Balance?
As we sat down at a table for coffee and opened our Saturday papers — the Sydney Morning Herald and Green Left Weekly, my friend looked at me wisely and said, "I think it is important to look at both sides of the story". Knowing him well, I understood this to mean that I, as a leftie, needed to balance the extremist ideas he assumed (correctly) I was encountering with something perhaps more conventional.
I scanned my memory banks in vain for a succinct quote from Chomsky, Pilger, or Arundhati Roy and was left temporarily speechless. Only later, in the cold light of my laptop, did the following surface: Every time I go into a newsagent, turn on a radio or watch television, I know I am going to get a Murdoch massage.
The corporate agenda is everywhere. I don't have to go looking for it. I have seen the king and he is naked. Alternative views, on the other hand, are not only not in your face, they are often marginalised or hidden from view and come to light only when actively sought. It is not a matter of looking at "both sides" to get a balanced viewpoint because the media is totally unbalanced. A balance will come about only when both sources receive the same exposure. Having said that I question whether the term "balance" has any meaning in this context; it seems very structural-functionist. If you put a truth and a lie on a set of scales, do they balance?
Michael Birch
via email
Taxes
Many federal Coalition backbenchers are continuing to press the government hard to cut tax, especially on higher-income Australians. But what would doing this achieve?
Among wealthy OECD countries, bigger-taxing nations produced, on average, as much economic growth per capita as smaller-taxing nations did between 1970 and 2000. Likewise, there is no significant correlation between tax rates and employment and unemployment rates.
What clearly distinguishes higher-tax countries is their lower level of poverty and inequality. Tax cuts would redistribute income from poorer to richer, leaving less money for social welfare and public education, transport, infrastructure and healthcare.
Australia already has high inequality and low taxes by First World standards, with children from the bottom and top socio-economic strata having very different expected lifetime incomes.
When it is politically convenient, John Howard uses egalitarian rhetoric. He should not now capitulate to anti-egalitarian pressure to lower taxes.
Brent Howard
Rydalmere, NSW
Iraq
It's time that the editorial staff [of the daily papers] made the same apology to the Australian readers as was made by John Maples, the former British conservative spokesperson on foreign affairs. "It has become obvious to almost everyone else that it [the war] has been a huge mistake." For an editorial staff to follow blindly the propaganda provided by the government war machine is journalism at its most lazy. Instead of following an impartial analysis of both sides of the argument, editors around Australia, along with the opposition, flew the patriotic flag of supporting our troops, despite their reluctant involvement in an illegal war.
Contrast the lack of pictures and reporting of the annihilation of the city of Fallujah with the professional coverage of the destruction of Aceh by the tsunami. In both cases a city of more than 300,000 citizens has been destroyed leaving thousands of innocent dead, hundreds of thousands homeless and thousands of widows and orphans. Why is there such a moral outpouring of support for the victims of one natural tragedy and yet not the (human-made and hence avoidable) other?
We were promised a short sharp war and yet almost two years after the US alone has lost more than 1300 troops, most after the "victory speech" by Bush. More than 100,000 civilians have lost their lives in Iraq and still we pretend that a US war-based solution will extricate us from the problems we have created. Tragically Latham's "home by Christmas" statement, which was the beginning of his demise in the eyes of the public, may well turn out to be his finest hour. Have the editors the courage to apologise to the Australian public for misleading them or will they too retreat behind the Howard defence of "what we were told at the time"?
Colin Hughes
Glen Forrest, WA
Plan Colombia
Even young Jewish people are sent to Auschwitz to find out about Nazism. Is that the only way to do it? A trip to Colombia, South America, today would illustrate the daily practice of the Nazi theory of murdering the entire population.
Plan Colombia, is the Organisation of South American States, and the good old CIA's new plan after their plan failed in Vietnam. Ho Chi Minh said that guerrilla soldiers were fish in the sea of the people. The new plan provides for draining the whole sea, i.e., by carrying out daily mass murders in villages throughout Colombia, to leave "the fish" with nothing to swim in. It was tried already in East Timor and in Guatemala.
The estimate dead so far is 350,000.
Denis Kevans
Wentworth Falls, NSW
From Green Left Weekly, February 2, 2005.
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