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  • Masterchef
    Gay Bilson | The Nation Reviewed | Media | November 2009 | Society & Culture

    It is like a sixteenth-century court: royal, papal, judicial – take your pick. The court makes its own rules and makes sure, by its self-designated pomposity and paternalism, that its power is never in doubt, that there will be no surprises, no rebellion. There is no jury,...

  • Rising Son: James Murdoch The Online Monthly - subscriber only access
    Malcolm Knox | The Monthly Essays | Business | Media | November 2009

    The Absence of Trust

    Murdoch’s choice of speech title was a simple pun. The object of his attack was to be the BBC Trust, the governing body that, he argued, has let the public broadcaster run out of control. James Murdoch likes wordplay and literary...

  • School for Gangsters: 'Underbelly' and 'The Wire'
    Alan Saunders | Arts & Letters | Television | Media | November 2009 | Society & Culture

    “Was that like a movie or what?” says one young thug to another after a shoot-up at a petrol station. We’re in the middle of the Melbourne gangland killings, as depicted in the TV show Underbelly, and the dialogue reveals two things: that the writers of ...

  • Mash-up: A Short History of the Media Future
    John Birmingham | The Monthly Essays | Media | October 2009 | Society & Culture

    The formal library, in contrast, has none of this. Occupying the centre of the original house, its one nod to modernity is a rather groovy white lampshade hanging in the centre of the room. The vast and intricate web of optical fibre and wiring, which forms a sort of nervous...

  • Hidden Treasure: Forty-three Years at the ABC
    Chris Masters | March 2009 | The Monthly Essays | Media
    Despite that dismal episode, I still see the ABC as a national treasure. It can be snobbishly self-important and oafishly bureaucratic. There are a lot of cardigans in those corridors. Managers come and go with the barest understanding of broadcasting, the central purpose of the...
  • Last Man Standing: Alistair Cooke’s 'Reporting America'
    Alan Saunders | March 2009 | Books | Media
    This book arrived on my desk during the week of the American presidential election, and it was still there a couple of days later when I returned to the office (from a studio, appropriately enough, after going to air live) to find that Obama had won and that I'd missed his...
  • Vanity Fare: Michael Wolff’s 'The Man Who Owns the News'
    Gideon Haigh | March 2009 | Books | Media
    In the mid 1960s, Fred Friendly, friend of and producer to the legendary newsman Ed Murrow, visited his boss at CBS, the no-less legendary William Paley, and fell to arguing about the network's profitability. "How much money did CBS make last year?" demanded...
  • Arise!: Philip Roth’s 'Indignation'
    Drusilla Modjeska | March 2009 | Books | Media
    When, in 1951, Philip Roth affixed decals to the rear of his father's Chevy - "one proclaiming the name of my new university, the other the Greek initials of my fraternity" - his uncle, a drycleaner, took to calling him ‘Joe College'. It was a name that stuck...
  • Tales of the City: Gus Van Sant’s "Milk"
    Luke Davies | March 2009 | Film | Media
    "I'm in San Francisco and I'm gonna take it all in," Jack Kerouac wrote in his 1965 novel, Desolation Angels. "Incredible the things I saw." He was harking back to the late summer of 1956, when he was still just a dharma bum, hitchhiking or...
  • Gone with the Wind: An Australian Fiasco
    Peter Conrad | February 2009 | The Monthly Essays | Media
    By now all those questions have had the same dismal answer. The few grudgingly favourable reviews Australia received chose to be amused by its giddy, garbled, retrograde kitsch - the lurid sunsets and silhouetted roos that pander to fantasies about an exotic continent,...