ANB

Check out Erin’s excellent post. I watched Q&A tonight because a friend was on, and was overwhelmed with frustration at the lack of thoughtful and engaging debate.

The producers seemed to have invited cranks and politicos on in an attempt to “make good television”, which is not what such shows should be about. It was  a live forum, and with an articulate and interested audience and excellent live web integration.  

Every opportunity for interesting discussion was then squandered on obfuscatory political non-answers, low-quality humour, and the voicing of the kind of uninformed, sound-bitey arguments that are new to almost no-one.

We have a publicly-funded, tightly-regulated national broadcaster and still we cannot get a good issue-discussion program on television. The best at the moment is SBS’s Insight,  which itself suffers from lack of focus and the tendency to give polemics too much airtime.

The future is clearly with the bloggers. That is why Erin’s post is so important.