Some handy tips from the Clooney and Murrow School of Journalism

Good Night, and Good Luck, George Clooney's superb account of CBS journalist Edward R. Murrow's very public fight with self-annointed Communist exterminator US Senator Joseph McCarthy during 1953, is a film that deserves all the public praise it's been lumped with over the last year or so. In the climate of fear that followed the Second World War, Murrow became the first journalist to publicly question the tactics and investigative methods used by McCarthy when questioning members of the public over their Communist links, a time when hearsay and innuendo were considered hard evidence just so long as they suggested guilt. Clooney's film, which he wrote, directed and played a staring role, is not subtle in its themes - the power and the responsibility of the press, the basic right to one's civil liberties, and commercial coercion inside our media - and is not subtle in suggesting Murrow's crusade, and courage, is as important today as it was in the staunchly paranoid environment of the 1950s in which he worked. Mild coercion is obviously not what Clooney aims for, at least not in Good Night, and Good Luck, although one can always argue the average American cinema-goer may have trouble with any level of nuance, so I'll let Clooney can pass on that one.

If you're a journalism student, reporter or media commentator - and I guess I'm a conflation of all three - then you can't go a minute in Good Night, and Good Luck without either throwing your hands up in despair, ready to give up on the whole notion of a free press or becoming energised to fight even harder for it - mostly, for me anyway, it was the later. At one point during the film though, I couldn't help wondering why us journos are so often at our happiest when we're feasting on and devouring our own, rather than the carcass of some deserving - notice the word deserving - politician. One of the film's most wrenching moments involves not Murrow or McCarthy, but fellow CBS journalist and television host Don Hollenbeck, who commits suicide after his wife leaves him, and after he is subsequently labelled a "pinko" and a former Commie writer by a prominent US newspaper columnist. Again Clooney doesn't just hint, he makes his point loud and clear, but it's duplicitous this time: sure Clooney wants to make sure we understand it was America's new-found culture of fear, and the stigma associated with being labelled a Communist in the 50s that led to Hollenbeck's death, but he's also taking a slightly more benign swipe at the media's bloodthirsty nature in general. Even after Hollenbeck's suicide, instead of an obituary or a carefully worded "we went too far", the columnist responsible for labelling him a dirty "pinko" decides to use the reporter's death as an opportunity to dig the knives in even further. It was one point in the film where I questioned whether it is actually all worth it - the bloody smears, the rumours and the gossip, and all the other shit you have to put up with when your name's in print.

Invariably you have to have a thick skin when you're working in journalism, and I have to admit that one of the few things I admire about someone like Andrew Bolt is his ability to take a whipping. But many columnists, along with a few reporters, just don't fight fair, playing very loose with the facts, and with little regard for their consequences. I know I'm not really one to go anywhere near a highhorse, but I try, as hard as possible, to engage the ideas, and not the person who's writing them. There's a wider debate to be had here about the responsibility bloggers need to bare if they expect themselves to become entrenched in the free exchange of ideas and become respectible media players, but that's another debate for another time. But just remember, and I've said it before, this is journalism fellas, not a bloodsport.

Like a windowpane

Years ago Orwell, with a little help from my uni lecturers, told me "good writing is like a windowpane," it's crisp, clear and should give us a clean, unadorned view of the outside world. This little phrase, along with scores of other journalistic gems of wit and wisdom that I've now forgotten, could be often heard coming from my a few of my journalism lecturers when I was studying to become a hack, back all those years ago. It has stuck in my head ever since. In fact it's probably the only thing I remember from my time as an undergraduate, apart from something about some mystical inverted hard news pyramid - although I still, after all these years, haven't found the pyramid, having met people who, like me, have only heard of its existence. In truth, "The Inverted Pyramid" was really more of a formula than any sort physical structure or pyramid, a guide designed to teach us journalists how to structure and layout our hard news stories. Although it was, and presumably still is, taught as an exact science - follow these rules and you will never need to know anything again, sort of - "The Inverted Pyramid" is anything but exact. And while it did teach us ambitious young newshounds the basics of how to write a hard news story, writing hard news is still the most imprecise of all journalistic procedures. It needs to be clear, concise and accurate - all things Orwell forced himself to be when he wrote.

Well, like the vaguely-defined and shifty inverted pyramid of hard news that we all had drilled into us at uni, Orwell's description of what constitutes good writing is open to interpretation, and only works as a guide - albeit a very concise one - to how we should slap down and arrange the English language on the printed page. And just like Orwell has come to represent the face of so many different political ideologies to so many political ideologues, good writing has come to mean different things to different people.

So last night I was out drinking - celebrating the return of two good friends from Europe, and the imminent departure of another - when the topic of conversation turned to writing. Having not been out of the country for 10 years, and having only briefly ventured outside the state, I had been feeling a little down on my luck, whining, quietly and to myself, about how little I've done since leaving university. So I was almost beside myself when when, after a few beers and a couple of shots at the Absinthe, which had just mysteriously returned from the Czech Republic, I was given the chance, in conversation, to show off what I'd come to learn from my years of studious study. Someone had raised the topic of Dan Brown, and had mentioned his name in the same sentence as the words "good writer", which, said in front of me, is like a red rag to a bull or a Reagan neocon. My friends always try and steer clear of the topic of Dan Brown while they're around me because it brings out a pugnacious, irasciable side that's normally kept hidden, cloaked by my often calm exterior. I don't find Brown an agreeble writer. I admit my verdict is only drawn from what I've read of Brown's work, which is about the first paragraph of his quadrillion selling novel The Da Vinci Code; but if I happen to get past the first paragraph there is a chance my opinion of his writing will change - probably for the worst.

A couple of my friends enjoyed Brown's bubbler of a novel, and during our conversation noted that I was coming at this whole "writing thing" from a higher perspective than most readers. I probably was. In the end there was an agreement that good writing should be basically entertaining and informative, with the two not being mutually exclusive - not a groundbreaking original consensus, but we were a little drunk. But one can't be entertained or informed if they can't read or understand what's written on the page in front of them, which is why I try and steer clear of most scholarly articles and finance news, unless required to for work. The language is so often convoluted and stuffy, and most of the time they leave me comatose with boredom. But Brown didn't do this, at least not inside the first paragraph of The Da Vinci Code, so why then did I find this man's writing so inexplicably offensive? Was it because it was popular? Maybe a little. Was it because he alluded to the idea his book was based around fact ("hundreds of research hours went into making this book" etc), even though it was sold as pure fiction? Yes, probably this too helped me to judge. But for me, Brown's biggest fau paux was not that he was being dishonest or disingenuous with his readers, nor his commercial opportunism (Brown allegedly went about writing the biggest blockbuster the world has seen, gathering up all the ingredients he thought would generate the most interest - religion, sex, the occult, murder and genuine intrigue - and baked them all into a 300 page novel). No, it was that his writing stood out like a sore thumb, a thumb that had left a big mark on Orwell's clear windowpane. The New Yorker's Anthony Lane, reviewing The Da Vinci Code's cinematic release, hits the nail on head:

There has been much debate over Dan Brown's novel ever since it was published, in 2003, but no question has been more contentious than this: if a person of sound mind begins reading the book at ten o'clock in the morning, at what time will he or she come to the realization that it is unmitigated junk? The answer, in my case, was 10:00.03, shortly after I read the opening sentence: "Renowned curator Jacques Saunière staggered through the vaulted archway of the museum's Grand Gallery." With that one word, "renowned," Brown proves that he hails from the school of elbow-joggers, nervy, worrisome authors who can't stop shoving us along with jabs of information and opinion that we don't yet require. (Buried far below this tic is an author's fear that his command of basic, unadorned English will not do the job; in the case of Brown, he's right.) You could dismiss that first stumble as a blip, but consider this, discovered on a random skim through the book: "Prominent New York editor Jonas Faukman tugged nervously at his goatee." What is more, he does so over "a half-eaten power lunch," one of the saddest phrases I have ever heard.

I know what you're thinking, but I had made my decision to stop after the first paragraph long before Lane came along and jumped on the anti-Brown bandwagon. From the first paragraph - or the first sentence in the case of the smart-mouthed Lane - Brown's prose should jump out and tell you to stop reading, at least warn you to tread carefully. It's offensive to the naked eye, and although it made me laugh - something I don't think Brown intended, at least not in the first paragraph - I couldn't continue.

A good writer's prose should jump and zip off the page, and hit you square on - but only for the right reasons. If the reader can pick up on when a writer's struggling for emphasis, just running through his thesaurus, or just generally treating his reader with contempt, and it happens often enough, then all you can do is shut the book and read something that inspires, rather than something that offends. Most people weren't offended by the opening paragraph of The Da Vinci Code; I was. But, saying that and keeping all this high-minded theorising firmly in mind, I'd be very surprised if people didn't find my writing intolerable. To be honest, I'd be surprised if anyone actually made it through the whole post.

But to bastardise, cut up and interpret Orwell's own words for myself, I like to think of good writing as a little more like acting than a clear windowpane - something you notice only when it's exceptional; otherwise it should be invisible. And while I may like to think of acting, I'll always keep the image of a gawky, gangly Orwell, polishing away at his windowpane with me at all times.

The reality of the newsroom

All Australian journalists, even the embittered hard-news variety, love the chance to slip a sly, cynical remark about the latest reality television trend or fiasco into their copy at least once a week. (Yesterday it was a story about a mass wank-a-thon, after a UK television station announced it will herd thousands of Britons into a hall and tell them to get their pants and then their rocks off, all in front of the cameras and all for charity.) As I mentioned, it's not just gossip columnists, television writers and entertainment reporters who are sucked into giving the genre oxygen, but even the hardest drinking, most seasoned and the most respected are susceptible. You would have had to be blind not to see the thousands of references (ok maybe one or two) to turkey-slapping pop up when the Howard/Costello leadership fraccas was in full swing.

But now media commentators and journalists alike have a plausible excuse for boring us to death with their thoughts on reality television - they're gonna be part of it. Well not the Australian jounos just yet, but their profession will definitely be on show for all to judge and joke about. A reality show that points the camera on reporters and editors at the New York Daily News, catching the news room in full swing as it tries to trample Rupert's New York Post. Make no doubt about it, "Tabloid Wars" is one new reality show I'll be eagerly waiting to see on Australian television - because it can't really be any worse than the British wank-a-thon, can it?. There are so many cheap shots you could make when comparing reality television shows about wanking and the journalism industry, but I'll refrain for now. And even though I'll be looking forward to "Tabloid Wars", I have to say that having been brought up with the cutting satire of "Frontline", there's a real good chance that when "Tabloid Wars", this latest shot at capturing the true essence of the newsroom appears (if it does) on Aussie tv, I'll probably be slightly disappointed. "Frontline" (as well as the UK's "drop the dead donkey") was as close to the bone as you're going to get to a look inside the insidious culture of the newsroom.

You can read the New York Time's review here, if you wish.

It seems everyone's out to get Nine, especially the public

The great Australian past-time known as "Eddie bashing" - a mildly popular Australian game, where media commentators, snooty-nosed journalists, and tv critics who have a penchant for quality television put the boot into poor old Eddie McGuire and his subordinates over at Channel Nine - has grown so popular in recent weeks that it's no longer exclusive to those inside the television or media industries. For years now bloggers, myself included, have been more than happy to throw sharp, often downright nasty blog posts about McGuire and Nine onto the information superhighway for everyone to read, but until now the sport of "Eddie Bashing", for which you can substitute "Nine Bashing" if you wish, hasn't managed to permeate into mainstream Australian culture. Presumably there were still some people unaware of how frustrating Eddie's Broadmeadows schoolboy charm really can be. Well, not any more.

The News.com.au readers have voted with their mice and rushed to a story posted earlier in the week (the story originally came from The Daily Telegraph's Sydney Confidential gossip column) about how Nine's exclusive Kylie interview, which Nine aired on monday night, had failed to make it into the top 10 rating shows for the night. A huge slap in the face for poor Eddie, who put down $300,000 for the exclusive rights to air the interview. News.com.au don't tell you how many hits its most-popular story gets each week, but you can safely assume that the wave of popular opinion has turned against poor Eddie, and that the viewers have turned away from Nine. It's been three weeks since the media caught a whiff of the rotting culture inside the upper echelons of Nine's senior management from Mark Llewellyn's leaked, and rather damning affidavit. And now the public has managed to get a hold of the scent, they're looking for some more juicy, bloody gossip. In an odd way Channel Nine has inverted the formula for attracting an audience: where ratings and commercial success normally drives a show's or even a whole station's popularity, Nine's dismal ratings are actually turning more and more people away from the station, with the audience hoping that if they don't watch they'll get more of a chance to read another bitchy rant about how poor old Eddie is cowering under the immense pressue of running the good ship Nine.

Of course News.com.au's figures could be an aberration, or even incorrect, and I'm not discounting either of those possibilities. There's even the chance that, in the true kick-em-when-they're-down spirit of commercial television, Kerry Stokes may have even put a message out to all of his cronies (he does have a lot of friends, you know) asking them to click through to the Daily Tele piece in the hope that it would generate some more bad publicity for poor old Eddie. If so, it's worked a treat. After all this time, Stokesy may have finally earned the title of the number one Kerry in the Australian television game.

Our Aussies in Lebanon.

We Aussies are a parochial bunch, we really are. The Middle East is on the verge of an all out war - a conflict that threatens to turn the Lebanese/Israeli border into the new frontline in the War on Terror - and all our media can report is the number of Australians stuck inside Lebanon, and the death-defying mission that's being planned to get them out. As is usually the way, the Fairfax broadsheets - The Age and The Sydney Morning Herald - and The Australian have taken a more widescreen world view of the conflict, offering up large front-page pictures of the carnage and regular reports from local Fairfax and News correspondents, at least in the early days of the conflict. But the tabloids and commercial television news maintains that our citizens are the most important part of story. There's a fine line that all of us in the media must tread when reporting international conflicts, and most of the time press coverage from the Australian media risk cutting us off from the rest of the world even more. Of course the our national media needs to tell us what's happening to those Australian nationals who are stranded and need a way out, but it's overkill, and such blind parochialism risks turning ours into a country so ignorant of the outside world that we could be easily confused with Americans. The United States might be the butt of the international community's jokes for its virtual isolation and international ignorance, but Australia isn't far behind them. One of the unexpected opportunities to come out of the post-September 11 conflict between the Muslim world and the West was, in part, a chance for remote countries like Australia, who before S11 had little or no direct experience with radical Islam and its politics, to engage and learn a little more about places like the Middle East. A few short news clips and sound bites of terrified Australians trying to escape Lebanon doesn't go any where near explaining the deep wounds that have just started to re-open in the Middle East.

Oh, and this just in: "Seven's Chris Reason is there with our stranded Aussies in Beirut" and "we (Channel Seven) told you about the plan to get them out". So says the voice-over for Channel Seven's Nightly News Promo. Good to know Channel Seven has us covered over in Beirut.

Cross media laws rile Murdoch. Anyone notice? Anyone care?

Anyone who's stumbled across this ramshackle of a blog over the course of the past few weeks could be forgiven for thinking this is a blog dedicated to berating poor old Rupert Murdoch. And believe what you will, but gratuitously insulting a 70 year old man is not what the Verbose Ghost is all about (that job falls to the lucky PBL and Fairfax PR staff). Now that's off my chest, I think it's fair to tell you that this post is again centred on Murdoch, News Corp and the current cross media reforms. Please don't let it put you off, because when you write about the machinations of the Australian media there are certain powerbrokers, businessmen and pundits (anyone say Jim Schembri?) who will invariably turn up more than others. Murdoch - still the most powerful media mogul in the world - is one of them, and I won't stop writing about him as long as he holds the world's old-school media in his grasp.

As I mentioned in my last post, I'm relieved that now the media laws have been announced the endless speculation and lobbying from PBL, Fairfax and News will finally come to an end: the legislation has basically passed through Parliament, and now the media can move on to speculating on who's going to buy who, and for how much. Not so for The Weekend Australian, who today published an acidic tirade of an editorial ("Coonan's media signal is blurred"), in which The Australian's editor Michael Stuchbury and his band of merry hacks decry Coonan's package because it doesn't give Murdoch the chance to own another free-to-air television station. Here's a selection:

But rather than accept reality, Senator Coonan is terrified of provoking the protectionists who own TV licences and will not wear change at any price. And so instead of announcing all existing arrangements are out of date, that ordinary Australians should be allowed to decide what they want to watch and who they will buy it off, she has come up with a formula designed to protect the present players...

This discriminates against News Limited, publisher of The Australian, which might bid for a licence if it could. In creating the Fox network in the US and revolutionising satellite broadcasting in Europe and Asia, News proprietor Rupert Murdoch demonstrated how to make money in mature TV markets by using new technology. But it is plain wrong to bar Mr Murdoch, or anybody else, from a market because he might make life tough for the existing oligopolists...

But we will not see it while old media organisations like the Nine Network and John Fairfax gut their newsrooms to save money, when their future should lie in expanding the size and quality of their news staff. If Senator Coonan was really committed to revolutionising media, she would abandon all regulation to allow existing and new media companies to make the money they need to provide the news services Australia deserves.

The News Corp campaign over these latest media laws has been probably the most audacious, blatant and pointless attempt to bully some favourable policy out of the Howard Government we've seen for quite some time now - from any industry. On the strength of the vicious language - which thrashes poor old Helen Coonan's competency in the communications portfolio, as well as the Howard Government's commitment to a competetive media landscape - it's pretty clear Murdoch's fallen out of favour with his former Liberal Party confidants. Murdoch is notoriously politically fickle, which probably comes more out of political opportunism than any burning ideology (Murdoch unexpectedly dropped his support for the Whitlam Labor Government in 1975 and had his Australian papers throw their editorial weight behind Malcom Fraser at the '75 election). So it really will be interesting to see who the News tabloids support at next year's federal election. Murdoch hasn't needed to seriously question Howard's legilsative agenda until now, but unless the Prime Minister can come up with an olive branch to quell Rupert's anger Howard may have fight on his hand come the next election. "It's democracy Jim, but not as we know it."

Reforming our media to keep Rupert out

They've been sitting in the pipeline for nigh on a decade now, so it was with a furrowed brow and some sense of relief that the Aussie press finally reported the preliminary details of the government's proposed media reforms earlier today. There would be no more guessing-games about what the reforms would entail, where some hack's reporting on a tip from someone whose housekeeper has a friend who cleans John Howard's house; no more arguments based on hearsay and scuttlebutt; and, most important of all, no more lobbying dressed up as journalism from our media outlets. And for that last point, I am thankful - The Australian's Mark Day has been really shitting me with all his talk about healthy competition within the Australian media marketplace, and the cornucopia of media outlets available to consumers in a digital age. Just shut-up will you Mark, please.

Yes, thanks to all the chit-chat that's come from the press in the last few years, Helen Coonan didn't surprise anyone when she announced the government will finally move to scrap the foreign ownership restrictions. The Communications Minister also announced the government's plan to do away with the current cross media ownership restrictions, making any media company able to own as many media outlets as they like just so long as there are five "independent voices" - TV, radio and print - in any metro market, and four in any rural market. This, too, was expected. On top of these major reforms, there are two more datacasting licenses, some more muscle for the Australian Communication and Media Authority to police content restrictions (civil fines, public apologies etc), and a number of other negligible initiatives to encourage the country to switch over to digital broadcasting. On the whole, nothing really revolutionary, and nothing really unexpected.

But not all were happy, for poor Rupert didn't quite get the complete overhaul he was looking for. Probably the biggest sticking point for Murdoch, whose company today issued a statement describing Coonan's reforms as a "policy failure on a number of fronts that will short-change consumers", was the announcement that there will be no new free-to-air television licenses issued until the switch to digital television is made, which is expected sometime between 2010 and 2012. Murdoch's long been aching to get his hands on an Australian free-to-air television ever since he was forced to sell HSV-7 in 1987. In late 86, Murdoch had purchased the Herald and Weekly Times Group, which gave him ownership of Melbourne's Herald Sun newspaper, as well as Melbourne's HSV-7 television station. In the end Murdoch was forced to choose between the television station and the newspaper; he chose to keep the Herald Sun. To this day neither Rupert, or any of his affiliate companies, have a commercial stake in Australian free-to-air television (although News Limited does have a 25% stake in pay tv station Foxtel).

It's often said that owning an Australian commercial television station is virtually a license to print money. And although Eddie McGuire, James Packer and John Alexander may not agree right now - what with all the strife going on at Channel Nine at present - Rupert is in a league of his own when it comes to creating cheap, addictive television that'll sell to the lowest common denominator. With Fox in the US and BSkyB in the UK, not to mention acess to hundreds of other content streams the world over, there's no doubt Murdoch would turn a healthy profit if handed an Aussie license. There may not be a lot of praise for the government's media changes coming from the blogosphere in the coming days, but denying Rupert a free-to-air license is one of the things the government got right in its media overhaul.

Who you callin' loquacious?

When you're known around town as The Verbose Ghost, and you write on all things media, no matter how trivial they may be, then this little paragraph was too perfect not to reference. This witty piece of prose was the runner-up in this year's annual Bulwer-Lytton literary parody prize, in which entrants were asked to write their worst opening sentence to a make-believe literary novel. As I said, the winner didn't excite me, but the runner up did:

"I know what you're thinking, punk," hissed Wordy Harry to his new editor, "you're thinking, 'Did he use six superfluous adjectives or only five?' - and to tell the truth, I forgot myself in all this excitement; but being as this is English, the most powerful language in the world, whose subtle nuances will blow your head clean off, you've got to ask yourself one question: 'Do I feel loquacious?' - well do you, punk?"

News gets a facelift, but will anyone look?

When News Corp purchased the social networking website MySpace and a bunch of other sites for an estimated $580 million last year, Rupert Murdoch was in the middle of his digital awakening, a virtual baptism of 1s and 0s that's still underway as we speak. So today I got a little excited when me and my fellow media watchers were greeted with some news we'd all been waiting for for quite some time now: News Limited's Australian online content is to be reshaped and packaged into a new online portal. Known as News Digital Media, the new site promises to be far more accessible and readable than the current News Interactive site (news.com.au), even though a form of the current News.com.au site will appear as a section within the new portal. Australian MySpace, Careerone, Cars, and number of other News affiliates will also be dragged under the new site's banner, the address of which has yet to be released. It's everyone website you'll ever need, at least that's what Rupert wants us to think.

I, for one, have to say I'm glad that after years of talking about the new digital media paradigm News has finally seen sense and decided to overhaul its atrocious online Australian news service. In the past year, The Courier-Mail has been given facelift, as has the news.com.au front page, but every other publication's homepage remains just as unreadable and difficult to navigate as ever, offering online readers about 15% of what's in the hardcopy editions. You're not going to drive online advertising revenue with such a scarce amount of copy freely available, especially when the journalism at some of the News tabloids is as trashy as it is today.

So bravo Rupert, you're only about five years behind Fairfax. Did anyone say Podcast? A what now?

ps. And in a brief footnote, I'll leave the last word of the day to Mr Murdoch himself. This address, given to the American Society of Newspaper Editors in April last year, heralded the beginning of Rupert's digital awakening, where the idea is very much, "give the public what it wants; not what it needs". On second thoughts, i'm getting less and less excited by the prospect of a new News Limited portal by the second.

What I worry about much more is our ability to make the necessary cultural changes to meet the new demands. As I said earlier, what is required is a complete transformation of the way we think about our product. Unfortunately, however, I believe too many of us editors and reporters are out of touch with our readers. Too often, the question we ask is “Do we have the story?" rather than “Does anyone want the story?”

Where has Costello's cheer-squad been for the last decade?

I feel a great deal of sympathy for poor Peter Costello right now, but it looks like I'm the only one - for who can care for a man with such a detestable smirk? Not the public, and definitely not the press. Like a poor man robbed blind, Pete's spent more than 10 years trying to keep a lid on his leadership ambitions and resolute hatred for John Howard, both carried out with varying degrees of success. This week a level of truth about the succession deal made it into the public domain after former Liberal minister Ian McLachlan admitted that Howard had promised Treasurer Pete the leadership should he win the 1996 election. As we know, Howard won the election and Costello is, 12 years later, still waiting in the wings for his chance to rule.

For a man with such a searing ambition to become Prime minister, and considering the part he's played in keeping the Coalition's economic reputation in the black for the past decade, Costello has been more than patient. In the leaky and murderous corridors of power that run through our nation's Parliament, Costello's resolve to keep his mouth publicly shut about the agreement is no small feat. Hawke made it only five years before talk of a succession agreement between the then Labor PM and his treasurer, Paul Keating, surfaced in the press, which continued to dog Hawke until his very final days as Prime Minister.

So where have Costello's supporters inside the Canberra Press Gallery been for the past 12 years? Sure there has been the recurring talk about Howard's retirement and Costello's ascension, but why has nobody brought up the McLachlan note and the hard evidence of the meeting until now? Surely the easily tripped-over and easily incensed Press Gallery Dwarf, The Australian's Glenn Milne, would have know about the meeting and know that McLachlan carried a recorded of the meeting in his wallet at all times. And although Milne has been Costello's biggest press gallery supporter - a pundit most adroit in the art of leaking something truly damaging to the Prime Minister - it's likely he's been keeping this evidence under his hat for a fair while now. Milne's Howard-hatred is one of the few reasons I keep buying the Aus, especially on a Monday, when, aside from Milne, it's got about as much readable copy as a Mr Men book.

And what of The Age's Shaun Carney, Costello's biographer and main Fairfax confidant - where has he been the last decade? What's the use of having sympathisers in the Canberra Press Gallery if they're not going to publish the dirty truth about Howard's alleged succession plan, citing, of course, "sources close to the Treasurer" or "a number of disgruntled Coalition insiders". That's right, there isn't one. Maybe Costello had the piety to keep the Howard meeting and McLachlan's record of it a secret from even his closest allies on the Hill. This is wishful thinking, even for Peter Costello, because even the most waterproof politicians find a way to leak. Maybe Costello managed to convinced his Gallery mates to keep it quiet until the time came for an assault of the Prime Minister's office, or at least until he thought he had the numbers to come close to kicking Howard out of The Lodge. Maybe that time has come, and maybe that's just what Costello did, but it's surely been a long enough wait for the Treasurer.

Pixar and Disney make strange bedfellows

What happens when a fresh, perky upstart animation company - a company with spunk and wit to boot, a company that has scored some huge box office hits over the last decade - gets hitched to the very behemoth that gave life to the animation industry almost 100 years ago? That's right I'm talking about this year's prodigious Disney-Pixar merger, which made former Pixar owner Steve Jobs, also co-founder of Apple Computers, the single largest Disney shareholder in the world, with $4 billion dollars worth of Disney shares. Well we're now in July, and the honeymoon is over: Steve Jobs is back doing what he does best, which is slaving away at Apple, working hard to keep driving the cult of cool his company has created, while at the same time dealing with Microsoft's ceaseless efforts to encroach on his company's digital music dominance. Jobs still has a seat on the Disney board to keep him busy, but his main focus is Apple, and his role their is only going to get more and more time consuming as Microsoft start to make up ground in the digital music war.

When Disney bought out Pixar animation studios in March this year for an estimated $7.4 billion, some in the industry saw it as a match made in heaven. Others viewed the takeover - or "assimilation", which is Disney PR's preferred term for the takeover - as a standard competition buyout, which would kill Pixar's quirky brand of humour; while others held their breath, choosing to see what the giant ears would do to the unique creative culture at Pixar, who has been responsible for films like Toy Story, Monsters Inc and Finding Nemo, before passing judgement. Well, judgement day is nigh, and it's not looking good for the merger. As you probably know, Cars - a Disney production of a Pixar film - was released a few weeks ago and has been met with some luke-warm reviews, both In Australia and around the world. The release of Cars has been viewed as a litmus test for the new partnership, and the word on the street is that there seems to be some cracks opening up between Pixars 700 animators, artists, mathematicians and all sorts of other technical gurus, and the new rule at Planet Disney.

So to coincide with the worldwide release of Cars, Tia Kratter, who worked as an Art Director on Cars, was in Melbourne on Saturday to give us Southerners a look at what it's like to work at Pixar. First it was a walkthough of Pixar's global headquarters in San Francisco, California. Now, you can probably imagine the end result when someone as enchanting and childlike as Jobs is let loose to design Pixar HQ: three themed bars; yoga, pilates, painting workshops scheduled for lunchtime and after work; scooters as the main source of intra-office transport - you get the idea. That was six years ago, and, according to Katter, Jobs is rarely seen at his former studios these days.

"Now I'm going to very briefly show you how to make a film. It's very simple really." It wasn't - of course - but the crowd, who I discovered was made up of 80% animators and industry insiders after Tia asked for a 'hands-up who actually works in the industry', were very attentive. So we were told just how painstaking a task crafting a film like Cars actually is - and the audience was just as excited to hear about how the flowers in Cars were chosen to emulate a Cadillac's tail-lights as they were when they discovered Pixar were looking for animators, and quickly. This was a crowd of true believers in the Cult of Pixar. Katter was ebullient and spoke with real passion about the culture at Pixar, and went about making the adoring audience incredibly jealous, in an incredibly short amount of time. Then the floor was thrown open for questions. There were a mixture of technical and procedural queries ("Who decides which Pixar scripts go into production and which don't"), as well as a few questions about the Pixar culture.

The Disney takeover eventually came up, and the mood in the room shifted to that of uncomfortable curiosity. While the rest of Kratter's talk sounded like she'd been reading a script written by the happy people at Pixar PR, and sincerely believing every word of it, when talk turned to Disney, Kratter was slightly more reticent. "The big goal right now is to retain that culture at Pixar; and that's going to be hard work," Kratter told the group. Although this may not quite be "fear and loathing at Pixar" material, it was definitely a hint about the prevailing mood in the San Fran Pixar camp. In another, probably more telling hint, Kratter went on record, and unprompted, about how she was a surprised to come to Australia only to find Disney Australia had given up on promoting Cars in the mainstream press. A possible reason, she said, could be that Disney now had decided to turn its focus to Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man's Chest , which the company is pinning its 2006 boxoffice hopes on. If Saturday's talk was any sign, then Kratter and Pixar may have hit an unforeseen snag. And for all the autonomy no doubt promised to Pixar and its staff by Disney during the courtship prior to the sale, Disney will probably now treat Pixar as one of its revenue streams, rather than giving it the respect it rightfully deserves. And while the writers, artists and animators on the ground at Pixar may be disappointed, it probably comes as no surprise to Steve Jobs.

Murdoch puts papers on the chopping block, but won't touch The Aus

Over the past couple of years some of the world's most credible mastheads have made the tough call to put pride and tradition behind them, dealing with an international print advertising downturn by taking the machete to some of their papers, reducing their physical size and hopefully increasing profits. Earlier this year, London's Times newspaper made news itself when, after 150 years of quality journalism (and yes, the last 30 or so have been under Mr Murdoch's frugal watch), announced it would move from broadsheet to tabloid. Oh, you could hear the treated pine creak and groan with the sound of those UK Lords turning over in their graves. Apparently, the sheer cost associated with producing enough copy to cover the tabloid's windswept pages, was getting too much for Rupert, without enough advertising to fill the space in between. For those of us who sit comfortably on the journalism side of the business journalism equation, the initial kick to the head has taken a while to get over; but I'm slowly getting over it, as well as getting half-way down from my high horse. The trip down was made a little easier by the news that the venerable American institution of editorial independence and purveryor of journalistic martyrdom that is The New York Times was thinking of cutting it pages size as well. Hell, The Courier-Mail's done it, so why can't, and why shouldn't the Times?

Here in Melbourne, The Age has slowly been slicing and trimming, tucking and preening away at its daily output, and now it's only the hard news and business sections that remain broadsheet; everything else - sport, entertainment, television, arts, culture - has been slotted into a tabloid format, even if the boys at Spencer Street do go out of their way to avoid using the T term. Out of Victoria, The SMH and The Canberra Times have gone the same way: shorter stories, tabloid format, and more pieces taken from international papers.

And then there's Rupert's baby, The Australian, which began life as a broadsheet in the 60s, and 40 years later is still trying to cement its place in the Australian newspaper market with the same broadsheet format. So while all Rupert's global mastheads and print magazines are trimming their inches and cutting down on pages, The Aus - probably Murdoch's least profitable Australian paper - is still as thick and rich as it ever was; for Michael Stuchbury, the paper's editor, and the rest of the team, it's like the advertising downturn never happened. It's certainly not the ruthless approach to the business of journalism we're used to from uncle Rupert. So, I was skeptical when The Aus announced it would bring out a glossy monthly magazine, Wish, which, according to NewsCorp's NewsMedia website, is "pitched at intelligent, successful readers who are interested in quality of life." Yes, as you have probably already assumed, quality of journalism does not come into the picture. It's an advertising magazine, and NewsCorp hopes it will draw enough advertising revenue to afford Rupert's favourite Australian paper the luxury of remaining a broadsheet for the next few days. And until this morning I hadn't had the time, nor the inclination to pick up Wish and have a look. In between the advertorials for $10,000 jeans and Hawaiian surf camps, we have some of the paper's most experienced writers - Mark Day (second in Murdoch's Aussie congaline of suckholes; first is, of course, Herald Sun columnist Terry McCrann) among others - who are forced to spin useless copy around whatever the advertisers are flogging. In fact, Wish doesn't even see the need to cover-up the fact that what the poor reader has picked up is a publication that has even less news value, and more advertising than your local Leader Newspaper, which, for those unfamiliar with the Melbourne suburban newspaper market, is nigh on impossible.

It's probably not fair to single out The Australian for its Wish magazine, especially since the Fin Review has been cranking out an almost identical magazine for as long as I can remember. But it is interesting to see the lengths Rupert will go to ensure his beloved Aus remains a broadsheet longer than the Fairfax papers do. But then again, Rupert probably won't have to hold out too much longer before the Aus holds the title of the only broadsheet in the country.

It's time for Eddie McGuire to pull his bloody head in

We'll, since the last post, and since Crikey published Llewellyn's explosive revelations about what really goes on inside the Nine bunker, the shit has definitely hit the fan. There 's no doubt Llewellyn's tantalising affidavit has given Seven the ammunition, and the targets (Jessica Rowe, Eddie McGuire and Jana Went) it's been gunning for since it began to its assault on Nine's ratings dominance just over a year ago, but it's unusual to see such a standard media story run for so long in all the papers and on every radio and tv station.

Llewellyn's leaked affidavit survived well beyond the life-span of a traditional media story - which, in this country, is about a day, unless of course a mogul dies - with the story not just igniting a fiery debate within the Australian media industry and the blogopshere, but knocking off Big Brother to become the watercooler topic of the week. That's right, the public pricked up their ears and listened when they read about how the potty mouthed Eddie McGuire had decided to "bone" his once prized recruit, Jessica Rowe: "What are we going to do about Jessica? When should we bone her?" The day-to-day goings-on inside the Nine bunker - and from all accounts it's pretty standard stuff at Nine's notoriously brash and macho Sydney head offices in Willoughby - were transformed into old fashioned gossip items, usually reserved for b-grade celebrities , and usually found in Womens' Day, New Idea or on Entertainment Tonight . The pulling power and the interest generated by people like McGuire and Rowe, who, along with James Packer, are probably the two most public faces at Channel Nine, cannot be underestimated. Anyone who thought (or hoped) Eddie McGuire would disappear from public view and retreat to a behind-the-scenes, off-camera role when he decided to take up the position as Nine CEO earlier this year could not have been more misguided.

Following Kerry Packer's death in the final days of last year, McGuire took the reigns and wanted to make sure his face would be the public face of a resurgent Channel Nine. But so far Eddie's smug face and his reputation have been a lightning rod for all that's wrong with Channel Nine, and to some extent commercial TV. A few weeks ago, sensing SBS was scoring some easy ratings with its World Cup coverage, Eddie loosened the purse strings and decided to send himself, Sam Newman and a few other mug pundits from the NRL Footy Show to Berlin for a World Cup edition of the Footy Show, where Eddie happily reprised his old role as host, mediator and chief Channel Nine spruiker. Never mind that the members of the assembled panel - which included a pugnacious Sam Newman who managed to get a fist in the face for his nasty comments about soccer after the show - have been largely responsible for keeping the real world game out of sight and out of mind for the last 20 years, this was Eddie's brainwave and it was going to work. Eddie's Berlin sojourn won the night, but no-one believed for a minute Channel Nine had actually turned over a new leaf, dropped AFL and NRL and had become infatuated with the round ball game.

Nine's expensive Berlin experiment reminded us why Eddie has always been such an infuriating character, on and off screen. It's shameless the way McGuire moves between his public and private roles as it suits, without a thought for the consequences. As we've all seen from Llewellyn's affidavit, McGuire is still striving to be everything to everyone, when he should probably be doing what he's paid to do: return Nine to no.1 spot in the ratings, and to do it behind closed doors. At the moment, the intrigue attached to McGuire's very public mug ensures neither job is being done properly.