Reform is one of those Alice in Wonderland words which mean what the speaker wants them to mean. They are often shorthand for why something or other you believe ought to be done as soon as possible – irrespective of the evidence one way or the other.

Reform has a moderately recent history – a bit like the word progress which once just meant moving forward rather than carrying a more progressive subtext.  In the late 18^th and 19^th centuries it meant political and social reform around voting rights, anti-slavery and a host of other Whiggish and Chartist demands. By the middle of the 19^th century it had been supplanted in some circles by the word revolution, although a quick modern day reading of Marx’s Communist Manifesto demands would probably not frighten many modern liberals even if Maurice Newman, or that former Maoist Keith Windschuttle, might have a problem with some of them. read more

A while ago the blog wrote about the manufacture of ignorance. A corollary is the manufacture of outrage.

Tony Jaques in his latest newsletter on issues management recently highlighted the problem of synthetic outrage. See

http://us1.campaign-archive2.com/?u=12234fd351f8df7c1f43248ea&id=48d81fe82f

“Social media has proved a powerful tool for raising legitimate issues onto the public agenda. But it has also facilitated a flood of confected issues and manufactured outrage,” he said. “Identifying the difference between the two is now an emerging challenge for issue managers and other senior executives. When can you reasonably ignore a confected issue and when might a real issue slip under the radar and cause reputational damage?” read more

Newspaper circulation and readership figures are depressing for those brought up in an era when print was important. Not that it’s now  totally unimportant, just that it is neither the dominant influence nor the first port of call for PR people seeking to communicate with audiences.

But the latest Roy Morgan readership figures comparing 2013 and 2014 readership are interesting and, in some respects, surprising. The blog realises the newspaper industry publishes its own figures but the Morgan ones are still pertinent and don’t get much attention in the mainstream media. In terms of readership totals the only newspapers where Monday to Friday readership were up were the Illawarra Mercury, Townsville Bulletin and the Northern Territory News while the Daily Telegraph lost more than 100,000 readers – presumably in the last case a 100,000 people no longer felt the need to consult a tabloid version of a Liberal Party internal magazine. In the case of the Illawarra Mercury and the Terror the increases were around 3,000 and 2,000 respectively. It might not seem like much, but represented increases of 6.6% and 5.4% at a time when everybody else was going backward. read more

Adam Smith, Karl Marx and John Maynard Keynes had three things in common – they all wrote extraordinarily well; they all went beyond pure economics and wove various insights from other areas into their work; and, they all share the problem that both their most fervent supporters and opponents constantly misrepresent what they said. read more

How will Tony Abbott be remembered? That might sound a tad premature particularly when the blog, along with Rod Cameron and a few others, declared authoritatively after Abbott was first elected leader that he was unelectable and could well be equally wrong again.

But, as the blog bitterly remembers from Victorian politics in the 1970s and 80s, once the leadership issue is out and about the media finds it much easier, and more fun, to write about leadership than other more complex subjects and the outcome is inevitable. So, much to the chagrin of Labor and others, it seems increasingly likely that he might actually be gone. Nevertheless, while the Liberals will be keen to ‘move on’, as everyone in politics says when trying to distract attention from train wrecks, his political impact has been significant even though that impact is more like that of Herostratus in Ephesus than that of builders of monuments or policy achievements. read more

Post-colonial societies face many complex issues– but like many countries facing complex issues – it is sometimes productive for them to focus on some significant symbolic ones, such as changing the names of places and things, to identify new priorities and new realities.

In India the names of cities and places have changed a number of times since independence – in some cases to remove British names and in others to erase memories of earlier colonial masters such as the Mughals. In lower Manhattan, some streets still bear their pre-revolutionary names and throughout the country from Charleston to Boston old English names survive, just as they do in Australia, demonstrating that change doesn’t require rejection of all the colonial past. read more

At a party last week the blog fell into conversation with someone who was shocked by the Murdoch media reporting on ABC audience share and the fact that the facts in the story were not actually facts but rather a distortion of significant proportion.

The conversation rapidly became a discussion of the fourth estate concept with the blog arguing that the concept of the media as an independent, fearless fourth estate truth teller was always a myth and that the times when media had acted in that role were the exception rather than the rule. The blog has been trying for years to get one of its quotes to appear in the media. The quote is in response to the question from journalists covering that perennial story – do PR people distort media coverage and have too much influence on the media? The response: name a PR person who has done more to distort media coverage than a Northcliffe, Murdoch, Hearst, Beaverbrook or Packer. Needless to say the blog is still waiting for a journalist to use the quote. read more

In 18^th century London the place to go for information about stock market speculation, political gossip, news media and the latest books and plays was the coffee house. No doubt some contemporary PR-type person trumpeted that this was a new media channel which could transform communications like no other medium before and that, for a large fee, they would explain why it was important and how to use it. read more

A US National Science Foundation survey recently found that a third of Americans deny the reality of evolution and believe that humans and the rest of the world’s animals have always existed in their current form and about a quarter believe the Sun revolves around the Earth.

The survey has been comparing scientific knowledge in various countries for more than a decade and tracking responses to questions about evolution, astronomy, radioactivity and other scientific facts. The questions are in true or false form and it is worth noting that some other countries do pretty badly too and that, before we scoff too loudly, we don’t know how badly Australia would fare in a similar survey although we do know, however, that the Abbott Government took more than a year to appoint a Science Minister and seems largely ignorant of the debate sparked over past decades by Vannevar Bush’s 1945 publication Science: The Endless Frontier. read more