The Rudd flyer
There will be some mighty relieved hacks at News Limited tonight.
By some distance, news.com.au was first to call the winner of the spill.
Just eleven minutes after the Labor MPs entered the room – and long before speeches and voting were completed – the news.com.au Twitter account tweeted:
First to report the possibility of a rudd win? The Commsec twitter account.
Of great concern for our education system, and the credibility of our media, is the fact that so many journos and media outlets appointed Rudd PM a day before the Gov. General did! Yesterday he was voted in as Labor leader only, yet many media automatically named him PM Rudd, saying the Labor Party had installed him as PM. Ever herd-like, several online news sites eventually altered copy to remove the PM title overnight to then run “It’s official – Rudd is PM” headlines after the official swearing in by the G-G this morning…
To be fair a lot of politicians keep journalists in the loop. As an example I was watching the spill on the ABC last night and both their reporters – Simpkins and Uhlmann – had their mobiles ready for a text straight from the party room. Too, Barry Cassidy was on the show and he basically reported the result (as he’d been told by Labor insiders) 30 minutes before it actually happened. Obviously the numbers had been canvassed and the results given to journos long before. That’s actually good journalism for mine.
Hats off to News Ltd
Congrats to friends and colleagues at News.com.au. Best on ground!
Bull dust – it was pure internet speculation fueled by a desire to be news breakers. Lets all be honest instead of hiding behind the good journalism tag. There was no leak from caucus to any journo – the ABC journos were standing around with their iPhones, receiving nothing, they did not have some insight on numbers until the Caucus Returning Officer read them out.
@ Al… As I said Barry Cassidy on the ABC predicted it just about perfectly 20 minutes before and he openly admitted his information had come from a Gillard supporter. I doubt it would be that hard, each side would have a ‘number cruncher’ all with an error rate of a couple of percent.