The Tirade

I have written a couple of articles for ‘The Conversation’ – this is an online news website. This is what they say about themselves:

“The Conversation is a collaboration between editors and academics to provide informed news analysis and commentary that’s free to read and republish.”

In short, you need to be an academic to contribute, which I am through an adjunct professorship at RMIT, and you don’t get paid for your efforts.

The editors feel that mainstream news channels are continuing to slide in the quality of their content. This is because they simply can’t afford to pay for content anymore; the advertising dollars are getting sucked up by Google and their mates.

By corralling academics to write for free, a supposedly quality news outlet is created which solves this problem.

However I have noticed one thing about academics; they have this in-built belief that all problems should be solved by government. In fact over 80% of the articles are either (a) imploring a government to do something or other to fix this or that problem, or (b) analysing government actions.

It sort of makes sense that the institutionalised academics that are totally dependent upon the government tit would not be aware that there are other ways to address issues, or more interesting subjects to write about.

I think I just oxymoroned myself.