Speech celebrating the naming of the Alan Whittaker Gatehouse November 2 2017
On behalf of the Whittaker Memorial Committee I would like to welcome everyone here – especially the Albert Park College students who have been making a film about the events of 1928 and written a commemorative poem which they will read shortly.
There are two very encouraging developments on the fake news front. The first is the emergence of a fail-safe system of evaluating the truth about a claim. It works very simply – if a politician or anyone else immediately brands any claim, accusation or information ‘fake news’ one can automatically conclude that the claim, accusation or information is true and correct.
The blog is taking a break – not for maintenance this time – but while it’s away here are some odds and sods which have caught its attention lately.
PR ethics
Given the controversy over the PR company Bell Pottinger’s issues it is worth noting that the UK Chartered Institute of Public Relations (CIPR) set up an ethics hotline some two years ago to provide advice to members on ethical questions. So far it has received nine calls. It should be said that Bell Pottinger was a member of the UK industry body, not the CIPR, although individual employees may be CIPR members.
No one will ever convince the US Environmental Protection Agency Administrator, Scott Pruitt, of the reality of climate change. Well at least while he stays in the pocket of the Koch brothers and the administration as a whole continues to be staffed by former lobbyists who have gone from spreading climate change denial propaganda to being put in charge of decisions on the problem.
The Bully Pulpit has been a US term for presidential speeches which seek to influence, define or shape public policy.
The phrase was coined by Teddy Roosevelt to describe an excellent platform for his reform agenda. At the time the word ‘bully’, one often used by Roosevelt, conveyed the sense of superb or wonderful rather than something which might describe a Trump tweet.
The blog’s neighbour, friend and former client manages to get lots of letters published in The Age along with a number of other regulars who obviously strike a chord with whoever is left on the outsourced letters page subs desk.
He sent the blog copy of his latest, not expecting it to get a run in The Age, but the blog thought it was worth a mention particularly given that the ‘little lying rodent’ – as one of his colleagues called him – is re-emerging like a creature from the Black Lagoon to join his acolyte, Tony Abbot (sic), on the same sex marriage campaign trail.
The last blog post focussed on the resilience of facts and how online search can generally uncover them. However, a distinction needs to be drawn between searching for facts and how facts and news are received.
The distinction is important when it comes to how people respond to online news feeds, how they select them, and how effective the various fact checking services attached to some of the services actually are. Arguably, however, while these issues are important they are neither new nor are they simply the product of the proliferation of online media.
Facts, despite all the talk about ‘fake news’, are still remarkably robust.
Surprisingly, perhaps even counter-intuitively, part of the evidence for this can be derived from Wikipedia. While Wikipedia is the bane of academics and the delight of firms making plagiarism detection software it provides a consistent fact base for online searchers.
There have been a number of shameful episodes in Australian history.
The dispossession of indigenous Australians and the many massacres committed against them will always be the worst of them. But the Australian treatment of East Timor (Timor Leste) will for years to come be regarded as a case study of Australian duplicity and consent to war crimes – all for a half a century of a determined attempt to procure benefits from Timor Strait oil and deliver some of it to the people who were the architects of the policy.
“History does not repeat, but it does instruct.” A few days after posting last week’s effort about learning from history the blog picked up Timothy Snyder’s new book On Tyranny and the quote above was the book’s first line.
Snyder wrote the book Bloodlands which is an astonishing record of the death and destruction in Europe in the 20th century caused by Hitler and Stalin. In the latest book he applies his deep knowledge of the impact of tyranny on humanity and derives ‘Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century’ for those living today.