justification. Now there’s something The Courier-Mail itself could do itself to cut “red tape” and business costs.

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Without wanting this column to harp on the foibles of the media, an article in the Gold Coast Bulletin caught my eye the other day. It was a story trumpeting the planned opening of a new Aldi supermarket at Runaway Bay.

Now you may or may not realise, but Aldi is a European company. In fact it is headquartered in a particular European nation, namely Germany. So my questions is whether the opening paragraph of the Bully's story should have been tweaked ever so slightly. It ran as: “German supermarket giant Aldi has opened a new battlefield in the battle for supermarket supremacy in Runaway Bay.”
Is it just me being over-sensitive, as is my wont, or do the words “German” and “battlefield” suggest some sort of national stereotype, given the events in Europe in the first half of last century?