{"id":35,"date":"2009-01-06T08:50:50","date_gmt":"2009-01-05T22:50:50","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.fionalake.com.au\/blog\/?p=35"},"modified":"2009-01-06T08:59:52","modified_gmt":"2009-01-05T22:59:52","slug":"alternative-rural-news-source-agmates","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.fionalake.com.au\/blog\/alternative-rural-news-source-agmates\/","title":{"rendered":"Alternative Rural News Source &#8211; Agmates"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a href=\"http:\/\/www.agmates.com\/\" title=\"Agmates website\">Agmates<\/a> is a source of rural news that has gone unmentioned or only reported from one (very biased) angle, in the mainstream rural newspapers, which have a monopoly in most states.  So as Steve Truman describes it, &#8216;Agmates&#8217; is an alternative news source for rural Australians, in the same way that &#8216;Crikey&#8217; is an alternative news source for urban Australians.  (In the same way &#8211; you don&#8217;t have to agree with every point of view that is stated &#8211; the point is to appreciate being given the option of an alternative view to consider and discussion opportunity.)  Agmates now has more than 10,000 members.<\/p>\n<p>For an example of a topical story, check out this piece on the <a href=\"http:\/\/www.agmates.com\/blog\/2009\/01\/02\/something-stinks-to-high-heaven-at-the-rspca-and-its-not-dead-animals\/\" title=\"Agmates story on the RSPCA\">RSPCA<\/a>, in particular, the NSW RSPCA President, solicitor Andrew Christopher Wozniak.  The now-retired National RSPCA President Hugh Wirth gets a look in too &#8211; any Victorian who has heard him on ABC radio will be familiar with his whiney holier-than-thou anti-farmer tones (though apparently the extremists aren&#8217;t happy with him either.  But if you listen to animal rights extremists, you quickly realise they&#8217;ll never be satisfied; so it&#8217;s no surprise.)   It was a big mistake to ring up to ask for Hugh&#8217;s veterinary advice on talkback radio if you were not prepared to be demeaned. <\/p>\n<p>I wonder what Hugh Wirth would say about about the NSW RSPCA President&#8217;s conflict of interest, with his firm pocketing huge fees for RSPCA legal work?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Agmates is a source of rural news that has gone unmentioned or only reported from one (very biased) angle, in the mainstream rural newspapers, which have a monopoly in most states. So as Steve Truman describes it, &#8216;Agmates&#8217; is an alternative news source for rural Australians, in the same way that &#8216;Crikey&#8217; is an alternative [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[3,6],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.fionalake.com.au\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/35"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.fionalake.com.au\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.fionalake.com.au\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.fionalake.com.au\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.fionalake.com.au\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=35"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.fionalake.com.au\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/35\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.fionalake.com.au\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=35"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.fionalake.com.au\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=35"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.fionalake.com.au\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=35"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}