• Annabel Crabb

via The Drum

19 October 2011Annabelle Crab discusses Australia's political engagement in an era of new information technologies and waning media profit models, on The Drum.

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It's okay. I don't commemorate the birthdays of all long-dead US presidents as a general rule. But Dwight Eisenhower, whose birthday it was on Friday, has brought me a lot of enlightenment this year, so I'll ask you briefly to indulge me while I give him a nod.

In April and May this year, I travelled to the United States with Eisenhower Fellowships, an organisation founded on the occasion of Eisenhower's first birthday in the White House, and which in the years since has brought people from all over the world to meet the great leaders and thinkers of the United States.

Many gifts were given to me over those two months. Hospitality, insights, and the opportunity to find extraordinary new friends among the fellows from 18 other nations. But the greatest of all was the gift of time to reflect, to observe and to think about the extraordinary changes that are tearing through the world in which I work - the media industry - and the world about which I write - politics.

What follows is not a travel diary. I blogged regularly from the road about many of the people I met, after all, and thanks to the immortality of the internet all of that remains available on The Drum. What follows is more of a meditation on the battleground that is media and politics, from someone who has been lucky enough to take some time out from living it to think about it for a bit.

In Australia, there is a hostile, scratchy feel to politics at the moment. Everyone's fed up to the back teeth with everyone else. The Government doesn't understand why newspapers write "crap", as the Prime Minister so pungently put it. Newspapers respond tartly that if Government's didn't dish up such crap, they wouldn't be obliged to report it. Whose fault is it all?

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