The dispiriting battle between traditional media opinionistas and the very online Twitterati has rendered much of 2020’s public debate ugly and destructive.
But there are encouraging signs that the conflict is ending with a better journalistic opinion remade by the gift of social media.
It’s been a hard slog.
A certain school of traditional media disdained the “social” offering of the media platforms, of the interaction and opportunity for discussion, of the potential for the social capital — trust — needed by all media.
Some have seen only the hot takes, argumentative contrarianism and punch-down trolling. Worse, too many journalists have thought: “I can do that.” And so 2020 seems to be ending as Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales tweeted at the weekend with “significant overlap between the professions of ‘opinion columnist’ and ‘Twitter troll’ ”.
Sure the tools of the troll are great if you’re trying to build controversy. And true, too, that controversy draws attention. But is that the attention journalism needs when the media’s future relies on engaged, rusted-on audiences?
Maybe it is if your business model is to monetise outrage by feeding the grumpy old man demographic (hello, Herald Sun!).
But journalism needs a business model that sells news and information direct to readers with analysis and context that builds trust.
This week the war bubbled up again after Nine’s mastheads published an anonymous parental hot take on transgender children. It set social media alight with a head-shaking WTF response, including from plenty of Nine’s journalists. (The Age removed the article but it’s still on the SMH site.)
Traditionalists responded — as they have all year — with the cancel culture card. Nine’s Chris Uhlmann pumped up the rhetoric-o-matic with “usual hysterics”, “a posse of bullies” and “Stasi ‘journalists’ ”.
Just another day in the culture wars.
But take a step back. It seems more like this attitude (outside News Corp at least) has become the outlier over just the past 12 months.
Social media and journalistic opinion are being increasingly integrated as the agora of debate. Journalists have to sacrifice the monopoly of access to opinion that industrial-scale printing gave them. (Although too many still refuse to accept those days are gone.)
The better journalists are finding a path that meshes the amplification that traditional media brings with the serendipity of discovery that social media offers. The price of admission to this new world? Accepting that the audience gets to talk back and, if journalists want the audience, they must be prepared to listen.
As with all 2020 trends, it’s been hurried on by COVID-19. Through the pandemic, the traditional approach to opinion saw Australia’s media editors encourage well-crafted contrarian takes challenging isolation, lockdowns and hard borders. Turns out these takes were not just wrong, not just (as the US experience demonstrates) profoundly dangerous. They served no purpose for the audience.
No surprise. In a life-threatening pandemic readers, viewers, listeners want information they can rely on. Forced to choose between institutions of government and public health and institutions of media, the public opted for government — despite all the spluttering about “Dictator Dan” and Stockholm syndrome and commentary on the danger of Twitter trolls and bullies.
Social media was better optimised for the crisis. The experts were already there. Once little-known epidemiologists, public health specialists, historians and data scientists who’d been puddling along on Twitter or Instagram talking largely to each other were suddenly must-follows for journalists.
The contemporaneous Black Lives Matter revolt similarly forced a recognition that the opinions fed by the lived experiences of disadvantaged groups were better understood when read directly through social media rather than mediated through traditional media.
No surprise then that the best journalism about the big moments of 2020 came out of a process that integrated the expertise and experience from social media with the storytelling amplification of the writer.
The best opinions were those that lit up that journalism with the moral clarity 2020 has demanded — and that 2021 will need.
Australia’s media editors encourage(d) contrarian takes challenging isolation, lockdowns and hard borders. Turns out these takes were not just wrong, not just (as the US experience demonstrates) profoundly dangerous. They served no purpose for the audience.
But Crikey wouldn’t do that, surely!
Only in the interests of ‘balance’, Woop.
Surely “journalism” spawned trolls?
When you consider the way “traditional media” has devolved and retreated to partisan bulwarks over the years, the way much of it has been used to troll and vilify those elements of public opinion, to wage their own agendas and vendettas with those it didn’t agree with (to try to cow them into silence) – not least “climate science” and progressive politics – because that “traditional media” controlled large lumps (to the point of virtual monopoly) of the medium and were prepared to (ab)use it to further their own political ends and influence?
Their “business model”, use of the mass communication medium, was bound to be copied when greater access became available.
Until more of the “responsible(?)” media starts holding those recalcitrant members of their club to account, for what they put out here, they will continue to lose support – after all we all (including media) float as the same social flotsam.
Spot on.
A great and nuanced take. The lines really are non-existent now. This bizarrely free-floating word-mode called ‘journalism’ was always just an accident of epistemology and passing circumstance. A gaggle of usually-not-especially (though sometimes-very, too) expert egotists with loud voices and lots of ambition to share them, over-amplified by technology, and supported by a business model that briefly melded mass production and distribution with cultural revolution.
What is a Gonzo Journalist but a Twitter troll without the internet? What are the rude bits of Canterbury Tales but the same? We’re all in this business of winning attention using only our voices (because most of us have no power), and ‘Journalists’ – for all their tedious chest-beating and delusional self-admiration – are no different.
Really, how stupid, how gullible, how easily impressed… do they think we are here on Teh Interwebz? Luvvies – we’re all journalists now, didn’t you hear? It turns out that what you ‘professionals’ do…isn’t very hard. It’s as easy as…going tap tap tap on a keyboard.
That’s the dirty little secret that Teh Interwebz revealed. The Fourth Estate just ain’t that special after all, that it should deserve its whole new titular bit of civic real estate. And perhaps one of the funniest (albeit most poignant) sights of the end of the Meeja’s ‘Golden Age’ has been watching the same narcissist old Boomer ‘infant terribles’ who trashed every epistemological pillar going (including – d’oh! – their own vocation’s one) in their iconoclastic upwards scramble to Make It All About My Byline…now, belatedly, trying to shore up some kind of craft-legacy, claiming that only ‘professionals’ – shorthand as ever for ‘Me’ – can really ‘do’ journalism, and that the rest of us here in Interwebzian Land are…erm, iconoclastic…erm..Gonzo…erm…epistemological pillar-trashing…erm…hippy…counter-cultural…erm…ah…
Journalism is dead. Hooray. Hooray. Oh, hooray. Let’s all just start telling the truth. With our real names attached.
Have a good Xmas CW. I have enjoyed your media coverage and your insights very much this year.
Keep tap, tap, tapping away Jack. I love your stuff!
It’s a little more than tap, tap, tap, IMO. Journalists still purportedly check and confirm their information for factuality. I can get on ‘teh interwebz’ and write any old garbage I like.
It pays to distinguish between information from someone who obviously believes what they write is correct, and has checked it for accuracy (I’m excluding News Corpse ‘contributors’ and ‘correspondents’ here) and what most people tweet or write in the comments below a blog.
Good points – if only more people noted them.
Aye, Mercurial…but just, manifestly, as many ‘professional’ journalists can ‘get on their masthead/crystal box’ and ‘write any old garbage they like’, too. Whether on Iraq WMD, climate change, a nuddy picture of Pauline Hanson that (whoops) isn’t, a bundle of meta-propagandising tosh from a failed Trumpistador over-amplified at taxpayer cost via a po-faced ‘professional sceptic’s’ sappy interview, the loonier accusations of a Peter Fox or the more self-interested self-hyping of a Clive Palmer or a Malcolm Turnbull….yep, any old legacy-click-bait boilerplate/agit-prop that plays to your legacy-comments-thread audience, whether you’re blogging from the Pyrmont studios of the ABC or the Sky After Dark penthouse bunker at Holt Street, and/or all points in between.
The point is not that there’s not plenty of good information in the ‘professional’ mix, too. The point is simply that…why, just the same applies to Teh ‘non professional’ Interwebz, too. Information, shminformation…in the end seeking out the good stuff has nothing to do with whence and from whom it appears, and everything to do with how interested in parsing, triaging and assaying it is…the seeker.
Teh Interwebz has made this process easier for authentic information seekers than it’s ever been in human history. If, that is, you are the kind of person who is…authentically interested in truth in information. Genuinely interested. And sadly ‘professional journalism’ as it has come to function is, for all sorts of reasons (mostly not really its fault)…on net balance now an obstacle, not an aid, to that type of information seeker, and that type of process.
A newspaper, a TV news broadcast, a radio bulletin…at their best they can be useful brief introductory pointers to something worth deeper independent research. But they are only ever now gateway prods to go and read original source documents online: MP press releases of all stripes, parliamentary transcripts, ministry websites (the ‘actual policies’!!), academic and NGO research papers, the experts, the knowledgeable, the doers…and especially the social media accounts of the ordinary individuals whose stories the ‘professional’ Meeja still arrogantly anoints itself (for profit or pay) both author and arbiter.
Let me ‘tell your story’, Jack. No thank you, kindly ‘professional journalist’. I shall – I now can – tell it myself. Here is a link to my FB page, though, do feel free to spread it around. No? But…why wouldn’t you want to, if the truth of my story is what you want to tell the world…
The days of automatically believing any information any ‘professional’ journalist produces as a default starting point are long, long, looong gone. Mostly because…they can be long gone. Who needs journalism to be well informed now (save perhaps re: the in-fighting and sniping of the media-politics sector)? IMO anyone who continues to look in the mouth of the epoch-shattering, species-evolving, gift horse of an epistemological miracle that is universal, 24-7, instant self-publishing…is a monkey, determined to remain a monkey.
Indeed. And how do you get to tell the truth or even be intersted in it when editors know what is expected by the bankrollers.
Wear a sandwich board in Martin Place and hand out pamphlets?
That precisely is indeed how many of the finest, most Humankind-improving information publishers got their start…
You may be of a vintage to remember the ex-taxi driving ‘reffo’ who, in the early 60s, would sit on a corner in the Cross surrounded by copies of his book “I Protest!” advocating wild ideas like liberalised drinking laws, legalising prostitution, single parent welfare and other kommo nonsense.
As a callow teen I bought a copy but can longer recall his name.
not quite, Abs.
But i’ve seen enough footage of dignified African Americans simply walking quietly along holding self-published hard copy FB page that said: ‘I am a man’. Etcetera.
True words attached to an identifiably human author are always powerful, no matter where they’re published.
Have a brilliant Xmas, Abs. I hope I have not banished myself from your circle with my recent activities.
Can’t imagine why that would be the case Jack.
More power to your battery.
Belt up and hang on, 2021 is going to be a wild ride.
Mutant virus, mad/bad politics and an evaporating economy.
Interesting Times indeed.
Sandor Petofi BERGER, “I Protest” – a complete collection of letters & articles which the author penned and sent to the press etc., on various current controversial subjects in the City of Sydney, N.S.W., Australia, in 7 years between 1954 and 1961-https://catalogue.nla.gov.au/Record/2061902The miracle of google.
How marvellous is this miracle called Teh Interwebz.
And, of course, your journalistic hunger to avail your noggin of its evolutionary splendours, Abs.
Herein lies our salving epistemological future. A Xmas toast to M. Berger, and his lovingly excavated story.
I didn’t realise there are so many epidemiologists in Australia and around the world until this year.
There are plenty, Robert. We have some world leaders in the field, and I suspect they may be very busy for the foreseeable future.
I do love the twitterati running a cancal culture pincer movement on cancel culture. Meanwhile the rest of us carry on as though nothing really happened. Did anything happen?
If it did I didn’t notice!