Last night Media Watch favoured us with what Paul Barry was pleased to describe as a special edition asking what can be done to “save public interest journalism”, not that he ever bothered to explain what the program meant by that term.
Instead, we were first given a predictable lecturette on how too many journalists are being shed by the legacy media as the internet continues to siphon off their traditional sources of advertising revenue. Gosh. Really? One might have thought that the Media Watch audience didn’t need to be told this (especially since the program had devoted an edition to the same theme a year ago).
No matter. A current Senate inquiry urged by Labor and the Greens has now given Barry and MW a topical peg on which to hang a reprise of their pet protestation: Facebook and Google are choking quality journalism to death while living off their content.
It’s a perfectly tenable complaint, even if it sidesteps the awkward truth that newspapers, radio and television could not survive today without the vast, free research resources provided via Google, and the endless supply of quotes that can be harvested (again at no cost) from Facebook and Twitter.
But there were a number of misjudgments and omissions in this Media Watch “special edition” that underline how dangerous it can be for a purportedly independent program to offer analysis in what is a contested issue of public concern.
The first, and most obvious, mistake was to rely on the utterances of a politician. In the space of its allotted 13 minutes MW featured five unchallenged statements from ALP Senator Sam Dastyari. For a Labor machine man struggling to revive his reputation, those free kicks on national television were pure gold.
In the context of public politics — the only world that means anything to him — Dastyari doesn’t give two hoots about “public interest journalism”. It seems to me a quick and easy way to grab exposure and curry favour with the journalists and editors whose goodwill he will need along the way. It also plays well in the inner-city ALP branches where preselection for his factional comrades is crucial and the members view cheap access to quality journalism (i.e. anything other than Murdoch) as a right.
A large chunk of last night’s Media Watch was given over to the proposal that internet giants such as Google and Facebook should be compelled, by taxation law, to contribute billions to other companies so that they can continue producing so-called “public interest journalism”. There were seven hefty quotes in support of this notion; none against.
Had the program’s research team bothered to canvass a balancing viewpoint they might have been told that the suggestion that one commercial sector should be penalised for its success in exposing the weaknesses of its competitors is the height of economic hypocrisy. Newspapers don’t pay a special tax to support the town-criers they put out of business. Trucking companies are not required to contribute a levy on their profits to support unemployed bullock drivers.
The same traditional media who for so long have been telling us about the virtues of competition within a private enterprise system cannot now rationally cry foul when new players on their patch start knocking them out of the game.
And it’s not as if this threat is new. Had the managements of our newspapers not been so slow and incompetent in their response to the obvious power of aggregation, their profit graphs might still be pointing north.
But the most disappointing aspect of the Media Watch feature was its implied snobbery. Throughout, we were meant to understand (although this was never stated), that the commodity that so urgently needs to be “saved” is serious journalism — the high-minded stuff they like to read in The Age, Sydney Morning Herald and The Australian.
Yet the popular press, still bought by more than three times as many people around the nation, has been hit just as hard by the leeching away of its advertising revenues to the internet. Nobody on Media Watch was proposing that they should be supported by special taxes. Perhaps the concept of public interest journalism doesn’t extend to what the public might be interested in.
Watching that ep of Media Watch left a bad taste in my mouth. It annoyed me that it was assumed that all journalism of yesteryear was valued by the audience. A lot of people paid for the paper because it was one of the only ways to get the major news stories and the crossword. The advertisers paid the bill and the journalists created the bloat to wrap the ads in. Has anybody ever finished an article in the good weekend? A lot of us do not and will not miss the print press as it was established before the internet.
…has anybody ever started to read an article in Gooey Weekend? The only page that is not an insult to intelligence is the samurai sudoku & occasionally the quiz – though its too full of footy/TV questions.
Unfortunately, G/W is really just the rest of the SMH on shiny paper – for at least the last 10 years it has been little more than a freesheet throwaway for R/E mavens & lifestyle porn.
(Northy will now leap in here to defend his uncle Greg’s organ.)
This is a disappointing take from the producer of so many great episodes of Media Watch. The charge of snobbery is very unfair. MW didn’t define what ‘quality’ or ‘public interest’ journalism means exactly — it made the point that doing so is very difficult. But most proposals for a subsidy scheme (like the one floated in the Finkelstein Review) would include the tabloids precisely because they produce lots of the kind of journalism that helps make democracy work (holding politicians to account, exposing corruption etc.). As Salter surely appreciates the question at hand is whether that kind of journalism – given its public good characteristics and the massive decline in ad revenue going to news media – is going to be under-produced. Sure Facebook and Google have outcompeted Fairfax and News in the advertising market, but they’re not even in the content market. That’s the point. As for Dasher, wouldn’t it be better to commend him for advocating a role for government in solving a pressing problem, rather than speculating on his motives?
I agree Tom.
We need to deal with the Limited News lot (or stop reading it altogether, as I have done), but surely we have the capacity to demand only factual material in our daily newspapers? What you get on the internet, including from Google, Facebook and others, might be anything but ‘factual’. Isn’t that part of the problem?
As for poor old Sam…I’ll give him the benefit of the doubt for now. They can’t all be as bad as members of this current government…can they???
Spot on, Tom !!
DEATH TO THE TYRANNY OF THE MEDIUM: THE CASE AGAINST JOURNALISM
Yet another cracker, DS, and if you do have any ‘serious journalist’ chums left you probably won’t for much longer. Good. They are phantom participants in a phantom debate, a pesky distraction. Because the best point that Media Watch made (by craven, albeit disingenuously ironic omission) is the only one that counts: discussion on the future of journalism (‘serious’ or otherwise) is meaningless unless we’re willing to answer exactly ‘that’ question, Paul Barry et al:
What do you all mean by ‘journalism’?
That IS the question now. Me, I say (again, 15 years and still gob-flapping…): it’s not simply dead. It never existed. It’s not a ‘thing’. There’s just information, and humankind’s passing-faddish tech modes of husbandry there-of.
Because it’s only when you try to answer that question – still waiting on yours, DS, and even GR avoided it in his beauty on the topic last week – you’ll quickly come up against the same info-infinity-loop. ‘Journalism’, ‘journalist’…boundless, blobbish, meaningless terms. Mia? Bolt? McClymont? Bernstein? Sam Newman? Grundle? Pilger? Piers? Overland? Penthouse? Alan Jones? PBS radio? Charlie H? Quadrant? Andrew Sullivan? Webdiary? Me? Dog’s Brekky? …Yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, yes…or in other words ‘all of it’, or in other words ‘none of it’. Journalism? Every thing. No thing. So it’s not a ‘thing’ at all.
What’s usually called ‘journalism’ is (at best) a set of information tools and skillsets, ie used for ‘doing’ GR’s ‘something else’ (ie outside/beyond its own tool/skill box); or (at worse, lamest, most banal)…nothing more than its own ‘produced container’ only, a ‘newspaper’, a ‘radio broadcast’, a ‘TV show’, a ‘podcast’, a website ‘comment’. Talking about the ‘future of journalism’ is like talking about the future of…talking. It’s an epistemological category error.
It was probably always thus, but just remained disguised across the ‘golden age’ of paid mass info-husbandry by the mere medium-circumstantial imperatives of the game, which were always more about mode and product-making skillsets (prose styles and sizes, content time-cycles & assembly-line-processes, broadcast skills, etc) than some supposedly unique-to-journalism, essential-to-democracy, definitive ‘information vocation’. What’s the real ‘internet disruption’? Simply: making this impossible to ignore in epistemological terms. Making it impossible not to recognise that there’s nothing necessarily ‘unique’ about what ‘journalism’ supposedly does with ‘information’, by stripping away – or rather, dissolving by universalisation – the hitherto unique-to-mass-media tools and production skills that journalists have overlooked were really just a kind of functional-industrial delineation line. That writer is a producer of ‘journalism’ because his words have a newspaper by-line and it pays. I’m a consumer of his journalism ‘coz I get the Letters page, if I’m lucky. It’s all just words, all just information husbandry, categorised by medium-production choices alone. Cutesy, sure, but the epistemological point is not. When we can all whip up a credible-looking ‘two minute news segment’ on iMovie, or ‘broadcast’ on FB from the local Council Meeting stand-off over the school sewage crisis (Going Live! from the front line now), or ‘publish’ our own daily Op Ed/goss column/city beat newssheet-bloh…it’s impossible not to see that what a (paid, mintream, ‘serious’) journalist ‘does’ in terms of information husbandry is in itself neither unique in its use of the info-tools we all have, nor frankly particularly essential – at least as a broad ‘vocation’, a must-have civic ‘estate’ – to the health of democracy, or public debate. Shit journalism doesn’t help any of that – it is its active, worst enemy (eh upes?) – and frankly shit journalism/sts out-number Kate McClymont journalism/sts about, ooh, 2000-to-1 these days…?
What is the ‘job’ of journalism? What does it ‘do’? In GR’s terms…’nothing’, except…well, ‘itself’. Researching, collecting, collating, cross-checking, rejecting, accepting, summarising, explaining, debating, disseminating…information? Rinse and repeat, 24-7 daily, en masse. What, you mean the same way lawyers, politicians, academics, executives, analysts, businessmen use those same information tools…to ‘do’ their lawyer/polly/acco/etc-job stuff, every day? Like doctors, nurses, carers, tradesmen, engineers, architects, artists use their information skillsets…to ‘do’ their real jobs, outside those info-tools, governed by the material human truths those info-tools maintain, or as close as matters to them?? Like mothers, fathers, sons, daughters, brothers, sisters, friends do, use their human information tools…to make sense of the world from their functioning lives and points-of-view? Like any sentient human being?
The mistake journalism makes is to think that ‘using tools’ is the same as ‘doing a job’ with them. (Ask a carpenter his ‘job’, and they’ll answer: ‘I build houses’, or ‘make tables’…not ‘I use a hammer and saw’…). In fact journalists invariably present this hermetic sterility in terms of a definitive vocational attribute: the information ‘ideal’ of objectivity, detachment, balance…it’s the great (and craven, cop-out) con of journalism; that you can present information that has grounded, material world meaning – truth – while simultaneously claiming or yourself a saintly authorial other-worldliness. Objectivity? Journalism? What a load of fucking horse-shit. It’s just the self-awarding of an ‘all care, no responsibility’ info-license to info-shit anywhere you want, and have the grown-ups clean it up the consequences. And they genuinely seem to wonder where ‘Fake News’ – which is nothing if not information untethered to anything but its own authorial anchor – really has its epistemological fraternity-roots?
The Fourth’s current debate about itself makes comically real the old epistemologists’ in-joke which I just made up now (yep, crowded field of gut-splitters, SAE please, best haiku published): that every story journalism produces is about the same infinite subject (journalism). But there’s no question that as an information sub-sector it’s been spiralling narcissistically inwards for decades. As Rundle put it: the big mistake – or the big ‘unknown’ I think he more sympathetically meant – regarding ‘journalism’ has always been…never quite knowing just how (un)important it really was to the vast majority of even its regular consumers. The only available metrics of journalism/journalists – ratings, circulation, ad rates, ‘of record’ credibility, reputation, access, writerly paid word-rate, awards, fame…all that Walkleyism – have always been distinctly self-referential and thus, erm, ‘dodgy’ (say): a collective, accumulating effervescence of mutual high regard. Sure, we all miss Mark Colvin, too. But…you know. We miss intelligent, decent, articulate people in our own material sphere who die much too soon…a lot more. No offence. It’s just they just don’t tend to get the same number of loving obits. Or haven’t – until now, when we can write and publish as many of our own for our friends as WE like, too. Again: no offence. But again, as I think GR pointed out (or maybe HR, recently): if there’s one episode you know ‘The Meeja’ are going to bust a gut to get exactly right, and super-sensitive, and lovingly, lengthily so…it’s The One About One Of Us.
We do notice, guys. And when ‘journalism’ keens in mass protest at its own impending epistemological ‘death’, sometimes I think that what it’s really mourning is…the coming to epistemological life of the rest of us (or the coming up to medium-equivalence, on the info-playing field ie same thing).
Is just…not being ‘info-special’ any more.
Well, you’re not, ‘journalists’. Get used to it. There is no such thing as ‘journalism’ any more. Not as ‘a job’ in and of and for only…itself. Its own self-perpetuating and justifying tool-use. Such, was a brief passing accident of epistemological-technical circumstance. Journalism as a ‘job’ was OK when only ‘journalists’ had the industrial firepower to produce/disseminate itself on a mass scale, but it’s always been a bit self-bullshitty – at best, parson’s eggy – as a ‘vocation’, a ‘profession’, a ‘trade’ (chortle chortle, ah, ye olde stout-yeomen blue collar jobbing scrivs, youse…snicker…). Yes, even at its glorious Watergate apex. Less often about ‘truth to power’ and ‘defence of democracy’ than simple epistemological self-perpetuation: the biz model/production-tyranny of the medium, of producing newspapers, magazines, content for radio and TV, all while making it pay for that production (circ, ads, cash-for-comment, infomercial, syndicated content, give-ways, tie-ins, puzzles, CD’s, page 3 tits, rock star Op Eds, fake-ad wrap-aound FP’s, totes fake FP’s)…anything, everything, no, it’s desperation stakes, burning the heirlooms, info-whoring your own ‘journalism’ out any old how to keep its mere presses rolling, mikes live, cameras glowing red… ). The tyranny of the mere media, ultimately now eating themselves, for simply the sake of…their own mode-of-info-production survival. Only to find that, when that’s all that’s really left of them – of newsprint, radio, free-to-air TV – the rest of us – via the internet – can do it all and more for ourselves.
What’s that you say? But we don’t have a ‘man in Canberra’? We don’t ‘ask the tough questions’ in pressers of the powerful? We have no subs, no Foreign Bureaus, no specialist knowledge, our photos are amateurish, or stolen off the net, our research sloppy or non-existent, our content trivial, parochial, click-baity…oh dear. You’re really sticking your chins out, aren’t you…
Petals, look around your dwindling workstations: neither do many of you, either.
There is no such thing as ‘journalism’. Journalism is dead. Hooray. The Age of the Tyranny of the Medium is over. Hooray. There is only…information. Hooray.
Let the Age of Information begin. May the very best and noblest info-tool users, and the better angel things they hope to ‘do’ with them…prevail.
..ummm, Jack baby, could you give us the shorter short version?
…ummm, AR baby…why? TL:CR? Then…don’t. Chrs.
Sorry Diddums, life’s too short, TL:TR (ranty, raving, reflexive – you choose)
Heartily agreed all round, AR! Only really writing it 4 myself, man. (Tho’ thanks as ever, long-suffering Crikey mods).
Warmest regards, AR – genuinely so. I do take your critiques/bum-kicks seriously, and very much to heart. Believe it or not. Bless.
Jack has too much time on his hands … meanwhile, back on the topic, I agree with Media Watch. Facebook, Twitter and Google get TONS of stuff ripped off the sites of credible (and not credible) media. It adds to their credibility and usage and I reckon they should pay for the content. Media organisations as a whole should have ONE DAY a month where it is denied them and see how they get on ! I mean if you’re going to disrupt – then do it!
Well, Aunty, this member of the Australian public is interested in why you never came clean on the false balance you forced on former technology editor Nick Ross’s reporting of the LNP’s NBN? Or why you didn’t apologise for – or at least own up to- the lies in the Lateline report ‘Sexual slavery reported in Indigenous community’ on June 21, 2006, that inspired the Howard government to implement the NT Intervention, with lots of public backing, courtesy of the ABC? And while I’m asking, what’s with the right wing and “centrist” panelists on Q&A? It’s like the Who’s Who of the Status Quo. Should be renamed The Safety Hour. Ever thought of asking some one from the left? You talk economics a lot: ever heard of Bill Mitchell?
Oh Aunty. What happened?
Ah, the old elitist line rolled out again. I think the tiny point you missed David is that public interest journalism might just have a more significant purpose than the popular press. Nobody will miss the old tabloids but we might just miss some of the protections for civil society produced by investigative journalism.