Don’t blame the journos for the media stumbles… or not just the journos at any rate. They’re caught in a tricky moment, a campaign when all politics is local — electorate-by-electorate local — and all news is, well, not.
Welcome to campaigning in Australia’s news deserts.
With the still-recent death of local media coupled with the decade-long slashing of journalistic resources, journalists have been forced to hack their way to a solution, holding out to both their polarised readers and the party leaders a safe critique of performance that could link the two sides together in a national narrative.
Seemed a safe enough solution — neutral, equally fair (or unfair) to both sides, rendering their reporting safe on gaffes and stumbles that are the least political part of modern politics. It sorta kinda worked for a while. But now our centralised news media and our local politics are pulling in precisely opposite directions, and tearing journalism apart in the process.
After three years of fires, flood and plague — those horsemen of the Anthropocene apocalypse — readers aren’t having it. In their communities, these past three years have splintered politics and, for many, generated an urgency for policy reporting that meets their expectations.
With Australians hit in different ways, depending on where they live, politics has become significantly more local than it was just three years ago. Different electorates, it turns out, have different wants and needs.
Savvy reporting that seeks to craft a national narrative out of gaffes and stumbles can’t meet the diverse news needs of the burnt-out communities of southern NSW, the flooded communities of south-east Queensland and northern NSW and mine workers of the Hunter Valley in between.
And that’s before the myriad ways the post-COVID care demands, the climate emergency, engrained discrimination against women, corruption (petty and otherwise) and the First Nations demand for voice-truth treaty play out across (and within) the country’s 151 different electorates.
Blame it on the business: while politics has become more local, traditional media has abandoned local news, particularly in the suburbs of the big cities where the election will be won and lost.
In the early days of the pandemic, News Corp stopped printing the free weekly suburban newspapers that had provided local communities with (at least some) local information. In 2021, it folded the local mastheads’ digital ghosts into its paywalled, big-city tabloid chains.
Meanwhile, big media that decides what’s “news” has centralised its national coverage, with fewer reporters pushing the same take on the news out into every city and town.
There’s not just less diversity. There’s less reporting due to the compounding impact of decades worth of closures and redundancies that have left traditional media without the resources to report across the range of issues that are affecting votes in different ways.
Australia’s established metropolitan media has long lost a handle on many of its communities. The further out a suburb is, the more it becomes somewhere that news — crime usually — is reported from, rather than for.
There’s a remaining handful of reporters in big media clinging on, still turning out important journalism. There’s a handful of new digital players trying to fill the gap. The ABC is attempting to report about and for the suburbs and SBS for diverse communities. But we saw the weakness of media reporting on suburban communities in the pandemic. We’re seeing it again now.
Come the election, the media doesn’t ignore all local contests. Live close enough to the CBD (in one of the electorates where most journalists live — like, say, Wentworth) or live in an electorate that’s historically marginal enough to be interesting and the local campaign will get a makeover once or twice in the election coverage.
And as the Liberals have found in Warringah, local candidates can deliver great value when they can be mined for gotcha moments that fit into the media’s national gaffes-and-stumbles narrative.
Three years ago, Morrison weaponised localism with rewards for loyal voting with a commuter carpark here, an upgraded sporting facility there. This time around, he’s confronting different local anger over unfulfilled commitments over bushfire relief and slanted commitments over flood assistance.
Last time around the media missed the local story. Looks like it’s missing it again. But tell me again why Albanese’s brain-block in Tasmania is the story that matters.
Main Stream Media has gone to the dogs.
Newspapers are now littered with more and more partisan political opinion pieces than factual News stories.
The edicts obviously come from the top, and Journalists are caught up in serving their masters for fear of losing their jobs.
Social Media is a disaster, and is a cesspool of misinformation, conspiracy theories, etc., and if you disagree with the thrust of a Post you are met with severe criticism of not just your beliefs, but also your character.
I have turned to alternative News Sources to try and obtain some balanced factual reporting of News. Some of the Independent journalism, such as Crikey seems to try hard to point out failings on both sides of the Political divide, but my main source for especially International News stories is Al Jazeera who seem to just report factually without applying any spin.
Thanks Peter. As the largely partisan mainstream election coverage emasculates any notion of a balanced, factual reporting so a considered, informed response in the ballot box is less and less possible. Thanks to all that is right for Crikey and the other independent beacons of hope; lights in the darkness of the most frightening public narrative in many, many years.
National private media, the only privatised media there is now, has prostituted itself to produce ideological propaganda consistent with it business model to commercially survive. There is not local media, but for an increasingly irrelevant exceptions. So we get local largely unreported politics overlayed with corrupted propaganda for those who still pay attention. What a debacle!
Totally agree. Have you tried to understand the commercial TV news hour lately? In Western Australia, we get 5 mins of local news, 25 minutes of eastern states and worldwide news, and 30 minutes of ads.
not worth the trouble to watch
I spend about an hour a day reading news and current affairs and surprisingly I do not read the MSM and definately do not read the pay walled links. We should require media ownership by Australian citizens a la USA. Then break up media ownership to create competition.
The hypocrites are obvious when they demand competition claiming it to be more efficient but do not want competition in media outlets. Legislate for diversification.
All young aspiring journalists understand that they will almost certainly end up in the last standing steaming media pile and be submitting to one of Rupert’s aligned editors.
It’s the reason why, as a genuine OAP, I haven’t seen an Australian newspaper for nearly a decade – a fundamental lack of trust.
And localised social media sites are more and more important to tell people what is happening locally. The centralised model with its eyeball approach to news means fewer people buy the old style news over time.