On October the 6th 2008 the Rural Press Newspaper The Queensland Country Life coped an absolute serve off the ABC’s Media Watch program for churning out press releases as if they were real journalism.
There’s sloppy journalism, and there’s non-journalism.
Take Queensland Country Life, for example, known in the Sunshine state as “the Bible of the Bush”But you don’t always need to advertise. You can just send in a press release.
There’s a good chance it’ll go straight into the paper, holus bolus, without even the lightest makeover by a journo…… It’s a poor substitute for journalism. But the paper’s staff is apparently so lean that this sort of thing is now a common occurrence.
We asked the Editor of Queensland Country Life for a comment. We got no response. QCL is one of more than two hundred papers owned by Rural Press, which merged with Fairfax Media last year.
Not only did media watch no get a response from QCL editor Mark Phelps, he and the QCL are undeterred. Take this weeks issue, page 4, under the headline:
Beef Marketing Ramps Up In The Face Of US Surge:
Oh if you have not got a copy, no problem, you can read the exact same article on the MLA web site. It came word for word from a media release issued … wait for it …. 2 weeks ago under the title:
Beef Marketing Ramps Up In Korea In The Face of US Surge.
Word for word and published by the QCL as if it is a news item written by a journalist.
Now thats only half the problem. The real problem is that Queensland Country Life has choosen to print the MLA’s sugar coated spinned out version of marketing initiatives and successes in the face of increased US competitioin.
Reading the article beef producers would have a warm and fuzzy feeling that their levies money was being well spent  keeping our market share and our NLIS system was protecting our premium beef export markets.
What the Queensland Country Life and the MLA won’t do is tell Australian Beef Producers is the real situation in South Korea. This is what the Headline Should have been.
Aussie Beef Slumps 17% in Korea as US Beef Surges.
U.S. beef has beat out other imported and even domestic product in sales at South Korea’s three largest supermarket chains, according to local media reports.
On Sunday E-Mart, Homeplus and Lottemart reported combined sales of nearly 1,300 tons of U.S. beef since Nov. 27, when they resumed sales of U.S. beef.
In the same period, sales of Australian beef reached slightly more than 1,100 tons, down some 17 percent from the same period a year ago. Meantime, sales of homegrown hanwoo cattle product grew 5 percent to about 712 tons.
The USA has no mandatory expensive electronic Livestock identifaction tagging scheme (Australia does), they have been banned from exporting to South Korea since 2003 when they had their first case of Mad cow disease (Australia has never had a case) and now they are back in the market kicking our butts.
Australian beef producers pay $5 per head marketing levy to the MLA, USA producers pay $1. Australian producers must by law electronically tag and track every beast at an estimated cost of $30 per head, US producers have no such requirements as their scheme is voluntary.
Granted Australia and New Zealand have the cleanest and greenest beef in the world. Yet when it comes to selling into world commoditry markets it means squat. There are only 3 considerations when buying certain grades of beef on world commodity markets,
1. Price
2. Price.
3. Price.
Australian Beef producers have a competitive disadvantage of $34 a head against US cattle producers because of the MLA levy and NLIS compliance costs.
The arguement put forward by MLA and proponets of NLIS that it gives our producers a competive market advantage in premium markets such as South Korea is clearly wrong and misleading. All they have saddled our producers with is an expensive, time consuming competitive disadvantage.
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