Could any amount of money buy Australia a Fox? Share your thoughts by commenting below.FEED ‘‘websites about words’’ into an internet search engine and you’ll have 950million-odd hits.
We’re collectively fascinated by what comes out of our mouths – possibly without going through our brains: because about one-tenth of those sites are about political words, and they’re pretty dismal.
The fault lies not in ourselves, but in our language. English makes it so easy to come up with insta-words (like ‘‘insta-word’’, for one) for every political occasion.
There’s that classic journalistic out, ‘‘-gate’’. Tack that onto any name, object or way of thought and it instantly becomes a political scandal. (I’ve been waiting for ‘‘Thomson-gate’’, but the favourite commentator of mining magnate Gina Rinehart has already trumped this with ‘‘brothel-gate’’.)
Last year we added ‘‘(name of country) Spring’’, ‘‘tsunami’’ and ‘‘Occupy (financial) Street’’ to our one-size-fits-all political vocabularies, along with a suggestion that debate over coal-seam gas recovery wouldn’t have heated up quite so fast if it hadn’t had the almost-naughty name ‘‘fracking’’.
We have more subtle ways of making you talk, though: tell me, would you rather be termed ‘‘Gillardian’’ or ‘‘Gillardite’’? Gillardians, clearly, are those who see what is noblest and best in our Jools. They surely bask in the faint approving verbal echo of the word ‘‘guardians’’, and may even dare, in the privacy of their own cubbies, to slip into Roman robes and call themselves ‘‘Julians’’.
But Gillardites, like all ‘‘-ites’’ in political terminology, are factional hacks who follow blindly wheresoever she leads, even unto those two ghastly months last year where Labor held the approval of only 26per cent of voters (now trending 32.6percent, according to Crikey statistician Possum Comitatus, or 45.8 if you want two-party preferred).
By the way, anyone want to bet that when Gillardites scorn Ruddites, they’re well aware of the echo to backward-looking “Luddites”? Crossing the aisle ... no, let’s not. Both “Abbottian” and “Abbottite” would drive any word-nerd to distraction, since we’d know that even the cheapest dictionary already has the real words “abbatial” and “abbotcy”, both of which invite equally cheap jokes.
What brought on all this word-musing was the distribution by activist website GetUp of a video showing climate-change sceptic Lord Monckton suggesting to a roomful of mining magnates that they invest in an Australian version of America’s Fox News (see it at getup.org.au/minersmediaplan).
GetUp did a nice bit of political dog-whistling by mentioning on the same web page that Ms Rinehart had just spent $192million to acquire 13percent of the Fairfax media stable, making her its largest shareholder. (A ‘‘dog-whistle’’, in case anyone’s missed out on the term, is a message that properly attuned ears can pick up behind the apparent message. It was first applied in Australia to racist overtones in discussions about asylum seekers, aka ‘‘refugees’’, ‘‘boat people’’ or ‘‘queue jumpers’’.)
Given that GetUp’s demographic is an educated one, they’re not likely to take seriously the suggestion that a 13percent shareholder could impose an editorial stance on, say, the Newcastle Herald. But the whistle about Fox News falls on more receptive ears.
Lord Monckton himself has described Fox News as taking, in its opinion segments, ‘‘an explicit, declared, one-sided view that is pro-democracy, pro-Western, pro-profit, pro-prosperity, pro-success, pro-freedom, pro-America’’.
‘‘And half of all the news audience in the US love it,’’ he added in Advance Australia Fox! on the blog joannenova.com.au.
There’s the rub, though. Fox’s ‘‘explicit, one-sided’’ view isn’t confined to its opinion segments. Letting opinions creep into straight news reports is what has earned the network the title ‘‘Faux News’’ among the other 50percent of the US news audience, who don’t love it. Whether Fox could operate in as untrammelled a way in Australia is a legal, as well as a social, question. Andrew Bolt, a commentator praised in the mining-magnates video, has run into the Racial Discrimination Act (and had his right to free speech defended by Julian Assange, of Wikileaks). It’s a truism of Australian politics that our tougher defamation laws have bought many a pollie’s swimming pool.
If Fox News does get off the ground here, we in the ‘‘hard left, Marxist’’ mainstream media (that’s Lord Monckton’s take on Fairfax, Murdoch and the ABC) may have cause to be grateful to any word nerds who object to our “-ites’’ when they should be “-ians”, and slam shut the insta-gates.
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