BARVENNON.COM
AUSTRALIAN DIARY
FEBRUARY 2010.
POLITICS MURDOCH STYLE
It might appear that Kevin has not chosen his enemies wisely.
For a while there I thought he was cuddling up to Rupert by keeping the
book subsidy going, which I thought might have benefited Bay Books.
Or maybe the book subsidy was not enough. However the
tone of the Murdoch press has been quite anti-Rudd in the last few
weeks. Just to make a list:
- Refugees.
- The quarter billion dollars to the free to air TV stations
for nothing
- The global warming subsidies fiasco, ($2b for Batts, $1b for
solar cells, $?b for solar hot water)
- Massive failure of Copenhagen
- The Whaling promise broken.
- The Hospital promise broken.
- The simmering cauldron about education in maths and science.
- And of course, the beatification of Tony Abbott.
Rupert is a very shrewd boy. It is my observation that he
usually throws his weight onto the balance after the election is
announced (i.e. the last couple of months before we vote). The
next federal election could be a year away. Following that train
of thought, this threat is just a warning. If Kevinator makes
peace offers (Rupert gets a big bribe) it could be that the Murdoch
press would not find quite so much to complain about over the next few
months. And Tony might not be such a poster boy.
I have said elsewhere that Rupert has printers ink instead of
blood. But to keep those presses rolling, he needs gold.
And times are hard!
MARSHALL MACLUHAN
Decades ago Marshal
Macluhan identified "hot" and "cool" media. (In a
book called "The media is the massage") "Hot" media was
communication via a single sense, "cool" media passed the message via
two or more senses. So disembodied speech or print was "hot"
while TV or movies were "cool".
With "hot" media, he speculated, the intellect was more intensely
involved. The reader or listener had to maintain a strand of
logic. The individual had to think in a linear fashion.
Cool media on the other hand, was "holistic". The individual
would garner a non-linear impression of the communication.
Macluhan observed that the majority of people pre the TV era were most
influenced by "hot" media, and came to conclusions by a chain of
logic.. People who were exposed as children to TV were
influenced by that "cool" media to think in a "holistic" fashion.
I confess to a possible bias, since
TV was not available to me until I was in my twenties. I would
therefore likely be a "hot"
thinker. I would like to make the further observation that
the Internet, being mostly print, is a "hot" medium, so perhaps the
populace is again moving
back to the historical balance between "hot" and "cool" thinkers.
Which leads to a further observation. Why is it that hot media
such as newspapers
and radio seems to predominantly support the conservative side of
the political spectrum, while TV and movies seem to most heavily
promote the "liberal" side of politics? Both hot and cool media
address the same ambition, which is how to solve the major problems of
the
world*. They differ widely in the methods that they suggest.
Of course, I being a "hot" thinker, suspect that only "hot" thinkers
have the patience to follow the rational policy determinations
disbursed by hot media. Allan Jones, Rush Limbough or Bill
O'Reilly. The spectacles shown on TV and films such as those by
Al Gore and Michael Moore leave me uninspired.
My "cool" friends also choose the same ambition, but
accept uncritically the emotive images provided by their own favored
media. It's not that they are dumb. It's just that "cool"
thinkers are affected more by images than by rationality.
* The major problems of the world like world peace, global warming,
famine, disease,
poverty etc.
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