I remember when these polls were published only on slow news days . How times have changed .It seems like our media have taken a leaf out of America's news outlets .

That said...

who cares

Yep . Sad our media have taken the muckracking to a new low . Hell it seems to me Andrew bolt , terry mcCrann and Miranda Devine have a crack at her daily.

Well, she keeps giving them ammo...

''No amount of glossy booklets makes up for an absence of clearly articulated costed policies,'' Mr Bradbury said.

Among the losses in Queensland would be Treasurer Wayne Swan's seat of Lilley and Trade Minister Craig Emerson's seat of Rankin.

NSW casualties would include the seats of Kingsford Smith and Lindsay, held by Labor ministers Peter Garrett and David Bradbury.

aldsun.com.au/news/jws-research-poll-shows-labor-could-lose-every-marginal-seat/story-fnho52jj-1226608138763

'Some bloggers and twitter tragics interpret every event as a giant media conspiracy, but journalists do not make up leadership tensions.'

The verdict from the parliamentary press gallery is in: the Prime Minister's government is dysfunctional, with lousy judgment and a fixation with polls. Herald Sun columnist Terry McCrann says Julia Gillard is ''the worst prime minister in our history leading our worst-ever government''. The public, we are informed, is so appalled that it has stopped listening.

Turn that around. What if this was the worst political reporting Australians have endured in history? Dysfunctional, with lousy judgment, fixated with polls, feigning concern about the toxicity of political discourse. And the public? They've stopped listening.

Too harsh? I'm not so sure. In the past few days, we have witnessed rare reflection among a few journalists about the media's role in last week's Labor shemozzle. Not that it was a one-off, just the culmination of more than a year of ''sources say'' stories speculating or predicting (or even advocating) the imminent demise of Gillard. As it turned out, they were wrong.

It is not a simple story. Some bloggers and twitter tragics interpret every event as a giant media conspiracy, but journalists do not make up leadership tensions in my experience and they didn't last week. Unnamed sources are essential for journalists (and the public) to get a sense, as murky as it might be, about what is happening beyond the bland public statements of politicians. And Gillard has made big blunders all on her own that heightened caucus rumblings.

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The more substantial criticism of the media is the same as the substantial criticism of Gillard's government - that it has lost the public's trust. It is a crisis just as existential as that facing the hapless government, if only we'd admit it. Lenore Taylor, one of the more insightful gallery journalists, didn't shirk it in a Fairfax column a few days ago: Parliament and the media, both reliant on public trust for their existence, ''should give long pause for thought about how that trust can be regained … for the media it now has to come down to meeting, and explaining how we are meeting, our responsibilities to be reliable and informative and interesting and fair''.

That is about as likely as Gillard falling on her sword. The PM wants to ''move on'', as though recent events were a ''disappointing'' blip on the road to victory. The media seem equally loath to face their own self-inflicted wounds - how willingly, eagerly even, they were used by unnamed Rudd supporters month after month, not to report significant leadership rumblings, but to inflame them, even to create them. Many reporters did exercise the caution and checking Taylor says is vital to cover messy leadership stories, but the truth is they were drowned out by the weight, placement and sheer volume of stories suggesting a leadership change was just around the corner. It left the public not just confused but cynical.

So let's pause for a moment before we move on. On February 27 last year, Julia Gillard defeated Kevin Rudd in a leadership ballot by a thumping 71 to 31 votes. This is how The Australian reported it that morning: ''Julia Gillard is poised to win today's Labor leadership ballot but faces ongoing political turbulence, with her critics predicting MPs will seek to draft Kevin Rudd to the leadership later this year.''

That was before the ballot was even held.

A couple of months of bad polls and blunders later, Gillard's time was up. News Limited's Niki Savva had already declared that ''sorry Julia, it's over'', and senior journalists, including then Age correspondent Michelle Grattan, were suggesting Gillard should resign (a dramatic step that makes it hard not to be perceived as having a stake in the outcome).

A Canberra Times columnist said of Gillard in May that ''anything she says or does can safely be ignored as irrelevant, because instead of months we can now number her time remaining in The Lodge as a matter of weeks''.

The Herald Sun reported that Gillard ''is facing renewed pressure on her leadership with some Labor MPs wanting her to consider standing down as Prime Minister before the carbon tax begins on July 1. Increased chatter in ALP ranks about their dire election prospects even has some raising the prospect of a leadership change as early as next week.''

Analysis was linked almost entirely to opinion polls. Things looked up for the government towards the end of last year - ''Julia Gillard's poll bounce spells doom for Rudd,'' declared The Australian. Then they went south.

Hundreds of stories were published and broadcast, often with prominence, rarely with scepticism, always quoting ''sources''. But sources lie, run agendas, ingratiate with ''scoops'' and always refuse to be named. At what point, as the ABC's Barrie Cassidy wrote last week, would journalists tell Rudd to ''stop pulling our chains?''

The problem goes deeper than that. News Limited mastheads such as The Australian and the HeraldSun - and some senior journalists in Fairfax - have all but campaigned against Gillard. (After she ''won'' last week, the Herald Sun screamed ''End This Mess'' on its front page, demanding an election now.) How can the public believe the media to be ''reliable and fair'', in Lenore Taylor's words, if large swaths of it are palpably hostile to the Prime Minister, then purport to report the ''news'' that her leadership is under threat?

If Gillard has a credibility problem, so, too, does the media. If Gillard can't ''move forward'' without recognising what's gone wrong with her own performance, neither can those charged with critiquing her government. If politicians and the media let down the public they purport to serve, then the public will reject them. Simple as that.

Gay Alcorn is a former editor of The Sunday Age and regular

columnist for The Age. Twitter: @gay_alcorn.



Read more: http://www.theage.com.au/comment/gillard-is-not-the-only-one-with-a-credibility-problem-20130328-2gxdd.html#ixzz2OqiOpBVc[

Will be interesting to see when she gets dumped-before or after election

Will any of her supporters get re elected besides Plibersek?

Will Gillard quit politics if the party is decimated?

They don't make up leadership tension, they just spend thousands of man hours reporting on it, only to see it completely exposed as total bullshit when the actual so called 'end of gillard' proves to be a damn squib.

I fail to see how it is "total bullshit" when a key minister from the government called for the spill and several others from the cabinet have now quit.

Did Crean actually come out in public and call for the spill or was that all behind closed doors?

They're not going to dump her before the election. She's the scapegoat.

She's also too pig-headed to quit politics if they lose a landslide. Especially when her electorate is a safe seat.

Crean called for the spill because Noone else would .the divisions in the alp are too big to fix . They need to be united and not forsake for what the alp stand for .

Stupid thing is that by now Gillard would have been campaigning for Labour PM in the upcoming election as Rudd had always said he would hand over the reigns after 2 terms.Party would have been united and she would have been in a far stronger position than she's ever been after the stabbing.

A million free kicks to the coalition.

Reap what you sow

They don't make up leadership tension, they just spend thousands of man hours reporting on it, only to see it completely exposed as total bullshit when the actual so called 'end of gillard' proves to be a damn squib.

Dude fucking Newman is a Class A fuckwit.

Have fun when these c:-#nts are running the country.

-PB

Simply put, Gillard is indestructible

It's hard to fell something which has its head THAT FAR up its own arse.

Dude fucking Newman is a Class A fuckwit.

Have fun when these c:-#nts are running the country.

-PB