The Herald urged people to fill in the census form fully and honestly. It noted the Australian Bureau of Statistics's assurances that its security systems were robust enough to keep our personal information safe. That appears not to have been so. Trust is broken.

The Australian Statistician David Kalisch said on morning radio that the ABS website had been subject to malicious attack which prompted him to shut it down at 7.45pm on Tuesday. That meant about 4 million households which were attempting in good faith to fulfil their civic duty by submitting their forms could not do so.

http://www.smh.com.au/comment/smh-editorial/census-debacle-puts-the-prime-minister-on-notice-20160810-gqp00c.html

Anyone with a brain had to know that this was going to be a debacle...

An "angry" and "bitterly disappointed" Malcolm Turnbull has lashed out at the Australian Bureau of Statistics for census failures he said should have been anticipated and prevented.

As the ABS prepared to reopen the census website on Thursday, the Prime Minister switched to more aggressive rhetoric and predicted "very serious consequences" when the matter was investigated.

read more: http://www.smh.com.au/federal-politics/political-news/angry-bitterly-disappointed-turnbull-lashes-abs-for-census-failures-20160810-gqpsq5.html

A nail in Turdball's coffin...

Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of the Mass Media (1988), by Edward S. Herman and Noam Chomsky, proposes that the mass communication media of the U.S. "are effective and powerful ideological institutions that carry out a system-supportive propaganda function, by reliance on market forces, internalized assumptions, and self-censorship, and without overt coercion", by means of the propaganda model of communication.[1] The title, 'Manufacturing Consent', derives from the phrase "the manufacture of consent," employed in the book Public Opinion (1922), by Walter Lippmann (1889–1974).[2]

Chomsky credits the origin of the book to the impetus of Alex Carey, the Australian social psychologist, to whom he and co-author E.S. Herman dedicated the book.[3] Four years after publication, Manufacturing Consent: The political Economy of the Mass Media was adapted to the cinema as Manufacturing Consent: Noam Chomsky and the Media (1992), a documentary presentation of the propaganda-model of communication, the politics of the mass-communications business, and a biography of Chomsky.

Propaganda model of communication

The propaganda model for the manufacture of public consent describes five editorially distorting filters, which are applied to the reporting of news in mass communications media:

1. Size, Ownership, and Profit Orientation: The dominant mass-media outlets are large companies operated for profit, and therefore they must cater to the financial interests of the owners, who are usually corporations and controlling investors. The size of a media company is a consequence of the investment capital required for the mass-communications technology required to reach a mass audience of viewers, listeners, and readers.
2. The Advertising License to Do Business: Since the majority of the revenue of major media outlets derives from advertising (not from sales or subscriptions), advertisers have acquired a "de facto licensing authority".[4] Media outlets are not commercially viable without the support of advertisers. News media must therefore cater to the political prejudices and economic desires of their advertisers. This has weakened the working class press, for example, and also helps explain the attrition in the number of newspapers.
3. Sourcing Mass Media News: Herman and Chomsky argue that “the large bureaucracies of the powerful subsidize the mass media, and gain special access [to the news], by their contribution to reducing the media’s costs of acquiring [...] and producing, news. The large entities that provide this subsidy become 'routine' news sources and have privileged access to the gates. Non-routine sources must struggle for access, and may be ignored by the arbitrary decision of the gatekeepers.”[5]
4. Flak and the Enforcers: "Flak" refers to negative responses to a media statement or program (e.g. letters, complaints, lawsuits, or legislative actions). Flak can be expensive to the media, either due to loss of advertising revenue, or due to the costs of legal defense or defense of the media outlet's public image. Flak can be organized by powerful, private influence groups (e.g. think tanks). The prospect of eliciting flak can be a deterrent to the reporting of certain kinds of facts or opinions.[5]
5. Anti-Communism: This was included as a filter in the original 1988 edition of the book, but Chomsky argues that since the end of the Cold War (1945–91), anticommunism was replaced by the "War on Terror", as the major social control mechanism.[6]

Government and news media

Editorial distortion is aggravated by the news media’s dependence upon private and governmental news sources. If a given newspaper, television station, magazine, etc., incurs governmental disfavor, it is subtly excluded from access to information. Consequently, it loses readers or viewers, and ultimately, advertisers. To minimize such financial danger, news media businesses editorially distort their reporting to favor government and corporate policies in order to stay in business.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manufacturing_Consent

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Public Opinion is a book by Walter Lippmann, published in 1922. It is a critical assessment of functional democratic government, especially the irrational and often self-serving social perceptions that influence individual behavior and prevent optimal societal cohesion.[1] The descriptions of the cognitive limitations people face in comprehending their sociopolitical and cultural environments make people apply an evolving catalogue of general stereotypes to a complex reality, rendered Public Opinion a seminal text in the fields of media studies, political science, and social psychology.

The introduction describes man's inability to functionally perceive and accurately interpret the world: "The real environment is altogether too big, too complex, and too fleeting for direct acquaintance" between people and their environment. People construct a pseudo-environment that is a subjective, biased, and necessarily abridged mental image of the world, and to a degree, everyone's pseudo-environment is a fiction. People "live in the same world, but they think and feel in different ones."

Human behavior is stimulated by the person's pseudo-environment and then is acted upon in the real world. Some of the general implications of the interactions among one's psychology, environment, and the mass communications media are highlighted.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Public_Opinion_(book)

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see also: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YHa6NflkW3Y

Meanwhile some American progressive news site seem to think that Noam Chomsky is an agent for Zionist Israel...

Rather than tell outright lies, the German media buries news in accordance with its favored narratives, German author Ulrich Teusch told Sputnik Deutschland.

A popular phrase in Germany is "Lugenpress" (Lying Press), which refers to media that doesn't tell the truth. 

"If a narrative has been established, then it is very simple to increase it from time to time, to create a little campaign or even outright propaganda," he said.

"This is my main criticism of the mainstream media which exists in Germany and in other countries."

Teusch differentiates between different kinds of mainstream media, which are more or less connected to the political establishment.

"I distinguish between the mainstream within the mainstream, and mainstream which is outside it."

"This inner segment is more dominant. This is often bold and biased, closely related to politics, the state and business, and this is what I criticize. However, there is also another journalism, and here in Germany that is mainly (undertaken by) public broadcasters," Teusch said.

The development of the media industry has resulted in fewer narratives for the public to choose from, the author said. For example, in the early 1980s in the US, the media market was controlled by about 50 companies, but now there are only six.

"There was a very strong narrative regarding the crisis in Ukraine. However, even prior to that most of the news that came out of Russia was portrayed in a negative light, so this goes back further. In the book I use a term, 'Pre-propaganda,' which describes the run-up, a kind of preliminary phase from which you can quickly and easily build propaganda."

Teusch gave another example of Germany's narrative regarding Russia, that of the news coverage about the death of Russian opposition politician Boris Nemtsov last year.

On February 27, 2015, Nemtsov, who occupied a number of senior positions in the Russian government in the 1990s, and was an active opposition politician in the 2000s, was shot dead in downtown Moscow.