... and now, the top soccer stories in Tassie newspapers today:

The Examiner - "Launceston may host Harry Kewell".
The Mercury - "FFT investigates brawl".

Just another example of how biased The Mercury is.

Still not convinced?

Of the thirteen top stories in the Mercury soccer section, six are about the "racial abuse" issue (the rest are local club news and match results).  However, in that time period (19 June - 8 July), The Mercury has also published articles about soccer workshops during World Refugee Day ("Kicking off a new life", 26 June) and an update on the Tassie A-League bid ("Tassie A-team in the pipeline", 30 June).  Why aren't these articles included?  Too positive?  Don't they suit The Mercury's point of view?

This isn't unique to the Tasmanian media - it happens all across the country, sometimes it is subtle, often it is patently obvious.  In any case, nothing is going to change if we stay silent!

".. that which is adequately explained by stupidity". - Robert J. Hanlon.

If you get your information about the National Broadband Network from the mainstream media, you couldn't really be blamed for thinking that the sky is falling in.  A lot existing media companies, including television and newspapers, have had their industry turned on its head by the internet, and as high speed communications becomes ubiquitous this is only going to get worse for them.  They are struggling, just like the music industry did in the 1990s and 2000s.

However that isn't what this blog post is about!  Sometimes you find someone who is well intentioned, but just doesn't do their research!  This article from the 22 May 2011 edition of the Launceston Examiner is a perfect example.

Tasmania faces long NBN wait

BY MATT MALONEY

22 May, 2011

To start with, the premise of the article flawed...

LAUNCESTON could have to wait until 2021 to be connected to the National Broadband Network.
[...]
... the company has not identified towns and cities to be connected to the network beyond last week's announcement on the project's first and second stages.

This is easily refuted by this press release from Stephen Conroy's office which was published over a year ago.

Also note the end date of 2021 - this appears to have been calculated by adding the ten year build time onto this year - ignoring the fact that construction started about a year and a half ago.

There are also comments such as:

"Tasmanian NBN users have told The Sunday Examiner that communication with internet users with a lower digital bandwidth was much slower than the one-gigabyte-a-second promised."

Gold. Confused by two different things in one sentence! The maximum connection speed of an NBN connection at present is 100 megabits per second, not 1000 - which, although it is within the network capabilities, it is not available to residential customers as yet.  He then fails on the difference between megabits per second and megabytes per second.  Easily confusing to the lay person, but someone educating the public should be better informed.  For those playing at home, a 100 megabit per second connection should result in a throughput of around 12 megabytes a second.

One Smithton business owner, Brett Dawes, said from his six months' experience, internet users must be on the same bandwidth for the network to work properly.

"There is not much point having a patch connected here and a patch connected there - it's all or nothing," he said.

Poorly worded, but I see the point he is trying to make... however, it ignores the fact that people in one house could be using the single FTTH connection to use several different services!  You could have someone watching ABC iView on their laptop, someone else streaming a movie in the lounge room, a third person one a video chat with the grandparents in another part of the house, and the teenager playing online games in his bedroom.  All with enough bandwidth left over for general web browsing and making phone calls!  Not to mention - a lot of the time the "other end" will not be another end user, but a data centre with huge pipes to the outside world!

There is enough misinformation about the NBN floating around in the media - from other news sources and opposing political parties - without errenous articles such as this one!

Just a note on the Hanlon quote at the top - I'm not suggesting stupidity in this case - just lack of research! 

• Postscript: Andrew from Digital Tasmania is in the process of contacting said journo, to offer advice in future instances!

"Footy saved from World Cup threat" read the front page of the Herald Sun yesterday.    What an alarming title – you would think FIFA was going to roll their tanks in and destroy the AFL headquarters from a headline like that.

So what has actually happened?  Let’s pick a few key quotes from the article.

The AFL and the “biggest show on earth” will co-exist if Australia hosts the soccer World Cup in 2018 or 2022.  Co-exist is a funny word.  It implies some sort of equality.  For example, the AFL and soccer don't "co-exist" at the moment - for the best part, the AFL totally dominates it in the media.  Does the AFL expect that this will happen during a World Cup hosted in Australia?  It won't even be 50-50 - the World Cup will, dominate.  The AFL's season continuing during the World Cup is not about whether it is legally allowed to - it is whether the AFL wishes to commit financial suicide by attempting to do so.

Skilled Stadium [Kardinia Park in Geelong], Subiaco Oval, Gold Coast Stadium and Adelaide Oval would also be off limits to the AFL during the Cup.  Oh yes, the FFA/Federal Government is taking these venues, modernising them, upgrading their capacity, using them for a couple of months – and then handing the nice shiny new venues back to the AFL to play on year after year.  Not to mention the MCG and Homebush.  Are we supposed to think the AFL is doing it tough?

The government guarantee appears to contravene a FIFA regulation that a major sport can’t run in the host nation during a World Cup.  Actually, the truth is a little simpler than that – the AFL is not a major sport.  The FIFA regulation relates to events such as Wimbledon, or the Ashes series.  Even Major League Baseball continued in the United States in 1994, and MLB is much bigger than AFL.

[Demetriou said] "We’ve always said we would be providing the MCG and Skilled Stadium [Kardinia Park]"  How nice of him to be able to speak for the Victorian State Government and the City of Greater Geelong.  Did the AFL "provide" the MCG for the Commonwealth Games, or was it simply that it isn’t theirs to provide?  

The AFL has also been concerned FIFA would require the MCG for longer, before and after the tournament.  This refers to a proposal to "rectangularise" the MCG temporarily, requiring the ground for longer for conversion, which was announced publicly in December last year.  However, this proposal had already been eliminated by the bid taskforce privately before this time and also again publicly about 6 hours after the news story was published (in the Herald Sun, no surprises there).  For some reason, despite the fact that it is not going to happen, it gets brought up time and time again by the AFL and the Herald Sun, alongside the equally unlikely threat of "cancelling a season and sending clubs broke".

In fine form as usual, the Herald Sun has followed up with another article today, "League compo for cup games".  This is all about the compensation they will receive for ... hang on - what are they being compensated for?  They apparently aren't going to stop their season or reduce the number of games.  They are mathematically perfectly capable of honouring their existing stadium contracts even with some of them being unavailable, so no issues there.  They are going to have to play some games in reduced capacity venues for 10 weeks, certainly - but this is negated by the fact that they are also going to play in increased capacity stadiums for years to come - surely hundreds of millions of dollars worth of government funded infrastructure is enough?  In fact, the United States bid - our closest competitor for the 2022 World Cup - is already taking advantage of the ammo being provided to them to promote their own bid - how much compensation is the AFL going to pay the federal government if it is their antics which causes our bid to fail?

Melbourne's self proclaimed title of the "sports capital of the world" is now a joke - nowhere else would you see the largest newspaper in such a city against the World Cup.

I really feel sorry for the hundreds of thousands of Victorians who support both codes, as well as the hundreds of thousands who have no specific interest in soccer but want the World Cup to come here.  Unfortunately to the rest of the country and the rest of world, their local media is portraying the state as extremely insular and closed minded.

... and to think that if the World Cup comes here, the Herald Sun would be the first to complain when Melbourne only hosted six matches and Sydney hosts twenty!  But why shouldn't Sydney get more?  Not only are they upgrading their largest venue - Stadium Australia - by adding 5000 seats and installing a retractable glass roof, they are also offering their secondary stadium (Sydney Football Stadium) as well as offering to build a new 40,000 capacity venue in Western Sydney!  The New South Wales Government and the people of Sydney obviously want to host World Cup matches, not treat it like some sort of invading threat. 

The AFL can't really be blamed for their actions - their job is to look after their sport - but the Herald Sun is supposed to be a media outlet, not the AFL's PR department.

If I were an international football fan planning the best location to base myself during a World Cup in Australia, I'd be looking at the city with three venues (and within commuting distance to Canberra and Newcastle).  Melbourne wouldn't even be on the radar.  Is the Victorian Government looking after the interests of the state, or the interests of the AFL?