I had breakfast with Jay Rosen this morning, the visiting New York University academic who for many years has been one of the world’s leading thinkers about journalism and journalists. Rosen has been in Australia courtesy of the Media, Entertainment and Arts Alliance and has, among other things, outlined his “branded explainer“ concept of what a public broadcaster such as the ABC might do.
And here is an example. Rosen asked me to explain the National Broadband Network election issue to him. It took about quarter of an hour — running through the history of the Telecom government monopoly, the sell-off, the difficulties of regulating a private monopoly, the fights over access to the infrastructure, and now the proposal to effectively bring the nation’s most important communications technology again in to public hands. And the competing Opposition proposal to provide improved internet speeds through a coalition of private interests.
Rosen had noticed that the media, including those journalists who earn their pay from their perceived special access and understanding of politics, had ridiculed Opposition leader Tony Abbott for not understanding the NBN.
But where, he asked, had they explained these very issues to the public, most of whom will have even less understanding than Abbott?
It should be explainable. After all, the voters in the outer suburbs are big users of the technology, as are we all, directly or indirectly.
And the NBN is one of the big issues of the election campaign. Everyone acknowledges it as such. It is not what social activist (and, incidentally, Australian Press Council chair) Julian Disney described on the SBS Insight program last night one of “many elephants in the room” — meaning a big issue that is being ignored by politicians and the media.
You would think we could explain the NBN. But I haven’t seen it explained. Instead the journos on the campaign trail are interested only in race-calling, noting that Abbott mucked it up and thus “lost the day”, but not explaining the substance of the issue.
What hope, then, for the elephants in the room?
Here are a few issues that have neither been explained, nor formed the subject of media reporting, but for a few brave exceptions.
Housing, housing stress and homelessness. Dental health care. The Henry tax review. Since when did you see a serious discussion of its recommendations, that did not amount to more “race calling” and “gotcha” without explanation of the substance?
Or what about open Government, and the Government 2.0 agenda committed to by the departing Lindsay Tanner, and now lost in a political no-man’s land, so far as I can tell. And as well as Tanner, we are also losing John Faulkner, one of the moving forces behind Freedom of Information reform.
No coincidence, I suspect, that one of those calling for an improvement in media campaigning is Nicholas Gruen, who chaired the Government 2.0 review.
In an email to me, he suggests that what is needed is a code of conduct to guide journalists to make the best use of their limited time and to avoid the hazards of the various hashtags he is using on Twitter to critique reporting.
The hashtags are: #racecalling; #hesaidshesaid; #onlynewsmakersmakenews #intepretationasreporting; #inanegotcha. I am sure readers will be able to come up with more, but to my mind it’s a pretty comprehensive list of the failures of election reporting so far.
Meanwhile, one would think that at least some of the tonnes of newsprint, the hectares of online real estate and the hours of air time could be devoted to doing what journalists are meant to do: putting important matters into plain language understandable by the average person.
Journalists like to think they are combating political spin by asking tough questions, or by playing “gotcha”. They are not. The effect of the faults indicated by Gruen’s hashtags is that they are allowing the spin doctors and the faceless men to set the agenda for their reporting. No matter how snarky any individual piece of analysis, the spin doctors win because they decide what issues are the subject matter of the reportage.
The alternative would be to allow the public to set the agenda: to try and find out what the public need and want to know, and to attempt to advance that agenda no matter what the spin doctors are saying is the issue of the day, no matter where the political minders decide the campaign buses should go. (Yes, colleagues. I think you should get off the bus. Please get off the bus).
But #onlynewsmakersmakenews is instead the unquestioned assumption.
Seems to me that on Saturday, we will be voting blind on many of the issues that matter because nobody has explained them to us, or pressured the parties to state their positions.
I get frightened when I think about this too much. One of the predictions about the rise of communications technology is that it will lead, through the erosion of the business models that support journalism, to a new dark age. Now I am an optimist by nature. I prefer to think we will instead evolve journalism, and thus exploit all the potentials of new technology, rather than be overcome by them.
Yet I wonder. There have been times in the past few weeks when I have felt that, even as we are bathed in media coverage, we are travelling to the dark ages with journalists in the lead.
A more optimistic note. There have been good examples of journalism in this election campaign. I plan to do a round-up soon. If you think you have an example of good reporting, please send it to Margaret@margaretsimons.com.au
It’s a toxic co-dependent relationship that’s evolved between the political class and what we call journalists in Australia. Sound-bites are getting shorter and shorter, and journalism is getting less and less informative.
It’s easy to posit that both politicians and journalists are doing their damnedest to keep us ill- or mis-informed, as if they are afraid of us making an informed decision. They seem to think we’re all incapable of processing anything resembling information or analysis any more.
I compare it to food labelling; if baked beans were sold like election campaigns, the label on the can would just be in big red letters: “The Other Beans Are Poison”!!! (I came up with the comparison weeks ago and was both annoyed and pleased to see that someone on the Gruen transfer made it too).
However, food labelling didn’t just appear because the manufacturers thought it would be a good idea; they did it because we demanded it, and laws were made mandating it. We can, somehow, as a populace, do the same of our politicians AND our media, by drifting away (as we are already) from the MSM and the major parties, but further, by making some kind of noise about it.
I don’t want to sound like a rah-rah snotface, but we really need to write letters, join political parties, vote independent, support non-mainstream media outlets, and, jeez, I dunno, raise a people’s army and seize control of the State. Or something.
The parlous state of journalism in this country is the result of the influence of it’s ownership and their ‘goals’ – political influence, “circulation” and advertising revenue, fed by sensationalism over matter. It’s become a “community disservice”!
While catering to the ignorance of the electorate (for the returns on that score), they then turn around and praise their “sophistication” – they can “walk and chew gum at the same time” – of course the continued “success” of these clowns depends on that nurturing of ignorance, for their own credibility and what they regard as their “influence” at what they’re paid to do. It’s more a case of “Of course I’ll still respect you in the morning, now shut up and keep suckin'”!
Look at the anecdotal evidence mounting at the actual level of ignorance of our electoral system, policy explanation in an impartial, analytical tone as embodied in the hysteria and “electoral appeal” of the disproportionate influence of “boat people on this country” – for the electoral benefit of the party so much of the tabloid media, owned and manipulated as it is, openly supports – while deliberately and pointedly ignoring that other “95%(?)” of illegal arrivals.
“Journalism”? It could be used to educate the rest of community, and keep them informed – “voting” as they do, for what. But, with the way they treat “(political) news”, trying to influence voting intentions in the way they handle “information”, as a commodity, it rates on a par with politicians in credibility, and so many of these half-wits can’t understand why “their not taken seriously”, when so many of them are carrying on as they do, with immunity from “peer pressure” that might address their “amorality” – instead it appears they’re more “encouraged”?
Nothing underscores the abysmal ignorance of the journalistic community in the past 12 months than the gross obscenity of the NBN. The obscenity of the $43 billion project without a cost benefit analysis is bad enough but the fact that project advocates totally ignore the economics and the required massive public subsidy in excess of $25 billion and concentrate on the benefits is a pea and thimble trick of politicians of such enormous magnitude that it defies comprehension. One is a read regularly drawn back to the statement attributed to Joseph Goebbels – “The bigger the lie it easier to sell ”
Of course as indicated, it might take a half an hour of concentrated effort for a reasonably competent journalist to get his or her mind around the blatant absence of any economic underpinning, the nepotism, political opportunism, and political bastardry associated with this project. However it easier to concentrate on elephants in the room and or budgie smugglers.
Ask yourself, Margaret, that 1970s rhetorical question: are you part of the solution or the problem?
Greg Angelo has provided an example of partisanship, which is at the root of some of the worst reporting.
Yep, the NBN has not been well sold by the journos and the politicians, however neither has the Angelo case, which is that it will not be a Good Thing once it has been constructed.
To start with, Australian communications policy has been a bit of a black hole due to the bastardry of Telstra before and since privatisation, which both sides of politics indulged in. Perhaps Greg is correct in his view that is based on an obscene lie.
I, however, prefer to view the NBN as the collision that we had to have. It may well be criticised in detail, however nobody has fronted up with an alternative scheme which will provide truly fast data speeds for >90% of Australians, in this case, via a mix of fibre to the premises and wireless in sparser locations. The opponents, including Greg Angelo, have not indicated what they believe is an appropriate standard of service for the bulk of Aussies, many of whom are unable to obtain better than dial-up speeds at all due to either prohibitive cost and hassle for satellite connections, or due to crappy line-sharing technologies which were installed by this same Telstra in many communities during the 90’s and 00’s, when they knew that they would fail.
So, Greg, instead of just complaining that you have not personally viewed a cost-benefit study, how about offering us the benefit of your superior knowledge , by outlining a technically better or cheaper or more equitable proposal?