This might be an extremely esoteric post...

When I studied mass media, instead of doing something useful with my youth, there was an irritating academic rivalry between competing theories of news values.

On one hand, a market theory claimed the content of your newspaper is filled with exactly what the market wants, a theory that kinda drowned beneath all the sniggering at its obvious idiocy.

Then there was an even more vegetative Marxist school, promoted by lamentable red brick universities in the UK, that promoted variations on the theme that the newspapers are filled with the propaganda of the ruling classes. Or something.

Along came an Australian academic called Keith Windschuttle, who cut through the crap. Remember, this was the eighties and rubbishy faux-left academia was pretty much the dominant scene in the arts faculties of the Western world. His demolition of the Marxist line was particularly memorable (and to prove it I'll do it from memory) - he said the idea that Marxist academics could see through the propaganda of the news media while yer working classes needed to be enlightened amounted to saying

"the Marxist fingers go click and the working class dreamers will awake from their slumber."

His theory was that mass media is simply a reflection of pop culture, which in turn is a dynamic beast, a sea into which many tributaries flow.

Windschuttle became something of a hero, among our classmates at least and I think I could safely say there was a heavily liberal bias in our class. In fact they made up about half the membership - and the entire leadership - of the very lefty Labour Party on campus, of which I was the President at the time. (Yeah well, so you were perfect when you were twenty.)

Now, twenty years later, Keith Windschuttle has been stuck on the board of the ABC and the federal Opposition ALP is criticising his appointment because, they say, "he is widely regarded as extreme right wing."

I can't say I've followed KW's career at all, so I don't know what he's been up to in the intervening decades but actually his media views were not extreme right wing. They were just right. Having correct views about media news values might not be a qualification for a media board, but it's it's better than nutty views.

He wrote a seminal book about the way news media treated unemployment, and advocated what was called a 'socialist' solution. Consciously or (media studies in-joke here) most likely unconsciously virtually every reporter who covers unemployment today is in some way influenced by that book. He also wrote a book more recently criticising leftish historians for exaggerating racism in Australia's past. Don't know much on that topic, but it's interesting that his critics take it as axiomatic this makes him a right-winger. But it doesn't.

I'm slightly disappointed to see his website doesn't carry his older books, the ones that made him one of our heroes. That may be because they're out of print, or it may be because he has repudiated his views. On the plus side, he has written a piece skewering Noam Chomsky for the latter's disgraceful, pro-fascist performance since September 2001.

It's interesting that the same classmates who admired Windschuttle in the 80s thought Kim Beazley was a buffoon. Kim Beazley is now the federal leader of the ALP, which is attacking Windschuttle's appointment.

Hmmm. Windschuttle good then, Beazley buffoon. Some things never change.