The Australian and the political blogosphere

There's a very interesting brouhaha on at the moment, more talk and hot air than anything else, but I can't help wondering if it's signifying anything more.

The Australian, flagship national daily owned by News Ltd, publishes Newspolls on a regular basis, and they've generally been spinning them as positively as possible for the government in the face of overwhelming evidence to the contrary. 

This sort of dodgy analysis (primarily by Dennis Shanahan) has, quite rightly, been commented upon by the likes of Mumble and OzPolitics in cold hard analysis of their own.  See also Possum Pollytic's wonderful regression calculations.   

So yesterday afternoon Peter Brent of Mumble gets a call from Chris Mitchell, editor of the Australian -

A courtesy call from Editor-in-Chief Chris Mitchell this morning informed me that the paper is going to "go" Charles Richardson (from Crikey) and me tomorrow. 

Chris said by all means criticise the paper, but my "personal" attacks on Dennis had gone too far, and the paper will now go me "personally".

No, I'm not making this up.

If they only get as personal as I get with Dennis, then it should be tame, as I don't believe I've ever criticised anything other than his writing.

And to think I described Dennis, in a chapter in a book being launched this month, as (with no sarcasm) "a fine journalist".

All very strange. And - I'd be lying if I didn't admit - a little stomach-churning.

Which ends up being a snarky editorial in today's edition of The Australian (aka "The Government Gazette" across the Australian political blogosphere).  So this has kicked off a bunch of discussions across the blogosphere - see The Road to Surfdom, Larvatus Prodeo and John Quiggin among others for examples.

And yet it gets more interesting.  Tim Dunlop, former mainstay at The Road to Surfdom before taking up a gig "inside the tent" with News Ltd online at Blogocracy, wrote a really good piece about it all this morning as well - which was taken down from the site within about an hour or two (note the empty page here where it used to be).  You can read a copy of it here.  Latest word is that Tim Dunlop has resigned rather than have such interference from News Ltd management.  Hasn't been a peep over at Blogocracy since, and it looks like comments have now stopped.

There'll no doubt be further word tomorrow - just thought I'd summarise as I think there could be more on this over the next few days...

Update Friday morning:

"The Orstrayhun" has a much better (albeit longer and harsher) summary, noting Crikey's much more central role, and ending with the breathlessly melodramatic conclusion that

Digital democracy has come hard and fast to The Australian, and they don't like the fact that on an average Newspoll day more than 80% (my rough estimate) of the comments aired on the boards portray a highly opinionated, often venomous, sprawl of Australian readers who simply do not agree with the way The Australian editorial team interprets the Newspoll results, and regularly claim that the writers are spinning for Howard Corp.

It'll be interesting to watch the mainstream media and blogstream reactions to all this in the next few days.

One thing is now certain.

The Blogstream Vs The Mainstream Media wars in Australia have begun. 

Be interesting to see if Media Watch picks up on this as well.