“can you imagine a dominion post or herald that is 90% filled with uninformed opinions?”

LMAO! very funny 2dd.

Did you stand at a podium, shake your fist in the air and intone in a very loud voice? – just trying to get the picture right in my head.

“can you imagine a dominion post or herald that is 90% filled with the uninformed opinions of people like me and you?”

Don’t have to imagine it – I get it delivered every day.

’nuff said.

Go. Away. Ignoramus.

Then come back and we can have a serious discussion.

Back in 04 when the blog thing was kicking off here, my family asked me ‘what do you think about blogs?’ my response was ‘they are too partesian, too extreme in their points of view. don’t pay attention because you are sure to be misled.’

i went on to talk about how, while one mainstream media outlet may be seen to have a bias from time to time, generally speaking they are pretty much neutral, that is their ‘creed’ and without that grounding, they would be cutting off a lot of their readership which is essential because they cost so much to produce.

the fallacy of citizen journalism:

You may say that blogs are gaining importance. i would contest that. i would say that, without blogs, that information would reach the public in any case. the only difference is the channel through which it passed. blog writers who like to pump themselves have to admit that, in the absence of blogs, they would have simply passed their ‘insider knowledge’ to friendly news organisations. one is tempted to think of blog writers as some sort of intelligence ticket-clippers.

and who wouldn’t? if i had some tasty tid-bit on labour or national, like hell id allow someone like audry whats-her-name or chris trotter take the credit! i wanna have my blogosphere day in the sun. thing is, if the information is worth anything, it gets picked up pretty quick and published uncredited in the MSM which makes the whole blog thing pretty pathetic.

lprent, you should be comparing yourself to talkback radio. most of the content on this website, and others, is generated by uninformed, opinionated individuals. that is where the attraction to this form of media lies. there may be small victories in breaking a storm in a teacup but that’s about as far as it goes.

blogs positions are valid but

can you imagine a dominion post or herald that is 90% filled with the uninformed opinions of people like me and you?

“The fact they denied someone standing for labour local body is almost irrelevant. Who knows that the story is? Could it be because that person might be a screw-up and an asset to the opposition?”

You would have understood what I meant.

It has no impact on the ‘primary thesis’ of the Herald editorial at all. The union could have turned that person down for any one of a number of reasons.

For example: What if the person was an idiot? I doubt the union would want an idiot standing, they would be more of a liability than an asset.

The opinion blogs have been steadily rising in importance consistently for quite a long time now. So have the internet news services.

The mainstream media channels have been decreasing in circulation and viewership bot individually and as a group. The latter is partially because of other access to information from channels like the blogs, and the former because of the fragmentation of more channels.

The blogs have a tendency to point out all of the factors in political spheres in microscopic detail. This is the same process as occurs (and has done for decades) in looking at standards in my computer sphere for the same reasons. Rather than depending on a few commentators in the MSM, literally thousands of people poke over everything and get the interesting details highlighted.

The same effects have been happening here. In this case for instance. This post pointed out that the EPMU :-
“Earlier this year an employee’s request to stand for the Labour Party in local government was turned down.’

That makes the primary thesis of the Herald editorial a complete waste of printers ink. It is interesting that you didn’t add that to your summary. It means that this is a practice that the EPMU does for all political affliations.

BTW: It also tells me that you didn’t read the post as that was its main point. Why don’t you read the post before commenting – it makes you look foolish to completely miss the point.

How many people watch the television news? How many people listen to the presenters reading out the headlines from the various papers? Saying things such as ‘EPMU sacks Tan’?

I wonder where ‘The Standard’ is going to be in another 12 months given that it seems to be some sort of reaction to National’s popularity?

Anita:

The public is not hearing something that is untrue. As you guys have pointed out, the facts of the matter have been laid bare. That is that he was suspended because he didn’t advise the heirachy of his intentions.

I’m sorry but the public are simply not going to buy that.

Particularly when you have Andrew Little saying that his choice of political party had something to do with it:

“Mr Little said most requests were dealt with on the basis of workload, but in the case of someone standing for ACT, which held positions counter to the union’s core beliefs, the choice of party could be an additional factor.

That was because the union needed to decide whether it was going to give Mr Tan time off from his job to campaign for ideas it disagreed with.”

http://www.nzherald.co.nz/section/1/story.cfm?c_id=1&objectid=10528449

Even if you assume very high numbers reading the same paper, that means that not many people read the herald. Probably not a particularly high proportion of Auckland’s population.

It’d be interesting to find the numbers of people who read the heralds online site.

We’re not that big a readership, but the number of people reading the site per week is getting significant. The herald has been running about 100 years plus and has a significant staff even in the web section. We’ve been running a year and doing it on a voluntary basis.

Yep, 2dd, condemned out of your own mouth. You don’t care about facts, just smears and lies; and as long as the effect is in your favour, that’s okay.

Well, the Standardistas and I do care about the truth. If you want lies and innuendo, there are plenty of right-wing blogs catering to your tastes. Oh, and the Herald it would seem.

No, that’s all you hear. Even after having the facts patiently explained to you in children’s terms.

Swampy:

“The Herald represents the half of the general populace who want Labour and all sympathisers out of government at the election.”

What incredible editorial systems they must have in place to represent so many people. Quite astounding. You could probably write for them, you know, with your incredible skills of analysis…

So the public is hearing something which is quite untrue. Why is that?

The public do not care for the semantics you use to dilute the debate on here. The public do not read the standard in any great numbers.

Tan suspended from the EPMU after standing for ACT is all they hear.

So good luck with that.

lol