gatewatching

This is my first post upon re-entry to academic life - I am now lecturing at the University of Wollongong and I am based in the beautiful Illawarra region. I’ll have more time and capacity to devote to my participation in this blog from now on, and I’m able to have a broader view of the issues Gatewatching has always dealt with, now that I’m no longer neck deep in the business of being a full-time practitioner.

The occasion for this post is the wash-up from Katherine Wilson’s hoaxing of Keith Windschuttle. I’m a little late on this, and my only excuse is the trauma of moving cities for the sixth time in five years. Most readers who are familiar with the Australian media and blogosphere will be across the details, so I won’t rehearse them here. If you don’t know what I’m referring to, and want a blow-by-blow account from near the centre of the action, check out the archive over at Margaret Simons’ place. There are also many astute analyses of the situation online.  For mine, Graham Young’s at On Line Opinion is the most sustained and productive reflection on the incident to date, even if I don’t necessarily agree with all of the conclusions.

First, a disclaimer: I enjoyed the hoax immensely, I think it worked, I think Windschuttle had it coming, and I think his excuses exceeded even the hoax itself for entertainment value. Among other things, his explanations show him appealing for slack that he has never been prepared to cut for other scholars. I think Margaret Simons behaved ethically throughout, and in my view most suggestions that the hoax wasn’t worth doing proceed largely from political or personal axe-grinding.

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Graham Young, blogging, citizen journalism academia, blogging, citizen journalism, Crikey, Graham Young, journalism, Larvatus Prodeo, Margaret Simons, newspapers

(Crossposted from snurb.info - for full coverage of the CCi conference, see here.)

Brisbane.
The post-lunch session at the CCi conference starts for me with a panel on citizen journalism which involves my colleague Jason Wilson from Youdecide2007 (and Gatewatching.org), Larvatus Prodeo’s Mark Bahnisch, and Graham Young from Online Opinion. Their theme is the role of citizen journalism in the 2007 Australian federal election.

Mark Bahnisch speaks first, and highlights the fact that news blogging and citizen journalism is a form of work, and in the longer term cannot be sustained simply by opposition to government and mainstream media. The latter perception persists both amongst detractors and proponents of citizen journalism, however, even in spite of evidence to the contrary. Mark points to his own experience in the 2007 election campaign, running and contributing to LP as well as New Matilda, Crikey, and various other news and commentary outlets - this is a significant workload which in most cannot be sustained on a purely voluntary basis. (Indeed, Mark did receive pay for some of these activities.)

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Graham Young, citizen journalism academic, blogosphere, citizen journalism, conferences, Graham Young, journalism, Larvatus Prodeo, youdecide2007

Yesterday, Possum did a piece for Crikey (reproduced on his blog) which was a great take-down of some MSM reporting of some pretty inconsequential movements in the Newspoll numbers. Poss reckons the Oz (especially the Shanahany bits) is back to their old tricks - spinning, shifting the goalposts, and generally trying to make things look worse than they are for the PM.

If you’d rather rely on qualitative polling than the hunches of Dennis to get an insight into what people thought about the budget a little while back, check out Graham Young’s write-up of his What the People Want polling series in On Line Opinion this morning.

The summary? “Overall the budget didn’t evoke strong emotions and was incremental rather than revolutionary.” Kevin Rudd consolidated things, and although Graham’s survey didn’t include the fuelwatch fracas, it’s likely that the long-term effect of the last week or two will be closer to the findings of his polling than the guesses/spin on the meaning of quantitaive polling by gallery journos.

Graham Young budget, Dennis Shanahan, Graham Young, poll wars, polling, Possum Comitatus, The Australian, What the People Want

Before, during and after the last Federal Election, psephological bloggers put MSM noses out of joint. They also demonstrated the value of alternative online sources of political information to a lot of people for the first time. Although some blogs like Poll Bludger, Possum’s Pollytics, Simon Jackman and Mumble had actually been around for awhile, an impending, much-anticipated election, and maybe (ironically) the MSM’s very prominent fulminations against them, brought these psephs to the attention of a wider audience.

The audience stayed because these blokes (and they are all blokes) write well, know what they’re talking about, offer comprehensive information archives and/or new and useful interpretations of polling material, and have an infectious enthusiasm for the mechanics of electoral politics and polling. In the last little while, I’ve interviewed both Possum and William Bowe from Poll Bludger. These interviews will be appearing soon in published forms, but what came through strongly in my conversations with both of them was that their main motivations were pretty altruistic. They were driven mostly by a desire to share information and knowledge, t to talk to others with similar interests and (especially in Possum’s case) to correct the grave calumnies in the MSM’s “interpretations” of polling. Of course, they also get kudos, job offers (Possum now writes regularly for Crikey), lots of readers and the pleasure of the odd smackdown, but fundamentally they’re working to educate their audience in a pretty specialised branch of knowledge. (That’s how the blogosphere “gift economy” works, as Margaret Simons book argues far more eloquently than I could.) As a result, many readers, including myself, now have the words “margin of error” forever embazoned on their minds, will never read the Australian’s Newspoll wrap in the same way again, and wonder daily whether their $1.30 is really money well spent.

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Graham Young has started releasing a polling series measuring the impact of the Rudd Government’s first budget. Graham is On Line Opinion’s founder and chief, and our colleague in the ARC citizen journalism project. But he’s also been pioneering the use of online qualitative polling over an extended period, and lately he’s been testing new tools that analyse his panel’s responses in innovative ways.

Although there’s more to come, Graham’s results so far suggest that the Government got the politics of the budget right. WTPW’s real interest is in its qualitative insights, but the raw numbers show that Swan’s budget was a hit with the Labor base, and has entrenched the sense that Dr Nelson is incompetent, even among Liberal voters. Graham concludes:

This poll was taken before (Nelson’s) address-in-reply so it may have improved after that. However, what it says is that while the budget didn’t win Rudd any votes, it lost Nelson some. You’ll have to wait for the qual to find out why, but my strong suspicion would be that it is to do with his performance.

In the first batch of qual, Graham analyses what the panel said they approved of in the budget, and uses lexical analysis software Leximancer to pull out the main threads, or “concepts”, in their responses.

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Graham Young budget, Glenn Milne, Graham Young, Kevin Rudd, Leximancer, polling, Possum Comitatus, Wayne Swan, What the People Want

One of the topics that consistently exercises the Australian blogosphere is global warming. What’s at issue, of course, is whether or not human, industrial activity is contributing to an increase in global temperatures, and possible environmental catastrophe.

There is an orthodox scientific view on this, as expressed in documents like the IPCC Report, the Stern Report, the Garnaut Report etc. It’s fair to say that most left-leaning bloggers and many centrists accept this view. But there are prominent blogospheric voices - including very popular bloggers like Tim Blair, Andrew Bolt and Jennifer Marohasy - who hold to a minority opinion that not all is as it seems in climate science.

Variously, they argue that climate change is not happening (or it isn’t as severe as we’re told it is), and/or that it is happening but it has nothing to do with human activity, and/or that the scientific orthodoxy is really just groupthink/counter-enlightenment propaganda/institutional capture by leftist scientists/scientific careerism.

The debates in this area can, of course, be quite heated. Each side has been ranging its favoured experts and arguments in tetchy exchanges for years. What’s fascinating is that it amounts to precisely the kind of thing that has come up in recent discussions here - an intra-elite debate, for which there is only so much space in a gatekept MSM, being carried on and maintained on a range of prominent and not-so-prominent blogs, which has ongoing implications in terms of its possible influence on public debate and policy. I’m not concerned here to take a position on global warming - I’m more interested in how it’s playing out on A-list blogs and prominent independent news spaces.

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blogging blogging, Bolt, Brisbane, climate change, Graham Young, intra-elite debate, Jennifer Marohasy, John Quiggin, On Line Opinion, public sphere, Tim Blair