I always thought CNN Headline News was set us as a wall-to-wall headlines bulletin channel to complement the main CNN channel. Now, it seems they have ratings-chasing O’Reillyesque attack dogs who hound people not just to their graves, but beyond.

If the Naomi Robson episode in West Papua is high farce, the Nancy Grace interview with Melinda Duckett, aired deliberately and unapologetically after Duckett’s suicide, is an outrage.

I’ll let the blogosphere pick up the story.

September 16, 1956: Channel Nine begins transmission with station manager Bruce Gyngell (long before his pretty in pink days) uttering that profound line:

Hello, and welcome to television.

Well it seems that it was actually Janet Gaynor who was the first face on Australian television, during laboratory tests in the 1934. The Ipswich City Council website documents it in detail, but of course we know never to let the facts get in the way of a good anniversary.

But there can be no better way to celebrate the half-century of commercial TV in Australia than that concocted by the people behind Naomi Robson. Summed up succinctly on the editorial page of today’s Sydney Morning Herald:

Naomi Robson, a glamorous and determined reporter, is on her way to save Wa-Wa, a boy marked, perhaps, for consumption by his cannibal tribe. She falls into an elaborate trap set by a fiendishly cunning Indonesian immigration official: she is asked for her visa. Not having a valid one, she and her crew are entombed alive in a three-star hotel. Using only their corporate credit cards, they cut their way to freedom and ratings success.

It’s still 48 hours away from the next episode of Media Watch, but until then we can follow the reportage from the Sydney Morning Herald, the Daily Telegraph and the ABC. (Where is Boris Johnson when you need him?)

Special 72-and-a-bit-years of Australian television celebratory link: the best of Naomi Robson on Youtube.

“More than 9,000 Palestinians are in Israeli jails nowadays; it is a nightmarish number. Anyone who knows the Shin Bet security service and the military justice system can safely assume a significant proportion of them are imprisoned for no reason. Israeli society doesn’t even ask why so many are jailed.”
- Gideon Levy, Ha’aretz, 10.9.06

The English language edition of Ha’aretz has become one of my must-read online newspapers every day. Uncompromisingly critical of Israeli government policy where it is deserved, and the closest thing I have seen to a “balanced” coverage of the Middle East troubles. A comparison with the Jerusalem Post, for example, is an eye-opening experience.

Levy, one of Ha’aretz’s most trenchant columnists, alludes in today’s piece to the hypocrisy over the Israeli government’s reaction to the kidnapping of Gilad Shalit et al, while they at the same time capture dozens of democratically elected Palestinian parliamentarians and have an enormous number of Palestinian citizens behind bars.

Reading Ha’aretz enables me to restore my faith in the goodwill of the Israeli populace. Now if only they could elect a government that could display the same humanity…

Congratulations to a former colleague of mine, Alex Balfour, on his appointment as Head of New Media for the London 2012 Organising Committee - the body which is responsible for staging the Olympic and Paralympic Games in 2012.

Alex, whom I worked alongside (in a cyberspace manner of speaking) with CricInfo between 1996 and 2001, will be responsible for London2012.com, according to the LOCOG press release issued last Friday. Answering to the LOCOG Director of Communications and Public Affairs, Alex will lead the creation, development and management of online structures and facilities for London 2012 over the next six years.

I am sure Alex will excel in his new role and I wish him all the best. Nonetheless, I should draw attention to a factual howler that appears in the LOCOG press release and has found its way into the headings of a few reports on the appointment:

As co-founder and Chairman of CricInfo Alex built one of the world’s largest sports websites from scratch with 20 million customers.

By no stretch of the imagination can Alex be considered a “co-founder” of CricInfo. Alex first became involved with CricInfo in 1995 as a volunteer, a few months before I did, at which time it already had an established presence on the internet as a gopher database hosted on a server at the University of Oregon. CricInfo was founded by Dr Simon King in 1993, and while a number of US-based Indian expats came on board in those formative days of IRC, telnet and gopher, Alex’s involvement was still two years away.

Alex was, however, a foundation member of CricInfo’s board of directors when it became a corporation towards the end of 1999, when he was employed by us as Head of Business Development. (Does this make him a “co-founder” of CricInfo? I’m probably one too, having been one of 53 foundation shareholders in the business when it was corporatised.) He became chairman of CricInfo Ltd towards the end of 2001, after a financial near-death experience saw the departure of Dr King from the company and the retrenchment of a large number of its staff, including me.

A tribute to another of the industrialised world’s finest telecommunication institutions, the United Arab Emirates’ Etisalat.

(Here’s some further reading on the subject.)

Wikipedia Celebrates 750 Years Of American Independence | The Onion - America’s Finest News Source

What happens when one of my favourite websites takes the piss out of another of my favourite websites?

One of the great moments of Australian media legend came when the Daily Telegraph in Sydney was announcing to its readers the death of Joe Stalin in 1953. They prepared a banner reading “Stalin Dead - Official”. The Tele’s owner, Frank Packer (father of Kerry, grandpop of Jamie) ordered the banner be altered to read “Stalin Dead - Hooray”.

Half a century later, put together the death of another self-serving power-hungry economy-destroyer, Ken Lay, and a Daily Telegraph alumnus, its former editor Col Allan, now in the saddle at Rupert Murdoch’s New York Post. And voila.

All I have to say on the passing of Kenny Boy is to re-visit a joke that was doing the rounds a few years ago:

Feudalism: You have two cows. Your lord takes some of the milk.

Fascism: You have two cows. The government takes both, hires you to take care of them and sells you the milk.

Communism: You have two cows. You must take care of them, but the government takes all the milk.

Capitalism: You have two cows. You sell one and buy a bull. Your herd multiplies, and the economy grows. You sell them and retire on the income.

Enron Capitalism: You have two cows. You sell three of them to your publicly listed company, using letters of credit opened by your brother-in-law at the bank, then execute a debt-equity swap with an associated general offer so that you get all four cows back, with a tax exemption for five cows. The milk rights of the six cows are transferred through an intermediary to a Cayman Island company secretly owned by the majority shareholder who sells the rights to all seven cows back to your listed company. The Enron annual report says the company owns eight cows, with an option on one more.

Chris Masters’ long-awaited unauthorised biography of infamous Sydney squawkmeister Belford Parrott has been shelved. The book, tentatively titled “Jonestown”, was intended as a follow-up to Masters’ Four Corners report on Mr Parrott in 2002.

The ABC issued a press release this afternoon, possibly the first press release I can ever recall announcing the non-publication of a book. The decision, according to ABC Enterprises director Robyn Watts, was made for “purely commercial reasons”.

Ms Watts went on to say:

“ABC Enterprises has a clear responsibility to deliver a commercial return to the ABC. To proceed with publication will almost certainly result in a commercial loss which would be irresponsible.”

While I get back to reading “Simply Stuffed” by HG Nelson, feel free to take a browse through the ABC Shop’s book section at all those titles responsibly published by ABC Enterprises to deliver a commercial return.

An extraordinary situation in Chittagong on Sunday when police used excessive force to stop a press photographer from entering a cricket arena, followed with a sit-down protest by his colleagues on the pitch, delaying the start of the match between Bangladesh and Australia. This, followed by further clashes between the police and the journalists, putting one reporter in hospital in a coma.

I’m covering this story extensively in my cricket blog. If you’re interested in this rather unlikely attack on the working media, I’ll see you there.

Blurring the line between employees and directors is poor corporate governance and presents a potential conflict of interest: the immediate interest of workers, after all, is not always in line with that of the long-term health of the company or its shareholders.
- Editorial, The Australian, 27.3.06

The “company” in question is the Australian Broadcasting Corporation. The issue is Friday’s announcement of a new stage in Johnny’s Jihad, the abolition of the staff-elected director on the board of the ABC.

Mull over that quote again (with the knowledge that The Australian is owned by a corporation under the wing of one Keith Rupert Murdoch) and consider it in context with that other major platform of Johnny’s Jihad which comes into force today - none other than “WorkChoices“.

And there’s something else to ponder - why, if you enter http://www.workchoices.gov.au, does it take you to https://www.workchoices.gov.au ? Why, perchance, does the workchoices site have to be on a secure server?