Coronavirus - Media Discussion
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Swan is well over the top.
Federal government has been on the lenient side.
Think what we need comes down somewhere in between.As far as the media go: FFS it is nonstop. Guy at work on Hangouts saying his wife is so stressed out and they're kicking around with a toddler in the joint.
"Just turn it off, mate" said another team member. And he's right. Look at the stats, see how they're changing, and fucking ignore the media. The government is late to the party on public health messaging, and they're doing a less than ideal job, but the commercial media will always be tripping over each other to sensationalise, and the ABC TV coverage I've seen is just rotating doors of experts BUT their radio has been decent as usual.
There is some good stuff in all of it, but pare it back to the facts, fuck yas. We don't need it every hour.
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Regarding Richard Horton (Piers' new best mate), whilst that tweet was correct,by all accounts he quickly changed his view shortly after making that tweet and has been pretty constant since then.
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I thought this was a sensible article from JA. I'm not always a fan, but this was a good reminder (if not stating the slightly obvious, but sometimes forgotten)
Coronavirus: It’s time for us to decide if the cure is worse than the disease
In Letters to a Young Contrarian, Christopher Hitchens writes that the essence of the independent mind lies not in what it thinks but in how it thinks. It is intellectual curiosity that matters most. And right now we need more of this key ingredient. A healthy democracy does not die in a pandemic.
Let’s be clear. No one has the wisdom of Solomon or the prophetic powers of Apollo. But finally, this past week, many more people are publicly asking if the cure is worse than the disease. We need more of this intellectual curiosity instead of joining the cheer squad for the Morrison government or the more hysterical Canberra press bubble.
It means probing government decisions, checking herd mentalities, raising differences between expert advice, and understanding that bureaucrats advising governments about the current economic responses to COVID-19 never lose their jobs in a crisis. We should not accept medical advice as the sole source of truth either. Not only is it both contestable and contested, but doctors have a laser-like focus on medical issues and have little or no knowledge of, and sometimes not much interest in, the social, economic or cultural consequences of their advice.
A few weeks ago, Guardian Australia political editor Katharine Murphy wondered whether dealing with COVID-19 might be the revenge of the experts. Beware of those who assert that “experts” equal a consensus, or accepted wisdom, or settled orthodoxy. Remember Brexit? These phrases are often used by people who pretend to love a rollicking debate — but only when it suits them. On some matters, they claim consensus to shut people up.
As American intellectual Walter Lippmann once said: “Where all think alike, no one thinks very much.” And happily, not all people think alike. Consider the comments this week from newly appointed Deputy Chief Medical Officer Nick Coatsworth, an infectious diseases specialist at Canberra Hospital. In an interview on ABC radio on Thursday, Coatsworth said the effectiveness of imposing harsher rules around social isolation to deal with COVID-19 is “a contested point”.
Coatsworth also challenged the ABC’s message that the broadcaster’s medical reporter, Norman Swan, is the go-to guy on COVID-19. “I disagree with Norman when he thinks that this is going to be over in weeks if we go for harder and faster lockdowns,” Coatsworth said. “I don’t think they’ve thought through the impact on Australia and Australians of doing that.”
It is no bad thing to push back. John Ioannidis, a professor of medicine in epidemiology and co-director of Stanford’s Meta-Research Innovation Centre in the US, questions the official death rate of 3.4 per cent put out by the World Health Organisation.
No one can accurately tally up unrecorded cases of COVID-19 and that single fact renders the modelling inaccurate. If the true fatality rate is closer to 1 per cent or even lower, Ioannidis says, then “locking down the world with potentially tremendous social and financial consequences may be totally irrational”.
Veteran left-liberal commentator Thomas Friedman also has broken from the pack about this pandemic. Writing in The New York Times this week, Friedman is asking whether the cure is worse than the disease. Friedman spoke with David Katz, founding director of Yale University’s Yale-Griffin Prevention Research Centre in the US, who questions the current “horizontal interdiction” — basically, shutting down commerce and limiting movement by large parts of the population.
Katz posits a more surgically targeted “vertical interdiction” strategy to sequester and protect the more vulnerable after a short, sharp period of lockdown of two weeks, rather than a longer, unsustainable and economically ruinous approach that will deliver its own devastating health costs.
Katz suggests that “the rejuvenating effect on spirits, and the economy, of knowing where there’s light at the end of this tunnel would be hard to overstate”.
“Risk will not be zero,” he told Friedman, “but the risk of some bad outcome for any of us on any given day is never zero.’’
Again, none of us has the perfect set of answers. And no leader should be demonised for changing tack. US President Donald Trump wants to reopen the US economy by Easter. It may not happen, but Trump offers hope instead of the dark, uncertain and confusing tunnels many of us face in other countries.
It was breathtaking to hear Anthony Albanese claim this week that the Morrison government needed to avoid a tension “between dealing with the health issues and dealing with the economic issues”. Is he kidding?
Was this brazen politics or reckless stupidity? There are devastating social costs arising directly from decisions to shut down businesses and shunt away people.
If Albanese cannot grapple with that, then he has no rightful claim to be the alternative prime minister.
The tensions are immense. Poverty kills people, too. Losing your job through no fault of your own is soul-destroying. Facing extended unemployment can wreck the prospects and futures of millions of people. People and families need to know how they will pay their bills and buy food.
Government Services Minister Stuart Robert assured me on Sunday evening that the myGov bureaucracy was primed for huge numbers of newly unemployed Australians desperately seeking help on Monday. It had already been road-tested by the bushfire crisis, he said.
This is not a time for cockiness. The system crashed the next day under the weight of demand. I had passed on the minister’s assurances to try to allay the concerns of hardworking decent people who lost their jobs on Sunday night.
Can Robert imagine what it is like to stand in a long line on a pavement during a pandemic to ask for money because a job has been taken from you overnight by a decision made by government?
The next day, Robert tried to wash the egg off his face by claiming there had been a cyber hack attack. It wasn’t true.
Robert still has his job.
We are tearing at the social fabric of communities, shutting down footy and pubs and church services. GPs tell me of their concerns about the devastating mental health consequences of enforced social dislocation. Are we potentially creating a powder keg that we will one day rue?
Being forced into lockdown in dysfunctional and even dangerous households doesn’t bear thinking about. But we must, surely, consider all these tensions as part of every single decision made to deal with COVID-19.
A woman who lives on South Australia’s Yorke Peninsula, 165km from Adelaide, was due to have a hysterectomy in Adelaide on Thursday. On Wednesday morning, she was told all elective surgeries were cancelled, effective immediately because of government directives. Early Wednesday afternoon, she was told her surgery would go ahead after a change to the rules. Later that day, she was told it was cancelled again. Her distress is immense.
At another Adelaide hospital, a nurse went to work on Monday, only to be told to stay home the next day because of new self-isolation rules that applied to her after a trip to Sydney on the weekend. On Tuesday, she asked to come to work after all. She was told that the rules about self-isolation applied only to people arriving after Tuesday 11am.
This confusion is across industries, across the country.
To be sure, leaders are doing their best in the most frightful circumstances. As the Prime Minister spoke to the nation on Tuesday evening following a meeting of the national cabinet, who could imagine telling the country that a funeral must have no more than 10 mourners, or that a big birthday party for a two-year old cannot go ahead in these times?
It is unthinkable. But that does not mean we must be unthinking.
JANET ALBRECHTSENCOLUMNIST
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@mariner4life said in Coronavirus - Media Discussion:
I actually think I need to step away from the news for a bit. It's affecting my moods
I had ABC News 24 on in the background when at home last week. I don't any more. It just depresses me.
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@antipodean I've quite enjoyed ... wrong word ... maybe appreciated Dr Norman Swan's "Coronacast".
But I did note his inconsistency over closing schools.
Seemed one day he's saying kids seem to be less likely to transmit to each other and therefore there's less risk with them in school, to the next day saying he'd always thought they should close.
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@mariner4life said in Coronavirus - Media Discussion:
That's really interesting mate. I generally have no time for the ABC but I have found their news website the best factual, no opinion source of new info
I am astounded by some of the coverage. Holding someone to account for something they said a week ago in s situation that changes by the hour is at best disingenuous, at worst outright misinformation.
I have in the main been impressed with both Australasian governments, and I'm willing to cut them an awful lot of slack for being forced to make it up as they go along
I don't get the hate for ScoMo.
Has come across well from what I have seen of him.
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@mariner4life said in Coronavirus - Media Discussion:
That's really interesting mate. I generally have no time for the ABC but I have found their news website the best factual, no opinion source of new info
I am astounded by some of the coverage. Holding someone to account for something they said a week ago in s situation that changes by the hour is at best disingenuous, at worst outright misinformation.
I have in the main been impressed with both Australasian governments, and I'm willing to cut them an awful lot of slack for being forced to make it up as they go along
I agree with this, I can't imagine Scomo or Jacinta or any other leader for that matter has had a lot of sleep in the past few weeks. They are making decisions than can have huge lasting impacts on people's lives here. It must be incredibly tough.
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I think ScoMo's standing is largely coloured by his recent actions e.g. sitting on a beach in Hawaii, "I don't hold a hose, mate" and "They want to be out fighting fires".
That is tough to come back from, as well as the fact that people are exhausted from a summer of bullshit. Probably also starting to get really pissed off at politicians in general (QLD - Adani flip-flopping, NSW - blowing budgets on stadia and light rail, etc).
Unfortunately, another part of it relates to his delivery - the same smirky goofball shit he always has done. That's just who he is and he can't actually help it. He's got a history of not answering questions directly (he's a politician) and therefore shades of either not knowing something, or knowing but not wanting to tell.
The core issue for me is consistency of delivery. "I'm going to the footy.... wait, no I'm not" - that one smacked of an advisor saying "bad optics, maybe don't do that".
"We will shut down events starting Monday" is actually a fair call given people had shit planned for the weekend, including a big Hillsong Conference just up the road from me, which looked like nepotism to a lot of people. Not saying it was, but again: optics.
EDIT: I should add - the fucking slogan politicking. Fucking hell that was a punish but he seems to have backed off a little on that.
I saw this the other day on FB and had to laugh.
Ultimately, he's paid a fuckload of money (for the rest of his life at this point) to lead the country. Sure, there are times it is going to be tough, but that's what you sign up for, lack of sleep or not. It isn't all just about giving your donors a reach-around and trying to push wealth up the chain.
There is a massive opportunity here for ScoMo to make the next election unwinnable for the ALP. All he needs to do is mobilise a bit more humanity in his party, sort out the human issues before worrying about the economy, and he can put his feet up for 18 months until the next election.
Lay down misere.
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@NTA That is the best meme. This thread seems to be a post articles from conservative media complaining about non conservative media treatment of the PM thread. I’m keeping up to date mostly through TSF and friends sending articles so I’m getting both sides of the media ... it’s all some good and some bad.
On the Ayatollah Morrison, I don’t think he’s doing a bad job per se, but that meme highlights some of the issues here in Oz. No one knows what the fuck is going on ... we’re in the in between, people are just doing their own shit because the govt aren’t making things clear. We all know that people are idiots even when given much greater clarity as evidenced by the NZ thread.
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@Nepia said in Coronavirus - Media Discussion:
@NTA That is the best meme. This thread seems to be a post articles from conservative media complaining about non conservative media treatment of the PM thread. I’m keeping up to date mostly through TSF and friends sending articles so I’m getting both sides of the media ... it’s all some good and some bad.
Naturally when you've got a conservative government in power that was put there with the assistance of a conservative media put a conservative slant on everything.
I don't get the criticism of the ABC - and fully acknowledge that I lean politically to the left in saying that - when they've been told to give the government a free run under threat of funding cuts. Sometimes they bite back, but mostly they just report "the facts" as they've been told them.
On the Ayatollah Morrison, I don’t think he’s doing a bad job per se, but that meme highlights some of the issues here in Oz. No one knows what the fuck is going on ...
Multiple levels of government don't help. But the Libs in NSW are more aligned with the ALP in Victoria on this and other issues, than they are with the Federal LNP - mainly because it gets held hostage by a few rightwing crazies and can barely keep the rest in line.
we’re in the in between, people are just doing their own shit because the govt aren’t making things clear. We all know that people are idiots even when given much greater clarity as evidenced by the NZ thread.
All these stories of people going to the beach. I'm questioning whether I nip out to Bunnings to pick up a deadlock so we can secure a house we're trying to sell when all this dies down (my wife's grandfather passed away 9 months ago and we were in the middle of renovation).
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@Paekakboyz said in Coronavirus - Media Discussion:
@Duluth jaysus - the Fern has corona!! new threads are popping up everyone!
OR they're being correctly isolated
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@NTA said in Coronavirus - Media Discussion:
@Paekakboyz said in Coronavirus - Media Discussion:
@Duluth jaysus - the Fern has corona!! new threads are popping up everyone!
OR they're being correctly isolated
Got our own section of the asylum and all!
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@NTA said in Coronavirus - Media Discussion:
Multiple levels of government don't help. But the Libs in NSW are more aligned with the ALP in Victoria on this and other issues, than they are with the Federal LNP - mainly because it gets held hostage by a few rightwing crazies and can barely keep the rest in line.
I find this being thrown out to be disingenuous, the "it's harder for him because of states ...", it doesn't mean we can't measure his performance with all that taken into account.
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There is an older Dr in the UK who has got a lot of traction on YouTube for his very simple videos and easy to understand manner. Check out his channel here. https://www.youtube.com/user/Campbellteaching/videos
Found his video on Vitamin D very interesting.
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can we chuck political speech writers on the bonfire as well?