Poor Journalism Award

.. That’s right, I am now ready to announce the winner of the poorest journalism yet.

The choice was indeed difficult, with choices from Alan Kohler, who seemed to think undecided on the broadband scene, despite being a financial reporter, had made several comments, that were simply incorrect.

We had the author responsible for the trash that is wps.

Certainly a few others to list here.

But the cream, the absolute Poorest of all Journalism reports, must go to this lucky winner: http://www.crn.com.au/story.aspx?CIID=83740&src=site-marq

The article is about a Report that says broadband is not critical. The report is fine.
The investigative reporting by the “Staff Writers” behind the article is not.

The below is the part of the article that immediately discredited the entire article, so much so that the rest of the content can only be assumed to also have came from the same arse cheek the below did:

If Telstra wins, the Government will pay over $4.5 billion for four million Australian households to be supplied with VDSL broadband that can reach maximum speeds of 50mbps (upgradeable to 100mbps).

Optus’ G9 opposition proposes a $3.6 billion investment to supply ADSL broadband to four million Australian households, providing them with maximum speeds of 24mbps (upgradeable to VDSL, or 50mbps).

The problems with those paragraphs are easily identified.

The Australian Government have repeatedly stated that the private sector will fund any FTTN roll out, because they are willing to, the government doesn’t believe they need to see any dollars for such a rollout, they are indeed capable of doing so themselves (with some regulation help).

Telstra’s network cannot supply 50Mbps on FTTN, there are no allowed VDSL standards allowed to be deployed in Australia yet.

Optus and G9 are two seperate things. Optus are Optus, and Optus are a member of nine companies, with no controlling interest in the G9 consortium. Read that. No Controlling Interest. Therefore, it’s not Optus’ G9. It’s the G9 consortium. Get it right.

Telstra’s proposal isn’t for 4.5billion, it’s for 4.1billion. 4.5billion isn’t mentioned anywhere from any source related to FTTN, another figure pulled out of the arse?

And further, both networks are upgradeable, but not just to 50Mbps for the G9 and 100Mbps for Telstra, both are indeed FTTN, and as such are upgradeable to FTTH, and therefore speeds unheard of yet.

I thought, that’s just lazy, piss poor, reporting.

You don’t have to be overly close to know those facts outlined above.

But, it seems Staff Writers believe they didn’t have to do any investigative reporting at all, and just pull facts that they wanted to out of their collective arse, and turn a report from an IT Analyst into a .. well, article without any credible information at all due to the incorrect and misleading information of just those two paragraphs.

I contacted them about it, I have had enough of piss poor journalism. If you are going to actually report the news, at least grab FACTS and make a report based on facts.

Anyway, it wasn’t just a few hours later I got a reply late last night.

They had said that the entire article, was provided by the IT Analyst, Guy Cranswick. (Note the winner of Poor Journalism Award doesn’t even show consistency in their typing abilities, spelling Guy’s name incorrectly at least once in the article, or again in the email (or both)), they suggested that if I believed part of it incorrect, I should contact Guy and forward my comments onto him.

And, I certainly did do that.

Guy replied, after receiving my email indicating to him that if he really wants to be an analyst, he should do more analyzing, and less false reporting.

His response to me after he read the article was that the items in question were not even in his report, and his report was not only related to Productivity gains in faster broadband, which makes sense, an IT Analyst is checking as to whether a fatter pipe will make staff work faster, obviously not, but it has cost reductions and other better incentives for business.

Anyway, the bottom of it was that he hadn’t wrote that at all, and the article didn’t even indicate this, however, Staff Writers did.

So, CRN appeared to have been dishonest with me. That wasn’t good, considering I did indeed tear into Guy’s Analyst skills in an email, and he received a rather critical email, for which I apologised to him for, and certainly sent along a copy to him of CRN’s Staff Writers response stating that he had supplied those paragraphs.

With that clarified, I emailed CRN back, asking for a Please Explain, and further outlining that they can’t go about spreading incorrect information in the media, those who read that article could indeed get several items that are important around the FTTN debate incorrect, the most important of which is of course the fact that they state the G9 network can only go as fast as 50Mbps, when in reality, right now, with Fibre Line Cards and Fibre to the home, customers could have 10Gbps at their houses, and even more!

It creates Telstra’s proposal as better because its upgradeable to faster speeds, when it indeed is not any different to the G9 proposal. And further, they take on the similar line Telstra does, and places ownership of the G9 in Optus hands, when in reality, none of the 9 members will ever have any controlling ownership. They never can, it’s in the proposal.

It’s not the SingTel Optus G9, it’s not Optus’s G9, it’s not the SingTel G9, it’s not the Optus G9, It’s not the Singapore G9. It’s just the G9 consortium. What’s so dang hard to gather from that? Nothing.

Anyway, well done CRN. Your journalism standards are piss poor, I’ve seen better reporting from Today Tonight, and anyone familiar with certain events will know just how poor Today Tonight is. And CRN, you are below them.

Congratulations, keep up the .. poor work. (Don’t really, it’ll do more damage than its worth).

Enjoy!