For two weeks now, insider gossip about who said what to whom in the battle of Kimberley Kitching versus the “mean girls” has dominated Australia’s political news. In the end, we know a little bit less about what really matters and a little bit more about the always ugly political sausage-making.
And we know a lot more about Australia’s media crisis. It’s become a story that in its reporting has brought together just about everything that’s wrong with the Australian media. Here’s why.
What else is there?
The Morrison government has just stopped doing, well, pretty much anything. That’s a disaster for short-staffed media that have come to rely on federal politics to fill the “this matters” content quota. Morrison knows this: he’s built his regular-as-clockwork announceables schedule around it.
In the fortnight leading into the federal budget, we expect the news out of Canberra to be full of agenda-setting teasers and tips and tactical leaks about what is expected to be the centrepiece of the government’s election pitch. And what have we’ve got? A sometime submarine base. Um… maybe coal for Ukraine.
Into that Morrison-sized policy vacuum has fallen the regular amuse-bouche of Labor preselections.
Conflict: man bites dog in both-sides scandal. Exclusive!
Journalism works on heuristics — mental tick-boxes that help journalists recognise news-worthiness when they see it. Suddenly here’s a story that ticks not one but five of those boxes.
Tick one: conflict — and particularly internal party conflict — is always newsworthy. And there’s nothing more conflicting than jobs at stake in preselections.
Tick two: death of a public figure is shocking, unsettling — and rare. (There’s been about one parliamentarian die per decade over the past 40 years.) When the shocking happens, journalists by instinct ask, what’s the explanation?
Tick three: unexpected role reversal. As the famous saying goes (allegedly by New York Tribune editor Horace Greeley, among many others): “If a dog bites a man that’s nothing; but if a man bites a dog, that’s news.” After 18 months of rolling scandals about the abuse of women by conservative men, suddenly we had roles flipped: alleged bullying by Labor women.
Tick four: the story was broken by a journalist — and one of the gallery’s A-team that’s been holding the government to account over treatment of women — Samantha Maiden from news.com.au. A genuine exclusive by a rated reporter: that demands follow-up, particularly from the same organisation. News.com.au’s sibling mastheads in News Corp have been particularly eager. The Nine mastheads and digital media have been more cautious.
Tick five: a both-sides-do-it moment (at last!). Australia’s media (particularly, ahem, the ABC) engrain a belief that both sides are as bad as each other — or, at least, have to be presented as such as a shield against that most shocking of accusations: political bias. If the government has gone all pear-shaped, then even an opposition apple, looked at in a certain light, will suit as a both-sides comparison.
News Corp and the news agenda
News Corp is not just the country’s biggest news-maker — it remains an agenda setter. Within the traditional media, at least, it remains trusted, and even admired, for its news instincts, even when it’s distrusted for its political bias.
Competing reporters have to balance seemingly contradictory ideas (apparently the sign of a first-rate intelligence, according to F. Scott Fitzgerald): News Corp is beating up the story largely fact-free in its tabloids for political gain and the story as reported must be largely true.
There’s a world outside Canberra?
Political stories are owned by the gallery. They bring a deep knowledge of what’s happening inside the parliamentary triangle. Outside that? Not so much. Here, the gallery has been reporting with a Canberra focus on Senate tactics and parliamentary relationships.
The core of this story has been happening far away in Melbourne. Not surprisingly, Melbourne-based reporters with deep experience reporting in that city have been closer to its essence, such as Shaun Carney at the SMH, Virginia Trioli at the ABC and Guy Rundle here at Crikey.
What’s the takeaway?
The past 18 months of reporting and campaigning over the mistreatment of women in politics has hammered home the truth that the personal is political. Maybe the lesson from this latest story is that, sometimes, the political just ain’t personal.
In the “Desperation for a Story Stakes”, I think David Crowe’s report of his “emotional interview” with Michael Danby wins hands down. He failed completely to note that Danby was a mentor of Landeryou and a member of Kitching’s Vic Right faction, and was using the “interview” to further his faction’s political agenda. No context from Crowe, just acting as Danby’s stenographer. And that was after Danby had already been given a similarly context-free opportunity on ABC’s 7.30. Talk about lazy journalism and slow news days.
And a danger to democracy.
Many of the lazy journo brigade fail to realise that a local community does have ‘local knowledge’ of what is actually going on in our ‘patch’. Many Melbourne citizens have a ‘view’ and detailed local knowledge of the Liberal and Labor factions that operate in our State.The lazy journos are insulting us with the half-arsed reporting of the ‘real background’ to this saga. KK was a right-wing ‘plant’.being influenced by who??
..No context from Crowe, just acting as Danby’s stenographer. And that was after Danby had already been given a similarly context-free opportunity on ABC’s 7.30.
I didn’t read Crowe’s article but I did watch the 7:30 episode. Speaking only for myself I think that I was able to draw my own conclusions from Danby’s interview and comments, s to where he stood and which barrow he was attempting to push. I had noticed the questions Kitching had asked and the comments she had made in Senate hearings; I recall the many twists and turns of Landeryou’s career; I remember when Danby was an MP and what his views were.
Joining the dots may be difficult for journos but some of us have good memories – and there is also Wiki to supply some forgotten details.
If media hacks can’t and won’t give us the bigger picture (because they can’t see it for their own political narrative and agenda – or to protect their access to sources by running such protection and interference for those sources, willing to trade their position and what that position accesses), we know where to go for that : and it makes them look pretty bloody puerile in their “calling”.
The partisan, subjective, political play-time media is sweeping half the story under the mat that is their own political ideology and agenda…. and they think us rubes won’t, and don’t, notice?
Then they wonder why we rubes are pissed at both politics and them (and their politics).
“The Morrison government has just stopped doing, well, pretty much anything. That’s a disaster for short-staffed media that have come to rely on federal politics to fill the “this matters” content quota. Morrison knows this: he’s built his regular-as-clockwork announceables schedule around it.”
One thing they are doing well it appears is providing pre digested talking points to “journalists” from the like of the News Corp, Nine media etc to regurgitate. There is no media these days, it’s all propaganda.
Big Swinging Chicks versus a cry-bully. Both sides playing the Deny Attack Reverse Victim Offender (darvo) routine. Poor bugger me.
Murdoch Press is ‘filling’ an abyss of ignorance. Why?
Because their favoured conscript has absolutely no idea as to what to offer; week’s out from a national Election. Other than sling public monies, promises, right, left and centre.
I wonder if a lot of voters aren’t afraid to be proven wrong in their instincts; that thus look to any sources that that feeds, nurtures, flatters, props up and even promotes that instinct – and provides a herd to hide in?
Those who prefer the herd have the security of their nose up under someone else’s tail – no edifying perhaps but if some horrible happens it happens to the one in front first.
Funny the things that comfort some people.
Insiders (David Speers) gave Maiden what seemed like a 15 minute diatribe on the issue last Sunday. Despite the other guests trying to interject and provide some alternate view other than that the Kitching case was yet another case of political bullying; they couldn’t get a word in edgewise.