- ewe2
- Jul 1, 2009
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So let me get this straight.
Judith Sloan is a regular contributor to catallaxyfiles.com, she's a batty neoliberal.
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Mar 27, 2017 03:22
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May 16, 2024 22:37
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- ewe2
- Jul 1, 2009
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Counter-riposte:
quote:
The Australian Financial Review has been tirelessly battering Alex Malley, the head of CPA Australia, for two years. How exquisite is the irony.
CPA, a professional body for accountants, lays down million-dollar surpluses year after year, “The Fin” lays down donut. Yet, as story after story ripped into Malley and his management of CPA, rival professional body CAANZ (Chartered Accountants Australia & New Zealand) has been mollycoddled with the customary string of Fin Review puff-pieces.
The newspaper really hit it straps this morning with a breathless page one “expose” on how, ten years ago, Malley gave tutorials to students without even telling his former employee Macquarie University he was doing it. He and a host of others even sold textbooks to students, like every other academic in the known world.
In the journalism trade, this is what they call a “beat-up”. It is the epitome of the beat-up.
http://www.afr.com/business/accounting/cpas-alex-malley-allowed-to-resign-from-macquarie-university-20170326-gv6nju
That defamation lawyer Mark O’Brien is bearing down on the Fin over its Malley coverage is one thing, that the newspaper’s credibility is shot and that this is a newspaper in “run-off” is another.
CPA appears to be the only peak body with an “Events” budget and an “A” in its name which attracts hard-hitting coverage from the Fin. You name it – BCA, MCA, APPEA, ABA – if it is an industry PR outfit which espouses lower taxes for rich people and lower wages for poor people, the Fin will be there bashing out its press releases, touting its campaigns from page one.
After a volley of ad hominem hit-jobs from the Fin’s gossip columnist Joe Aston, Malley finally got fed up a few days ago and fired off an 11-pager to CPA members defending his stewardship and answering the newspaper’s criticism.
The Fin and CPA used to host a Sunday morning TV show on Nine Network. The show, which featured Joe Aston, got axed.
In its place, Nine ran a chat show with Alex Malley interviewing celebs like The Fonz, Gai Waterhouse, Neil Armstrong. To the chagrin of the Fin, that still runs.
Here’s what Malley told his members last week:
“Since Financial Review Sunday was “shelved”, the columnist has written more than 30 articles across print and online, with many being tweeted and retweeted by AFR journalists and the paper itself, disparaging CPA Australia, our chief executive and, by extension, all CPA Australia members.
“In February 2016, CPA Australia’s television program took over the 10am Sunday time-slot that had previously been occupied by Financial Review Sunday.”
Aston rubbished the CPA claims, though failed to land a real punch. The Fin has since put two other reporters on the story.
http://www.afr.com/brand/rear-window/unpicking-alex-malley-cpa-spending-defence-20170318-gv18x4
The next story began with the line “the screws tightened on Alex Malley”; another majestic irony from the Fin as Mark O’Brien has also filed a defamation suit against the newspaper for an Aston story about flamboyant investor Michael Kodari.
Further, Malley’s email reveals he has a recorded conversation with Fairfax editorial boss Sean Aylmer in which Aylmer actually apologises to Malley for Joe Aston’s stories.
In Aston’s defence, Alex Malley is fair fodder for a business gossip column. Malley’s grinning visage adorns giant billboards around the country. His head is on the sides of buses. His book, The Naked CEO, is promoted from pillar to post.
Malley, many would say, was cruising for a bruising. For an accountant, for the head of an accounting advocacy organisation, the branding would seem overkill … but for its sheer success.
The CPA’s personality strategy, selling Alex Malley, has delivered spectacular results. Memberships up 30,000 to 160,000 in seven years, record surpluses, a presence in 19 countries. The Malley branding has worked.
There are reasonable criticisms to be made about the CPA’s lavish marketing budget, directors’ pay, and transparency; but these are the very sort of criticisms which might be levelled at a thousand other institutions – including the Fin which markets the personal brand of gossip columnist Joe Aston.
While CPA strapped on another 30,000 members over the past nine years, circulation of the weekday Fin dropped by 40,000 to 47,000. As it was late to the digital party, online audience is negligible.
Besides CPA’s 160,000 members, Malley has 454,318 LinkedIn followers and 126,000 on Twitter. As his personal distribution already eclipses the Fin, Alex Malley hardly needs to clog up with courts with defamation proceedings. But it is obvious the Fin has it in for him.
Unfortunately the good work of the real journalists at the Fin, as is the case with The Australian, is tarnished by the agendas, ideological prejudices and toadying of its managers to vested interests.
Just as The Oz has torn down acres of plantation forest obsessing about free speech clause 18c – bellicosely defending peoples’ rights to insult people – The Fin has squandered its resources on harebrained campaigns like the pursuit of Alex Malley.
Both the national dailies have been bleeding red ink for years pandering to a tiny market of big business people.
The Malley coverage is redolent of the newspaper’s campaign against the ANU. The depths were plumbed in 2014 when the Fin pumped out literally dozens of stories lambasting the Australian National University (ANU) for divesting its shares in Santos.
After this festival of indignation, shares in Santos dived from more than $12 to less than $3. A jumbo capital raising ensued. In dumping its Santos shares, the ANU probably did the deal of the year. That was never reported.
The orgy of insults which followed the divestment was not matched with even a skerrick of investigation when a suspicious looking takeover bid offer for Santos conveniently materialised after its share price rout.
Such is mainstream business journalism these days. It is getting worse. As Paddy Manning, freelance journalist and former SMH business chief of staff, wrote about the Fin in 2013:
“Herograms for business leaders, unreadable roundtables and conference-linked spreads featuring plenty of happy snaps of business leaders with a glass of champagne or mineral water in hand…
“Nobody reads it. Educated readers … hate it. Ultimately, even advertisers shun it. It’s a business model for business journalism that had been tried at both The AFR and The Australian. It doesn’t work.”
Manning was sacked for that, sacked for telling the truth, sacked for exercising free speech, sacked by Aston’s boss.
https://theconversation.com/paddy-manning-the-fairfax-watchdog-eats-one-of-its-own-13327
So parlous are the finances of the Financial Review that Fairfax management hides them. They are not stripped out in the newspaper’s results, instead they are buried in Metro Media division along with the Sydney Morning Herald and The Age.
While Malley’s CPA notched up its enormous surplus last year, the poor old Fin and other metro papers suffered a 55 per cent fall in earnings before interest and tax to $13.8 million.
Where their journalism has failed, they are now counting on “Events” to lift revenue. Indeed “Events” sales were up 33 per cent last year. The actual dollar figures, if disclosed, are hard to find.
It is true that the kowtowing to big business is de riguer for the financial press, dilapidated as it is and desperate to keep advertising coming in the door.
It is also true that the Fin and The Oz – in spite of all their resources – also miss a lot of the biggest stories in business, beaten by the likes of The Guardian (which doesn’t even have a business reporter) on Adani, the ABC on Macquarie, the metro dailies on big bank investigations and by yours truly on multinational tax and the debacles in electricity and gas … just beaten into irrelevance weekly; its good reporters interred on the inside pages while it campaigns off the front page for the corporate PR fraternity.
The big business bootlicking might ever so slightly defensible if it were even-handed. Yet The Fin has disclosed that it had a commercial arrangement with CPA’s arch rival CAANZ (also with Westpac which would not take kindly to Malley’s efforts to undermine the big bank’s financial planning empires).
Indeed this reporter copped some heat over CAANZ coverage – a solid story on the merger pulled from SMH online for two days while CAANZ was busy advertising – far fairer and coverage than the Malley stories.
http://www.michaelwest.com.au/witch-hunt-the-fins-campaign-to-destroy-cpa-boss-alex-malley/
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Mar 27, 2017 09:37
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- ewe2
- Jul 1, 2009
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David Marr discusses his Quarterly Essay The White Queen: Pauline Hanson and the Politics Of Race on Monday's Late Night Live, with some interesting stuff about what Hansonism is not as much as what it is. It's not religious, it's extremely native-born and anti-intellectual, and it's run by a control freak racist who doesn't have the electoral pull that the media constantly assumes.
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Mar 28, 2017 00:01
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- ewe2
- Jul 1, 2009
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Get a lawyer, get assessment for damages, nail them to the wall. They're up poo poo creek and they hope you won't do your homework.
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Mar 28, 2017 08:14
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- ewe2
- Jul 1, 2009
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Idiots outside my house are already driving through flood water. All schools closed, flash flooding warnings.
Stay safe Qld goons.
WRT that Cash interview, what kind of advisors are giving her dumb lines, she's already proven she can't talk her way out of them.
Also the only reason the Hun would go Bishop is the readerships fury at the rorting. They do want to sell papers sometimes.
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Mar 30, 2017 03:15
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- ewe2
- Jul 1, 2009
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Has Michaela Cash always been absolute trash during interviews?
Because over the last year or so she's been a complete trainwreck. Is it a case of the pressure getting to her, or just ongoing long-term incompetence?
Yeah she's hopeless. Beyond the obvious stupidity of a feelpinion that evaporates when you look at it, it does smack of a media time-waster to divert attention while the government desperately tries to think of something else. Nothing explains the idea that Cash would be the go-to to front the media on it better (apart from the guys wanting to avoid the job). It certainly explains whatever the hell she was trying to say about the Victorian CPA bullshit bill.
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Mar 30, 2017 07:50
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- ewe2
- Jul 1, 2009
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There is no loving ironicat big enough.
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Mar 31, 2017 10:35
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May 16, 2024 22:37
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- ewe2
- Jul 1, 2009
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At last our evil lefty plan has succeeded. Now to destroy the Bolt Report!
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Apr 1, 2017 04:18
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Mar 27, 2017 03:22
Let that be a lesson unto you, Daisy.
