Isentia Index: disasters aplenty

The wild weather continued to dominate Australian media coverage as another front hammered South Australia and brought further rain to swollen catchments across NSW. The media continues to predominantly report each of these incidents in isolation, which is of course understandable in day to day crisis reporting, and I’m sure the longer term ramifications of more frequent and more intense storms on our economy and society will be thoroughly examined in our national media any minute now.

The immediate response to the SA blackout from a wide swathe of the media (including one ABC broadcast journalist who suddenly morphed into an expert opinion writer on energy distribution…before actually asking an expert or two what might have happened a few days later) was to point to those ugly, bird murdering wind turbines and say “it was them wot done it.” That debate managed to mostly obscure the serious discussion about SA’s network infrastructure and whether it is strong enough for the increasingly wild weather.

Most of the Australian media have also jumped on Donald Trump’s reported disastrous week following the first presidential debate with some glee, many reporting that the chickens may at last have come home to roost, mainly over his refusal to release tax returns and his apparent confirmation that he hasn’t paid any tax for decades. The polls remain relatively close though, and as someone might once have said, a week is a long time in politics, and there are nine of them to go.

The news continues to unremittingly awful out of Syria, with the situation in Aleppo remaining hellish and the US and Russia walking away from negotiations aimed at refocusing military efforts purely on ISIS. The deeper issue that the Syrian Government clearly is starting to see ISIS as no longer their biggest ongoing threat hasn’t had much examination.

The banking inquiry has been receiving blow-by-blow coverage in some media outlets, but it may not have quite filtered through to most Australians, with ongoing calls for a Royal Commission seeming to have little chance of success as we hear the same issues and the same responses trotted out in Parliament House.

Between them, the two grand finals picked up well over 100,000 sydnicated mentions across news media, with not one, but two fairytales coming true. Fairytale fatigue, anyone?