Whoever controls the media, the images, controls the culture.
— Allen Ginsburg, born in 1926
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Secret Chats Show How Cybergang Became a Ransomware Powerhouse New York Times
Bloody hell. Talk about giving us privileged white males a bad name. Michael Kroger’s rant about ABC chair Ita Buttrose this week was outrageous. “Ita should resign,” Kroger told, who else but, Sky News. “Ita has been a terrible failure.”
At this point he had barely cleared his throat. “She’s lost control of the board,” he went on. “The board has lost control of the managing director. The managing director has certainly lost control of news and current affairs. The ABC staff are more powerful than ever. They have weaponised Four Corners, Q&A in particular, which is like political acid in the face of the Liberal Party. It’s a shockingly biased program. The Drum, these current affairs shows are just weaponised against the Coalition.”
You get the drift. There are so many levels of wrong to this it is hard to keep track, but can we start with the fact that the ABC is not Pravda? Its job is not to pump up the tyres of anyone, it is to hold power to account, and as the LNP has got most of the power, its members are the ones who get held most to account! The very idea that it is the job of Ita Buttrose to intervene in the fine journalism she presides over is outrageous, and yet not to Kroger who, followers of his career will recall, was the subject of accusations of interference when he was an ABC director in the late ’90s and early 2000s.
Chris Masters became so convinced that the Liberal powerbroker was trying to interfere with his Four Corners profile of Alan Jones, that when Kroger agreed to an interview about Jones, Masters, told me this week, “my first question was about his blatant attempt to pressure me. He was so angry a button on his shirt burst. I will never forget, as we were wrapping up, one of his office workers giving me a surreptitious thumbs up.”
Darien Shanske (UC-Davis), Chris Moran (Venable, Baltimore) & David Gamage (Indiana; Google Scholar), Maryland's Digital Tax and the ITFA's Catch-22, 100 Tax Notes State 141 (Apr. 12, 2021):
This essay analyzes whether U.S. state-level taxes on digital advertising — like Maryland’s new tax — are barred by the Internet Tax Freedom Act and argues that the Act’s prohibition against “discriminatory” taxes on electronic commerce should be construed narrowly.