Isentia Index: Olympics, Census and the Nauru Files

Most of the media lost interest relatively quickly with the Census technical and other problems, but radio was still white hot throughout the week following the outage on Census night and the widespread apportioning of blame that followed, with plenty of discussion on radio returning to privacy issues and the general unreliability of doing anything on the interwebs. Social media of course went nuts on the night, the first #CensusFail tweets directly related to the outage appearing around 7:30 (the tag was being used for general criticism of the Census for a variety of reasons before that).

For once it wasn’t Four Corners making the investigative breakthrough, but the Guardian Australia, releasing thousands of leaked pages of incident reports from Nauru, which quickly became known as the Nauru files. The allegations were of course a rallying cry to those opposed to offshore detention in total, and hopefully the media will show as much interest in following up specific allegations now that the ‘exclusive’ is no longer available.

The dairy industry crisis has been brewing for some time, and push seemed to be coming to shove, with media focusing on government meetings with the large co-ops this week, and to what level they might directly intervene, with claims that the whole industry may be in peril if the current price collapse is not dealt with. There’s a few deeper investigative pieces begging to be written about this one, with most coverage just skimming the surface to date.

Liberal Democrat Senator David Leyonhjelm proved that he has learnt a thing or two about getting publicity in the past three years, and that he doesn’t want to be overshadowed by the One Nation and NXT blocs on the Senate crossbench, as he tried to bring back to life the debate about Section 18C of the Racial Discrimination Act by lodging a complaint against a Fairfax journo for calling him and ‘angry white male’.

This Sydney Siege inquiry has been a traditional news story covered in a very traditional way so far, even given the terrorism angle and much of the reporting being centred around deleted text messages. Criminal investigation and coronial inquiries remain a bastion of traditional media methods, particularly as most crimes still aren’t Periscoped or Facebook Lived.

Even higher numbers this week, despite more limited Australian success, as a full seven days of competition saw our airwaves decreeing that too much sport was barely enough. Plenty of commentators have started talking about the demise of the Olympics as a landmark event, but nobody seems to have told the punters, who have been lapping it up at the usual rate.