Odd Perspectives

For all that the US and Australia are firm allies, their really is a vast difference in perspective. It’s a concept that has been on my mind for some time, and was brought to the fore by an article - Down Under, Oil for Food Scandal Spins the Other Way.

Cute headline aside (I really hate it when they think them up first) Washington Post columnist, Jefferson Morley was spot on describing the anomaly, at least in relation to the Oil for Food scandal.

“In Australia, the politics of the United Nations Oil for Food scandal have been reversed.
In the United States and Europe, conservative commentators have played up the scandal, noting that French, Russian and British officials who opposed the U.S.-led invasion in 2003 had privately benefited from dealings with Saddam Hussein's regime.

But in Australia, the oil for food story is spinning the other way. Revelations that the Australian Wheat Board (AWB), a government-sanctioned cartel, paid $300 million in kickbacks to the government of Saddam Hussein has pro-war officials on the defensive and critics calling for a wider investigation.”

Although I should point out that India, which must not be underrated, tends to the Australia line on this and other issues.

Morley, it seems, is a media watcher and in that capacity refers to America’s own (well Australia had to get rid of him somehow) Rupert Murdoch. “The Australian …Usually supportive of Howard, the paper rejected his government's explanations and said it was "time for answers."

Strange doings, Jefferson, strange indeed. But it really goes much deeper than that. It could be that Australia simply has a more robust media environment, or perhaps a wider education base. I’ve noted comments from Americans bemoaning their narrow educational experience which limits historical perspectives, for instance.

But I’m not fully convinced on the education tack, the average Australian is no more engaged in the process than their US counterpart.

I believe it really does come back to the media. Murdoch’s empire wouldn’t survive in Australia if he insisted they toe the line like his US properties. There is too many competitive sources who actually work on the principal the “reporting is just that. It is not creating news or rewriting events, it is reporting what happened!” Well, it was something like that when my first editor gave me the lecture.

Even those appalling commercial news segments, composed solely of headline grabs, still reflect the basic truth of the story, even if somewhat hyped up. If Iran says they have ‘enriched uranium’ it is not rendered as the having ‘the bomb.’

The newspapers, including Murdoch’s Australian, are perverse in other ways by US standards. The conservative papers have their ranting conservative columnists, like the noisy Peirs Akerman in the Murdoch stable, but they also run what Americans like to refer to as ‘liberal’ commentators. The luminaries of the loony left are represented, in part, in the Australian by my old cobber Phillip Adams.

Equally the ‘liberal’ rags tend to balance their content with right wing viewpoints. Well, perhaps not so much balance their content as ensure they don’t completely turn off half their potential readership.

As for India, I’ve not really worked out whether their media is split in some partisan sort of way or there is just a tendency to attack authority at every opportunity.

But there is one thing certain; media is business pure and simple. In Australia and India the media respond to their readership (or viewers and listeners), it is about gaining readership and selling advertising.

I really don’t believe the motive of US media owners is any different, which suggests the US media consumers are getting exactly what they want. Well, most of them anyway. Personally I will stick with news sources which report first and clearly differentiate opinion and comment from news.