Outsourcing

Tuesday, July 13, 2010

The ABC, by virtue of so-called rationalist accountancy, is yet another public institution being systematically degraded of standards. The latest degradation is the outsourcing of news resources which apparently happened on the eve of Julia's ascension to the crown (see previous post here).

I don't watch TV much. We don't have one. So you can imagine the occluded laughter when on Saturday night we tuned in with friends to watch the ABC news and saw that I was labelled "Patrick White" and "Garden Artist"?


It was very kind of the ABC to report on our Food Forest plant-in and help further the idea of free, local-community organic food, I just feel for those in the ABC who have to work within such a culture of sub-standards, or rather sub-less standards, because it's sub-editors who seem to be our absent friends across the media.

Here's an idea: slash accountancy departments in half and put the resources back into content and editorial services. But of course this won't happen so we have to remain evermore cynical that what content the mainstream media simulates into our living rooms should always be taken with a grain of salt.

Come to think of it, if any of you are budding sub-editors and find fault on this blogsite, we'd be happy to hear from you. We have neither an accounts department or a salaried editorial team, but we do have standards we'd like to maintain.

4 comments:

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Glen Dunn said...

Hi PMZ/AAF.

It was kind of Aunty to give the Food Garden a little spray... and to get it so wrong, so thoroughly. Highly trained, world-travelled, intelligent folk, with access to abundant technical resources, cobbled that article together with less care than taking a dump... and fed that to it's customers. The audio grabs, the visual edits ("I also see this as a physical poem") Cut! The passive smile to camera from the reporter... here's some more whacky stuff! Eating weeds! Oink, oink, oink, chortle, nod, wink, back to studio... make-up! I cannot begin to explain how redundant I believe this type of media is.
Bring on the garden.
Love.

Pedestrian Pastor said...

The ABC report also miss-named the church upon which the Food Forest has been planted. It named it St Stephens. The church has been called St Michaels for the past 155 years.

The Pedestrian Pastor

Lucas said...

The shittiness of television reportage... The shame of it is that it isn't really a surprise at all...

My fave brainworm along these lines is a grab from the TV news show within The Simpsons, sometime in the early 1990s. The newsreader Kent Brockman throws to an ad break, saying:

"Coming up next: Which work better? Springy clothespegs, or the other kind?"

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