Rodney Tiffen – författare

How Australia Compares is a handy reference that compares Australia with seventeen other developed countries across a wide range of social, economic and political dimensions. Whenever possible, it gives not only snapshot comparisons from the present, but charts trends over recent decades or even longer. Encyclopaedic in scope, it provides statistics for a huge range of human activity, from taxation to traffic accidents, homicide rates to health expenditure, interest rates to internet usage. This new edition is fully revised and updated, and features two new chapters: The Howard Impact and The Search for Scoreboards. New sections include obesity, advertising, broadband internet access, childcare and corruption. Information is highly accessible with double-page spreads for each topic. Tables and graphs are presented on one page, and clear explanation and analysis on the facing page. In each discussion the focus is to put the Australian experience into international perspective, drawing out the implications for the nation's performance, policies and prospects.

In this landmark book, Rodney Tiffen asks: what is the truth about Rupert Murdoch and his audacious business practices?Tony Abbott thinks that Rupert Murdoch is one of the most influential Australians of all time and that we should support our ‘hometown hero’. Murdoch, who has mainly lived in New York since 1973 and renounced his Australian citizenship in order to move into American TV, has aroused much more controversy than most hometown heroes.This comprehensive book traces his business career, the entrepreneurial strategies that led to his early success and his later exercises of monopoly power. It dissects his political ideas, the relish with which he approaches political campaigning, and the way he leverages political support into policy outcomes that favour his business. Some of his news outlets have been responsible for very good journalism, but have also been lambasted for outrageous sensationalism and political bias. Fox News has reached new lows in the mixing of propaganda and news and his newspapers in Australia have mainly championed conservative governments.

Since 1970 seventy-three political leaders within the major parties have been forcibly removed from their leadership positions. And at the heart of the turmoil is the media, with its 24-hour news cycle making political leadership evermore precarious.Disposable Leaders is an engaging and insightful analysis of the high-drama leadership challenge – a regular event that is now central to Australian politics. Not only does Rodney Tiffen explore some of the most intriguing federal leadership struggles that have dominated recent Australian politics in detail, he also examines all of the 73 successful leadership challenges that have occurred since 1970. In doing so Tiffen also shines a light on the central role the media plays in the revolving-door leadership that has become the new normal in modern Australian politics.

This book looks at Australian newspapers over the half century following the introduction of television in 1956. Through a quantitative study, it illuminates how the nature of news has changed and how central journalistic practices have developed. It examines newspapers’ changing size and structure, their story priorities, their use of visual aids and interpretive frames, their changing range and treatment of sources, and how these changes affected their political and international coverage.The content analysis shows a dominant theme of growth and improvement. Newspapers offered their readers much more at the end of the half century than at the beginning. The much larger volume of news was presented in more visually attractive and reader-friendly ways than before. News agendas expanded in response both to changing reader interests and a changing political environment. Newspapers had a more active orientation towards using a wider range of sources. All papers shared in the major trends but to varying degrees so that by the end of the period there were sharper differences between the papers than at the beginning.Mapping the multi-dimensional nature of change in this pivotal period lays a groundwork for analysing the changing nature of journalism during the existential crisis that news organisations are now facing during the digital age.