To be honest, I have been having my problems with those who oppose the recommendations of the Human Rights Consultative Committee.
I suppose they represent the forces of darkness, represented as practical politics, and because I do not understand their arguments, not just in terms of logic but where they are coming from. This tends to be the way it goes. I note, as an illustration, Keith Olbermann’s essay and polemic on the state of the American health care system run, argues by the insurance companies. How can anything run by a corporation be not good? So it is with newspapers and television stations. To my mind he states the case comprehensively with compassion, which is includes those who might otherwise be seen as irrationally are opposing change. Since it is the case, that such contribution is service to a larger process that should be recognized. In this case, I am also frustrated by the self appointed critics.
I like newspapers, especially a major metropolitan daily, such as a The Sydney Morning Herald when they work. I like the physicality of print because somehow there is a fuller engagement. Like similar newspapers throughout the Western World, its editorial views are of the conservative establishment which might sometimes be distorting, as all our ideological predispositions tend to do. And they are struggling with developing a sustainable business model in the face of technological change. Technologies usually take us to a new place and in arrogance we tend to forget from where we have come, so easy to do when change is dramatic and rapid. Sometimes, it seems to me, we ought to praise them especially as on the issue of human rights good writing and and wide reporting and commentary broadens and deepens my understanding, which it is redundant to observe is more often necessary that I had realized.
Often when considering business models we put the cart before the horse, not with deference to George Orwell that I have seen many horses and carts lately, or have even had any close affinity with them unlike my friend who walked or rode three miles to school. In practice business has to focus on the cash flow, otherwise the accounting department who are almost wholly concerned with this outcome without a vision of how the result follows. We can obsess on outcomes and forget how and what the purpose the business serves from which in effect is drawn. The social purpose of a business in not making money which is the result of what it does. As with all human endeavours, the business model runs the show, sometimes without the appreciation we need to have of there implications and ramifications for the wider environments, including the natural environment. When they work newspapers set up an ecology, perhaps limited and filtered in the range of opinion, which establishes sometimes an informed political community. This stuff I do is necessarily more personal, more limited, and considerably of less value to anybody else except me.
Anyway, it seems to me the insularity of opinion is not for the best, or at the least opinion and belief might with regard to democratic process should be offered as a product of thought, inquiry and reason, and with application might be. Democracy is one of our most important social technologies. It is the method of how we can get to the distant shore with all our diversity and conflicting purposes without violence and with social cohesion. Newspapers have for long being integral to our systems of government and politics, and their place has of course being challenged by television and now the technologies and forms of the internet. As participants in these new technologies, as consumers and otherwise, we are in the process of creating means to the end. Our global atmospheric crisis places these processes and social technology in acute focus. For better or ill, they are the vehicles in which we travel.
I am moved to these thoughts by reading the SMH reporting of the Human Rights Consultations Committees report. Even if the forces of reaction (in my view) have the short term political victory, attributed as always to timidity on the part of those who make political calculations, those of us who were foolhardy and brave enough to participate have gained. The whole issue of not just human rights but citizenship has been brought to our awareness. Some of us, facilitated by Get Up, and the internet have engaged in a new, but old as the hills, form of democracy by small gathering of people providing insights that tend to stick.
(Treat this as an essay in the process of being formed, an open development, a work in progress. None of which, can justify coming to some, albeit provisional, conclusions.)
In the Herald, Richard Ackland reviews the Committees’ recommendation, including giving an explanation of the “dialogue” version of the human rights bill. No surprise perhaps that George Williams supports the conclusions. Jonathan Pearlman provides the reporting on the promise of a fair go and a fierce debate.
ELSEWHERE:
I cannot write about economics, let alone think about it, because I do not understand what a market might be. I imagine, in the first instance, it was a sensible arrangement by which surplus could be exchanged for mutual benefit. Now markets are mediated by money, and measured by transactions, more so that either social relationships (in some societies taking the form of nepotism) or social purposes. Market advantage is market power amplified by public relations and advertising. The loss of revenue from advertising is a fundamental issue for newspapers, and their ability to resolve this matter will determine whether they go the way of North Atlantic Cruise liners. This particular analogy reminds me that industries form are created by a matrix of social and other technologies, including corporations, not forgetting often unseen infrastructure, such as educational institutions, and other public goods. Mark at Larvatus Prodeo in recent days has put up, what were to me, interesting and informative posts of these subjects: “Living Capitalism Freely” and “The Internet has not destroyed Capitalism”.