Isentia Index: crashes all round

Our top issue had actually been talkback led up until #CensusFail last night, with the security and process complaints flowing for several weeks, and radio taking the lion’s share of coverage. But last night’s technical problems saw social media take over with a vengeance. The ABS has claimed the site overload was owing to DDoS hacking attacks and that all data is secure, while some tech types on social noticed no unusual activity and were suggesting the site simply couldn’t handle the Census night load. Media reported the ABS did not post an outage notice until 11:30pm, four hours after the site went down and the first tweets appropriating the existing #CensusFail hashtag started being used to describe the outage.

Interest rates continued to get coverage, mainly across the business media, who were debating how much lower the rate was likely to go and whether the drops were having much affect either way, with some commentators citing a further hit to confidence along with the bank’s not passing on the full cut. As has been the case for several years now, the business media is completely split on whether the Australian economy is actually doing well or poorly, how low inflation really is, and whether cuts are a good or bad idea. It’s almost like no-one really knows for sure.

The Emirates crash landing in Dubai received a small smattering of immediate concern over terrorist involvement that swirls around any incident of almost any nature these days, but it quickly became an examination of just what went wrong, the traffic control practices at one of the world’s busiest airports and pictures of passengers taking their bags off with them as the plane burst into flames.

“Flatlined” was the media word of choice in describing the mediocre NAPLAN results that showed no improvement for the third year running, which once again kicked off the debate about how meaningful they are, regional differences and plenty of “my state’s better than your state” reporting.

The new Royal Commission into the Northern Territory’s juvenile justice system was still receiving coverage, some of it from right wing commentators saying there’s nothing to see here, move along, with the ABC continuing to take the lead on investigating the issue, with claims that a string of new allegations are being investigated by police.

Top five issues in the Australian media: August 4-10

Now that competition has started, the Olympics coverage is all about the sport, and it is wall-to-wall, as expected, taking up most of the media space, as it will next week as well. There has been the odd whinge about streaming from Channel Seven’s app, but it’s overwhelmingly gold, gold, gold to Straya that everyone is talking about.