Comments (2)

• Paul, thanks for your comment. At one stage in recent months on the letters page in the Australian Financial Review the editors indulged us for a moment or two talking among ourselves. One of the writers ventured to write that there were a mere dozen or so of us across the country.
  
  Just to note too that this recreation of my exchange with Joel includes a little rewriting of the original exchange which slightly muddies the clarity, especially in the first passage.
  Posted by Patrick Hockey

  10 April 2025
• Joel Deane, not to belabour the repartee, but I side with Patrick Hockey regarding voter indifference. How often would the average Joe take a quarter hour to email the letters section of one of our major newspapers concerning a political issue? Or contact their local state or federal member, or a minister or an Opposition bench warmer? Sure, there is a cohort of voters who actively pursue such activities (and I applaud them, I'm one of those same tragics) but I'd suggest the cohort is miniscule. I agree with Patrick Hockey, we are much more likely to couch-sit and groan into oblivion until the cows amble home (my words) rather than lift a keyboard finger or an iPhone to convey our discontent.
  
  However, your observation that our media is ‘dangerously inbred’ is spot on. The year journalism qualifications became tertiary (1978), when a newspaper cadetship was no longer enough, was the year the floodgates began to open not only to a massive influx of ‘qualified’ graduates into the profession but a conga line of prospectives both tarred with the same brush and moulded by mostly mediocre practitioners who'd privileged the then safe halls of academia over the daily grit and grind of the profession. With the vast increase in institutional sites and course accessibility over the last three decades, tertiary journalism study has become a cascading self-serving monolith unto itself. Henry Ford himself well may give the churning homogenous product more than a cursory nod of approval.
  Posted by Paul Dawson

  07 April 2025