The Herald Sun has a story on the $15 million bill to media monitoring firms to allow departments to keep an eagle eye on a limited number of keywords used in the declining mainstream media.
If the value of staff time put into collating, disseminating, and absorbing this stuff was added on it would be a much larger number again I would guess (guess based on working both sides of this industry).
But hey, it builds empires and keeps the self absorbed from messing with important stuff, so no entirely without merit.
