World watch

The challenge of presenting news objectively. Historically, there was a clear delineation, in concept at least, between news and opinion. The premise was that news should report facts objectively, opinion was exactly that and that the two should be clearly delineated. That is simply no longer the case with opinion being passed off as news on a regular basis. But, was the delineation ever achievable or was it just hiding the subject nature of news reporting. Let's take COVID-19 as an example. If you have a worldview that believes that elimination is the only strategy then case numbers are vitally important and so reporting them is imperative. However, if you follow the government view that hospitalisations are the key indicator, then you are less likely to report case numbers and more likely to report the hospitalisation or ICU rates. So it is it objective to report case numbers or hospitalisation rates, or maybe both should be reported, but that also has implications. It seems that...

 COVID The Victorian government has passed a pandemic bill amidst large protests. The bill has sparked outrage amongst many sectors of the community including an open letter from the Victorian Bar and objections from human rights advocates. Interestingly, it largely replicates the NSW government Public Health Act by moving the decision making power to the Health Minister rather than the Chief Medical Officer. The issue seems to be that whereas the NSW Public Health Act was written sometime and is very vague, the Victorian Act spells out the powers in quite some detail. This puts the powers available to the Minister in black and white, which is what seems to have sparked the outrage. The reality is that human rights and liberal freedoms only have very limited protections in Australia under either a state of emergency or a pandemic. This is because the Australian Constitution and the resulting attitude of the courts is to support a representative democracy which means the Government ...