Telstra slams Whirlpool and 'œdead tree journalists' over unfair NBN coverage

Alex Zaharov-Reutt
Tuesday, 02 December 2008 06:43

IT Industry - Strategy

Bruem then takes aim at those who believe building the NBN is effectively as simple as digging holes in the ground, a remark I remember Paul Budde suggesting on Sky Business News Channel when questioned over the difficulty of building the NBN network. 

Telstra says that it’s silly to believe that “building the NBN and switching customers across to it is a relatively simple straightforward job that any old contractor can do”, and you’d have to think that Bruem has a point, even if whoever wins will be getting one of the Alcatel-Lucent or Ericsson type companies to do most of the hard work.

Bruem then launches some financial missiles asking where the “serious analysis of the funding situation” went. He asks “Can an Australian Government turn its back on an Australian company willing to invest $5 billion in infrastructure and jobs in this economic climate? Which business journalist has seriously looked at that?”.

Then Bruem shines the light on “The Australian’s” business columnist “Martin Collins”. Bruem expresses extreme disbelief that a top grade professional business journalist would refer to Telstra as “Solstra” have taken a cue from “the juvenile anti-Telstra haters on the Whirlpool chat site”.

Bruem notes: “Apparently the implication is that Telstra is no longer really the company Australians have known and loved to hate -   but it has now been taken over and held hostage by one Sol Trujillo.  Get it?  And this is what passes as top grade business commentary! (Note to The Australian - the Whirlpool geeks are even cleverer as they've added a dollar sign to make the word 'Sol$stra' -isn't that hilarious!)”.

Bruem thinks that the need to come up with “entertaining copy that sells newspapers on a daily basis” is partly what “motivates intelligent journalists to stoop to silly name calling”.

However Bruem says it is possibly something a lot more sinister, suggesting that “maybe it comes down to pushing the bosses' interests. Rupert Murdoch has made it no secret that he'd like to see Telstra broken up. If that means pushing Singapore's propaganda, perhaps that's the price we have to pay.”

Bruem also notes that Murdoch’s desire to see Telstra broken up is possibly “payback given that Telstra has chosen not to advertise in The Australian for more than a year because of its record of unbalanced and inaccurate reporting.”

But “whatever the reason”, Bruem says, “it makes a mockery of the journalists union's belief that standards of fairness and accuracy need to be upheld.  They seem to have left the building a long time ago.”

Given that I've seen several articles suggesting that Telstra is going to win the NBN tender no matter what, I guess Bruem doesn't have too much to worry about.

He does raise some interesting points and clearly is very motivated to ensure that Telstra does indeed win the NBN tender, no matter what.

As Telstra's competitors are nevertheless very powerful, the final outcome of this great game is definitely still unknown, and there's a still quite a few more rolls of the dice to come before we'll all find out.

Until then the NBN is the "Notyet Broadband Network" as per normal, with Senator Conroy's "expert panel" weeks away from making any preliminary decisions, with plenty of negotiations yet to come.

Please resume your ADSL, cable, wireless, satellite and even dial-up connections until further notice.