Today Tonight
Last August, the ABC’s Media Watch highlighted a Today Tonight report on young muslims for editing together a series of interviews dishonestly. Though it was obvious that the vibe of the story had been twisted in that way that Today Tonight does so well, one interview’s cut in particular really irritated me. A bloke named Ahmed was quoted by Today Tonight as saying:
I mean you have all this talk about integration. Why hasn’t the Muslim community assimilated or why doesn’t it integrate into the Australian community as quick as other communities. Well, at the end of the day OK, we will never integrate.
When in fact, he went on to say:
… we will never integrate in the way other communities integrate purely because of the fact that you have to draw the line with what your idea of integration is and what our idea of integration and accepting, you know, accepting the practices of other people.
That’s my emphasis up there by the way. I don’t completely understand the integration issue. I don’t see why anyone cares whether muslims around the country are having a barbecue and watching the cricket. Does an Australian immigrant have further responsibilities past making sure he or she can communicate sensibly with other Australians? Anyhow, the reason I’m highlighting this is because according to Media Watch this week our TV watchdog — the Australian Communications and Media Authority (ACMA) — doesn’t think Today Tonight was naughty. This from page four of their report:
The latter part of the quote which was not broadcast did not alter the statement “we will not integrate”.
Really. Hmmm. Interesting. Try chopping a statement like “A bumblebee does not fly in the way that birds do” in half and see how much sense it makes. If the part I highlighted in bold wasn’t there, I could see the ACMA’s position. But it’s there, and it qualifies “We will not integrate” very strongly.
On a basic level, I’m a bit concerned that we can have an organisation like the ACMA and that they can look at Today Tonight on any night and think “Hmm, yes, fair enough.” There needs to be a clause preventing a program from being full of shit put into the Code of Practice. Just think, it could have protected us from Skithouse too.
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Andy
February 21st, 2006 at 6:41 pm
You know, I think the Daily Show edits their interviews to be unfavourable to the interviewee.
I hope that anyone who watches current affairs programs are aware of the spin the show puts on their stories but for these shows to survive their must be plenty of uninformed people who watch these shows.
This topics nicely covers a report on the dangers of using a DS I meant to link to recently. Nintendo are being accused of letting chatroom predators talk to children. The report manages to ignore that Nintendo have gone out of their way to sanitise online gaming. My favourite part: “Nintendo confirms what happened to Emily is possible but the company claims that person must also be using another DS system and be within 65 feet.”
Tom
February 21st, 2006 at 7:04 pm
You know, Today Tonight is both not a comedy show but a news program and subject to Australian rules and Code of Practices forbidding the twisting of interviewees’ meaning. Eat your sarcasm please.
I don’t like to speculate as to the exact percentage of people who would take Today Tonight (and ACA) at face value but in my darker moments I place it at around seventy percent.
That last sentence is typical of the media these days. “The company claims”? Do some research and find out the device’s actual capabilities, you idiots. Then report them as fact. Please.
Is it possible to boost the DS’ wireless range?
Andy
February 21st, 2006 at 9:19 pm
You know that my first reaction to anything is sarcasm, even when the topic is worth discussing.
I can hear the emphasis the presenter would put on the the word ‘claims’ when I read the text. The whole article is so ridiculous that the sites that I saw mention could only manage incredulity as its fallacious nature is so obvious to a gamer that it doesn’t need rebuttal but I can’t help myself. My first impression from that story is that it is probably a teenage boy who thinks he’s clever by using a swear word as his screen name.
I did find one blog about this story which conjectures on how chatroom predators might lure unsuspecting children into dangerous situations using a DS.
The comments point out (aside from the ability of the media to get their facts wrong and make a controversy) the worrying thing is that if someone is sending messages via a pictochat then they are close enough to see the child and do whatever evil chatroom predators do to children.
There’s nothing I know of that boosts the signal for a DS but it shouldn’t be hard to make if you knew the details of the DS wireless signal. You could hide them in bushes to create a signal all the way down your street and prey on children from your house.
My favourite comment from that blog: “The Pictochatter is coming from INSIDE THE HOUSE!”
Shannon
February 22nd, 2006 at 6:50 am
I wanted to post this under Andy’s blog entry with a screencap of bittorrent and a title that read something like “speeds to make your eyes bleed”, but I can’t find it. Hell, I cant even find Andy’s blog. There are some serious navigation flaws here, to whom it may concern.
Anyhoo -OUTSTANDING CONCEPT. I just had a make your eyes bleed moment. With my shiny new iinet connection (adsl 1 mind you, not the super cool one) and a LAN connection instead of wireless, I’m getting around 150kb/s down speeds in IRC for my stargate and BSG episodes. Yay woo whatever I hear you say. The REALLY COOL part is this: it takes less than 42 minutes to download at that rate! No more waiting!! Just start downloading, give it a minute’s head start, and then start watching!! The download will beat you (watching) to the end by about 5 minutes!! HAH!!!
No. More. Waiting. For. Episodes. To. Download.
Ever.
Wow.
I’m having a moment.
Tom
February 22nd, 2006 at 6:57 am
Glad to hear the internet thing is picking up! I’m impressed you can watch like that. The advantage of IRC downloading I suppose. With bittorrent you can’t guarantee that you’re downloading the beginning of the file first (indeed it’s quite unlikely).
For those not paying attention, there’s just one blog on grapefruit, and in theory, we all post on it. In theory. Searching in the blog for “eyes bleed” takes you to the right place.
andy
February 22nd, 2006 at 4:22 pm
While the default setting for Bittorrent is to download whatever is available to maximise speed, some clients have an, option to d/l the file in order. Then you need a media player that plays partial .avi files. WMP won’t, I think vlc will.
Shannon
February 22nd, 2006 at 5:21 pm
VLC is my best friend.
Pfft. I did run a search. There’s a search bar at the top of the page. Of course, it doesn’t say “I only search articles, if you wont information on something that we happened to talk about our blogs (sorry, the one blog) then you need to click on blog and find its own special search bar. The two individual search bars are then right one beneath the other, but are still very different things.”
You need to know specifically what you are looking for, before you go looking for it. That way, you can search the right area. Never mind if you cant remember where specifically something was said – cos then you would need to, you know, search for it.. and we can’t have that!
Ok great big smiley. Wallow in the sarcasm. No narciness.
Tom
February 22nd, 2006 at 5:26 pm
Yeah, VLC is pretty good like that. Most troublesome media is powerless before its might.
In a way, I’d rather download everything first so that I can be absolutely sure my internet isn’t going to cut out halfway through watching… But I’ve never had the choice.
My irresponsible media thread has been well and truly hijacked!
andy
February 22nd, 2006 at 5:35 pm
Our wireless network interferes with our video streaming to the tv so it’s not been tried here.
It would be more useful with a movie that takes longer to download but I rarely get a movie downloading fast enough.
iinet says cheltenham gets some dslam action is Q2 2006. I miss the eye bleeding speeds.
Tom
February 22nd, 2006 at 5:38 pm
Unfortunately, as I use a CMS called textpattern for the blog (to allow normal people to edit it easily) and my own code for the articles, it’s nigh-on-impossible to merge the two searches usefully. However, I could easily add a link on the normal search to say “click here to search the blog with these terms”.
No snarkiness taken, don’t worry! I might point out that you did in fact know specifically where it was.
And in case anyone’s wondering, I promise to fix the ‘numbers overlap the comments’ bug soon.
andy
February 22nd, 2006 at 5:59 pm
So it’s not just a problem with IE5?
As for ACA and TT, letter bombs?
Shannon
February 22nd, 2006 at 11:26 pm
For once it would seem IE are only as crappy as everyone else.
They problem have better mail protection at the offices of ACA and TT than they do in the federal government. If I was big business, or the government, or the royals, or any of their common targets, I’d have sent them a good dose of anthrax years ago.