Monday, October 10, 2005
SENSIBLE AND RESPONSIBLE SCHOLARSHIP
Received this email, from an anonymous attendee, shortly after John Doyle delivered Friday night’s Andrew Olle Media Lecture:
Watch the Andrew Olle lecture. You’ll puke. It’s unbelievable. Undergrad lefty conspiracy theories sewn together with one liners and masturbatory adolescent fantasies about how the world should work ...
Terrorism apologist (literally) Peter FitzSimons was at the same lecture and reported in the Sydney Sun-Herald that it was just super (no link available; sensitive Peter evidently prefers that his column no longer be published online). Who is right? Let’s take a look at Doyle’s terrible/wonderful (and here abbreviated) speech:
It’s a cold, cold-hearted world out there. Look at the way Mark Latham treated his Labor family. Look at the way the Liberal family treated John Brogden.
Labor family? Liberal family? That puke warning came just in time.
So forget diversity of opinion – it’s out there on the margins. If you really want diversity go to the ABC or ABS.
You can’t get more diverse than that; one is a $773 million public broadcaster, and the other is an anti-lock braking system.
I’ve always enjoyed reasoned commentators. I loved the sturdy assuredness of Paul Murphy and now Mark Colvin. I lean forward when I hear Catherine McGrath or Fran Kelly in attack mode. I love Kerry O’Brien getting angry. I pull up a chair for any Chris Masters or Sally Neighbour Four Corners special. I flick the page to the Paul McGeogh article. It’s the mixture of gravitas and style.
Doyle has cultivated an odd, very pretentious, vocal affectation; it seemed to take him nearly 30 seconds to roll out “gravitas and style”. He enjoys listening to himself. Which is curious, given Doyle’s admiration for 50s radio presenter Arch McKirdy:
He was a master of the medium having the easy confidence of one who has made the time, the moment, his own and he knew his subject and somehow gave the impression of having left the ego behind.
Doyle doesn’t give that impression. The dried-lake shallowness of his ideas have the ego at centre stage:
Suddenly the world is awash with Opinion ... Newspapers too, are full of it. Any half-baked dickhead who can string a few sentences together is given a go, particularly if the opinion is inflammatory or somehow ratchets up the climate of fear or loathing – simply and obviously because it sells more newspapers.
He’s talking about conservatives. And then, imagining his point made, Doyle moves on:
I remember reading some years ago about the series Dallas being beamed in to the New Guinea highlands. It was being viewed by mountain tribal people who were just a generation removed from First Contact, people who’d had little or no connection with European society at all apart from the odd Christian missionary ... What were they to make of Dallas? A highly camp styled vacuous rich oil family living the life of Reilly in a bed-hopping fun-filled soap operatic adventure, laced with stylized irony. Probably the highlanders saw it differently. They saw a lifestyle that was heaven on Earth. Irresistible. Vast houses, huge cars, heated pools, money, booze, guns and loose women. And no morality to speak of. Ancient and modern cultural universes brushing against each other. Again a cataclysmic event.
Doyle’s audience, mostly media oldtimers, loved this. It possibly struck them as Revelatory. The last episode of Dallas aired fourteen years ago.
The truth is that in the belly of any society there’s a violent brutal core that exposes itself when the thin veneer of culture is stripped away.
Interesting biology lesson. Strip away the thin veneer and you’ll instantly expose the brutal core within the belly. Nurse! More clamps!
The marauding Rascols blowing into Port Moresby from the New Guinea highlands are no different to the clans of Mogadishu; and those filmed roaming the streets of New Orleans armed to the teeth, all with hunger and many with hatred in the belly are similarly the result of neglect and cynical indifference by politicians and media alike. The recent Hurricane Katrina in the Gulf of Mexico has partially revealed the feral world that snuggles so closely within the first world.
Doyle was complaining a few minutes ago about inflammatory columnists who “ratchet up the climate of fear or loathing”, yet now he does exactly that, days after it was known that tales of feral armed gangs were a media exaggeration. Speaking of climate:
The fact is New Orleans has been known to be a disaster waiting to happen for decades. Being in denial about global warming is to court disaster.
This should have provoked an informed audience to rip Doyle from the stage and throw him on to the street. Instead, he was encouraged to continue:
The Internet allows anyone anywhere to access information that might be true, might be false, but you can find whatever information you need to prosecute any argument you want. Conspiracy theories abound. History can be written any way you wish. In the past, information bound culture. There was a shared sense of a gradually expanding library of sensible and responsible scholarship whereas now information is serving more to fracture culture.
Doyle earlier called for diversity of opinion. Now he pines for an “information bound culture” with a “shared sense” of “responsible scholarship”.
The future of information is with bloggers. And who knows what the blogging implications might be of a generation aching for the steely coldness of Grand Theft Auto San Andreus and other games involving cyber murder, cyber torture and on line sex and anonymous chat rooms and bomb-making instructions and clubs dedicated to nihilism and terrorism and all manner of misguided madnesses designed to accelerate Rapture.
Yep. Sounds like us bloggers. By the way, the transcript of this speech is so poor I suspect it’s taken from Doyle’s actual copy. Let’s skip past a bunch of fear-mongering over the Economy and Investment to Doyle’s next Dallas-related point:
To imagine that everyone on the planet can aspire to the lifestyle of JR Ewing at the cost of the global environment and the resources of other nations is to live in a fool’s paradise. Arm poverty and ignorance with moral rectitude and hang onto your hats. We live in interesting times.
If commercial radio is so slight because it is under resourced, so too is Television. And if more channels are allowed then the resources will be even further stretched.
Doyle wishes for diversity, yet opposes any increase in the number of networks. Stupid, but not all that unpredictable coming from someone who says that 9/11 was ...
... a blunt cleaver that questioned Western certainty. One of the pilots of the first American Airlines plane to smash into the World Trade Centre was Mohammed Atta. He spent his last hours on this earth in Las Vegas roaming amongst the gambling dens and strip clubs theoretically to further steel his resolve such was his loathing of the excesses of the West.
His last hours? According to timely accounts and Doyle’s trusted ABC, Atta left Las Vegas on August 14. Fascinating “theory”, too, about why Atta may have visited Vegas; this from someone who desires “sensible and responsible scholarship”. Of course, Doyle is also a why-ner:
The quest for our media is to ask why it happened and to understand the motivations of those who are willing to end their lives at a young age on the altar of sectarian anger.
Apparently it’s all to do with television. And the internet. And the New Guinea highlands. Doyle claims to reject conspiracy theories, but get a load of this:
To join the dots between that state of mind and the mindset of those in the New Guinea highlands cutting down their pristine forests to feed the generators that provide the power for the television to screen Buffy, or The OC or Backdoor Bonanza three or if they’re on line to power the modem to any cyber freak show the mouse takes them. If the examination isn’t exacting or truthful and without fear or favour, then this universe’s accidental experiment with self-awareness and consciousness may well have been a total waste of time.
At which point Doyle received a standing ovation from Australia’s collective media elite. Seriously.