© 2018 Greg & Sylvia RAY

Author: Greg Ray

This author has written 481 articles
Read more about the article The Queen and Covid: slanting the news

The Queen and Covid: slanting the news

Is it news? Or is it propaganda? If it's propaganda, what is it trying to achieve? Living in Australia at the moment these are important questions. Long ago I worked at a newspaper. One job I had for a time (an honorary additional duty, actually) was to mentor cadet reporters. A thing I liked to do during our little "lectures" was to compare the different treatments given to news stories by different newspapers and media outlets. This was, and is, a very instructive and helpful exercise, not only for journalists but for anybody who wants a…

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Read more about the article Three’s a crowd in a matchbox

Three’s a crowd in a matchbox

What is it with matches and the number three? Always a sucker for brightly coloured bits of paper, I've managed to accumulate a small collection of matchbox labels. I like these odd little works of art that flourished for years in a seemingly unlikely niche. They are like postage stamps, I suppose, in that they had strictly utilitarian beginnings but soon became a field for fertile design imaginations. I'm often baffled as to why certain designs were chosen to decorate the outsides of matchboxes, and some are nothing short of weird. Threes. Three of them. But…

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Read more about the article Where does the job-cutting road lead to?

Where does the job-cutting road lead to?

ANOTHER day, another how many hundred jobs being lost? You can blame the pandemic for much of it right now. The impact of the virus on business has forced Qantas to cut at least 6000 jobs. Australia’s dominant news and propaganda distribution network, Rupert Murdoch’s News Limited, is shuttering papers all over the country and putting hundreds more people out of work. What’s left of the universities are slashing jobs and pay for non-executives with considerable ruthlessness. Accounting firms are cutting. Law firms are cutting. But really, the pandemic has only accelerated and exacerbated an existing…

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