Were you to write a satire of our current situation it might go something like this: a leading journalist and presenter, who made his career as a pioneer of tabloid TV that went after “dole bludgers”, single mothers etc, reinvents himself as an upmarket presence. Though he has never denied his First Nations’ heritage, as he makes the media market transition, it becomes a more prominent part of his public identity, and of his output. Increasingly the performance of his own pain at the country’s racist history becomes a focus for the national discussion of where we should go.
When, as a de facto leader of this process, he is attacked by his opponents on a reactionary, spite-slum TV station with 30,000 viewers, he quits a public network with millions of viewers, denouncing the entire organisation. At his last appearance, a show designed to hear from a range of viewpoints by Australian opinion makers and the public is reorganised so that he can make a final performance of his agon, at which he announces that it is not racism at all, but the media in general, and he himself, to blame, for which he gets a sustained standing ovation.
Have I missed anything?
Look, Stan Grant is clearly not a bad guy, but he’s been a TV presenter for decades, and inevitably he has a touch of narcissism, which is to on-air types what black lung is to coalminers. You’re just going to get it sooner or later, so you may as well plan for it.
Grant’s development of the second part of his career, as an author of books and a more thoughtful commentator on national issues than he once had scope to be, made him a prize catch: someone who could say something intelligent, with the slick skills of commercial TV transferred across. Various institutions have encouraged him in that, and they got what they wanted: a performance in which what the nation was going through was mapped by Stan onto his own life and emotions.
The man whose career began by introducing stories about dole cheats pretending to be seals to get free fish from oil rigs (or something) now began each episode of Q+A with a recitative in a First Nations language which quite possibly no-one listening actually spoke, just part of the absurd tokenism on such matters which has taken over the ABC in recent years.
When you set out to personify a major cause — which is one form of leadership — don’t be surprised if you become the principal target of that cause’s enemies. Grant participated in the ABC’s silly and irritating pre-coronation coverage debate, in which his contribution was once again performative and personalised. The event, which was a moment of real historical consequence for our nation, good or ill, demanded a neutral coverage — neither fawning nor sarcastic. It became another chance for the ABC to give a gee-up to the republican campaign, whose pathetic inability to generate its own politics shows that it is no sort of movement at all.
Grant’s announcement of his departure became an opportunity for a performative outburst by the wider media elite and knowledge class, about “our racism”, which largely means the racism of “the others”. Grant suggested he had been poorly supported by ABC management, not publicly defended against Sky as dark AF, and subject to relentless abuse in social media.
Only the first of these seems to be the responsibility of management. Maybe one statement from the ABC about the News Corp pile-on might have been wise. But it would also have been another manifestation of the Streisand effect. A TV station with 30,000 viewers would have had its obsessive campaign become a national news story. Social media? That’s just the return of the repressed (often the justifiably repressed). What people once said about you in pubs, they say about you online, and you get to hear about it.
Grant’s personification and representation of “the cause”, and his crisis within it, comes at a time when the knowledge class’s increasingly obsessive self-definition through First Nations issues has become performative en masse. This has become a full kitschification, with, as Stuart Littlemore and David Salter noted in Nine’s newspapers, the national radio signal coming to you from Gadigal land etc etc.
This organisation is not immune. For 12 years here, I have been arguing that Crikey’s coverage of First Nations’ issues has been appallingly low in priority, that we need either a First Nations’ journalist or a series of reports from freelancers. Nothing has happened, and Bob Gosford’s “Northern Myth” blog was allowed to drift away. On the bright side, our Worm has events listing for “Kulin Nation Country (also known as Melbourne)”, which is rather silly and unctuous.
There’s also some hilarious hypocrisy going on. On Tuesday Patricia Karvelas on RN Breakfast grilled Defence Minister Richard Marles, fresh from a News Corp-sponsored conference on Australia’s defence (News Corp and weapons manufacturers), and pushed him to condemn News Corp’s attacks on Grant. “Disclosure,” Karvelas said. “I worked for The Australian for years.”
Disclosure: Karvelas didn’t disclose that when at The Australian she was the lead author of a string of articles attacking First Nations’ academic Larissa Behrendt for a funny, mildly bad-taste tweet she made to her 800 followers (while watching a Q+A episode featuring Bess Price). The Australian, with Karvelas in the lead, went Behrendt day after day on its front page, with a series of attacks that were far more implicitly racist — how dare a Black girl be an academic and thought leader was the unstated tenor of them — than anything Sky has thrown at Grant in the past week.
The attack on Behrendt was the first in a series of truly brutal attacks by The Australian, using the powers it once had as a paper that people read. The aim was to psychically terrorise the victim with the prospect of something new every day, relevant or otherwise. The campaigns were either indifferent to what they were doing, or actively seeking to prompt psychic collapse in the victim. They culminated in the truly malign attacks on Yassmin Abdel-Magied, driving her out of the country.
Karvelas’s campaign against Behrendt provided the template for that. It should have excluded her from a job at the ABC; instead she was allowed to reinvent herself as “PK”, which suggests that the accusations of structural racism within the ABC are true, and that it finds it far easier to accommodate “diversity” — southern Europeans, “people of colour” — than it does the tougher issues of Indigenous/non-Indigenous relations and representation. Karvelas now uses her increasingly strident and programmatic breakfast show — which has lost 50% of its audience, 400,000 to 200,000, since she took it over from Fran Kelly’s more rounded effort — to interrogate people over their organisations’ racism. You couldn’t, as they say, make it up.
Political desperadoes will recognise a whiff of Leningrad 1937 about all of this. It is happening for the same reasons: because the campaign for the Voice Yes vote is visibly failing, and everything must be done to distribute blame anywhere but with the poor leadership and incompetence of the campaign.
The thing was inaugurated without the question of “executive consultation” being worked out, leading to public splits and nasty recriminations about motives. Noel Pearson, having hung back for some time, has now shown why he did, denouncing Mick Gooda as “a bedwetter” who has “achieved nothing” because Gooda suggested removing the executive consultation provision to make the referendum winnable. But it was topped a few days later by (checks notes) Pearson who in his column in The Australian denounced readers of (checks notes) The Australian for being obstructive N-voting nuisances who should just get out of the way — prompting editor Michelle Gunn to attach an endnote to Pearson’s column reassuring its readers that they were not, in fact, miserable crypto-racists. Incredible stuff.
While all this goes on, the 70% or so of non-Indigenous Australians outside the now utterly self-serving self-involved knowledge class watch in amazement. Some wish Black people well; most can see that there are wrongs to be righted; some are indifferent. But almost none caught in the daily struggle of raising families, making a living, dealing with rising costs, squeezing wages, housing shortages, a strained healthcare system, inadequate childcare, aged relatives without a real state system of care and much more, see this issue as absorbing or crucial to their life on this continent in the way that the elites within the knowledge class have made it to be.
Is that why support for the Yes campaign is falling steadily? Falling into a zone where a No result is a likely possibility? This is surely part of the reason, this relentless insistence by one dominant class against another whose lives it shapes, that it must feel a certain way, be shamed or guilty in a certain way, reshape its subjectivity and emotions to an authorised version of history and the present.
That never works. It returns through channels, and it is doing that now. As well as listening to the murmurings in our heart, it is worth paying attention to the singing in the wires, to hear what “the others” are saying outside the theatre of our obsessions, where it is increasingly difficult these days to pick the satire from the tragedy.
Has Rundle got it right? Is it all just a sad farce? Let us know by writing to letters@crikey.com.au. Please include your full name to be considered for publication. We reserve the right to edit for length and clarity.
Brilliant article Guy – your truly independent analysis is a main reason I subscribe.
Me too. At least Crikey allows for a range of opinions, which is more than can be said for others in the media game.
Another slovenly piece like this and my sub won’t renew.
Guy’s point about most Australians being focussed on their own struggles right now, is absolutely true. We have to control what we can and not spend too much time on stuff over which we have little control if we wish to stay sane.
This is why so little happens after the numerous Royal Commissions over the past few decades, because people are just trying to keep up with the stuff they need to manage. There’s little time and headspace for issues that don’t affect people directly.
It’s not that we’re apathetic or don’t care, but there’s only so much we can do. The government is supposed to be governing with integrity to protect the vulnerable and support taxpayers, which is what we pay them for. They’re not doing their job, so we need to find more competent governors who do the right things, instead of bowing to the self-focused powerful people who exploit everyone else.
It’s funny how some inmates of Mudroch’s cloisters can go somewhere else to work, and find absolution and redemption – and forget their history, their prior role in that bestial enterprise.
Except that self-serving ex-commercial meeja narcissists like the Karvelases, Grants, Speerses, Milligans, Tingles et al who have so over-colonised the ABC now don’t actually change when they insinuate their fat bums, unearned by any public broadcasting apprenticeship, into a premium gig at the taxpayer-funded ‘journalists retirement heaven’.
Whether a natural born diva like ‘PK’ (*must…swallow…vomit*) is using a bolshie lesbian union posture, a hard-hitting Molochista-contrarian posture, or a Fran Kellyesque Boomer-whisperer posture, it’s always…all about her. These journalistic imposters are wannna celebs from day one who’ll hijack any old platform they can for a Selfie. Most of the ABC’s Brand journos now are really just glorified social media influencers, with a better PR department and a guaranteed Paypal income. (They don’t even have to maintain their click rates to command the big bucks.) They are meeja opportunists = everything is performative. Like Leigh Sales – remember poor Leigh’s own awful Twitter abuse ordeal? – Grant will back on the ABC before you can blink.
As for ‘PK’, it’s utterly predictable that she’s in the frame for Stan’s gig already, as adroitly self-serving a cynical chameleon poseur as any in Oz’s fetid broadcasting pond. Give her a gig at Quadrant and inside a week she’ll be pounding out Blimpy 4000 worders on the ‘black-armband killing of history’ and the ‘mutilations’ of affirmation therapy, wrangling top billing there, too. Offer her a Wiggles skivvy, meanwhile, and she’d demand it be rainbow coloured with a big ‘Me’ on it, shoving Anthony Field off-camera and reworking Big Red Car as a solo turned My Speedy Scooter.
It’s this corrosive subversion from the inside of our lovely favourite Aunty into a brothel madam for social-climbing meeja whores that most irks. These commercially primed super-egoes don’t go to the ABC and find absolution and redemption. They trash the joint, refashioning it in and to their trivial Vanity Publishing image and wants. Making Ita – Queen of Me Me Me Oz Meeja – their presiding Diva-in-Chief was unintentionally apt. Though entirely predictable, given it was Scotty from Marketing wit dun it.
I don’t think these prima donnas come in from the cold wilderness, that is commercial media, to the hearths of ‘Auntie’s Beneficent Cleansing Scourge Clinic’ for absolution and redemption – that’s bestowed by a lot of the audience, for ‘having seen some light’. They’re more interested in ‘making it’, becoming ‘real journos’ – as bestowed by taking their act to tread the boards on Auntie’s historical lime-lit stage.
And back to Barron’s Media Watch judgement of Monday night (re the Grant issue) :- “… But perhaps the ABC should also review the way it encourages some of its star journalists to walk the impossible line between news, analysis and opinion, and whether that is in line with public expectations…” (‘some of it’s star journalists’? Like Barron?) I for one amn’t interested in some self-gratifying hack making news (to be quoted by some other hack) with their ‘analysis’ strained through their own opinions – I can misshape my own opinions without their influencer input – if indeed Auntie does ‘encourage’ that?
I think they just like to see their opinions ‘up there’, fluttering, pinned to some mast of greater importance.
‘… as bestowed by taking their act to tread the boards on Auntie’s historical lime-lit stage..’
Spot on. That’s what I hate the most, the way the weak Board and conniving Execs (too many commercial alumni now too) lets these impostors use and abuse the fantastic, multi-generation built legacy of the ABC for their personal career gratification. Not to mention gazzumping the lesser-heralded staff – vast majority toilingbin honest APS good faith, increasingly under-funded, hard-working, stretched. The ‘non star’ and regional editorial staffers, back roomers, tech and AV peeps, etc…must look at a Stan Grant performative victim act, and have to work hard to step up to the picket line to ‘support’ him.
These big names, really, are mostly users.
The board is the trick isn’t it, stacked like it is.
The Board is a sinecure. Its main ‘stacking’ problem is that governments of both stripes invariably load it with lazy, ineffectual placeholders, not partisan activists. All parties tend to adopt a bipartisan collusion in this, with Oppositions and x-bench parties and MPs equally recognising the strategic advantage of having a weak Board installed even when it’s their opponents who do it. It’s because no politician of any stripe want any countering impediment to their own direct interaction with senior ABC Executives – especially via Senate estimates – or, increasingly, via direct relationships with the National Broadcaster’s ‘star’ journalists. Mobile phones, texting and social media chats have profoundly changed the relationship between politicians and journos. It’s so fast, easy and safe to bypass – just ignore – Boards and senior Execs, especially when they’re weak and lazy.
It’s a mutually beneficial symbiotic dance, now. The ‘star’ journos get to become ‘stars’ the easy way, by hitching their wagons to a constant supply of drops, feeds, leaks and political interview ‘selfies-with-the-subjects’. And pollies secure their personal PR assets. Ayes, it’s not just about intimidating journos off stories; increasingly, the advantage of a weak Board/management is that it makes it easier for pollies to actively collude with ABC journos on them. The 4C ‘Bubble’ series and the snowballing #MeToo targeting of the Morrison government on grossly over-hyped ‘misogyny’ grounds was a classic example of a Opposition artfully using its direct conduits to individual ‘Brand’ journos to prosecute a political strategy. The likes of Malcolm Turnbull, Sarah Hanson-Young, Penny Wong, Katy Gallagher, political camp followers like Jo Dyer and Michael Bradley, etc, destroyed Christian Porter in this way, using the ABC as a weapon.
They could do it because the Board is a collection of faceless ciphers, and Morrison’s captain’s pick to helm the Board especially is – for all the inexplicable hype she’s garnered over her career (much of it of her own making) – Ita Buttrose is actually a media lightweight. She’s both exponent and product of publishing triviality and superficiality; the Queen, as I said, of Me Me Me journalism – the prototype Social Meeja Influencer. Morrison thought he was being so clever cynically catapulting her from being a washed-up daytime agony aunt to being Australia’s Aunty: heading up the most important and powerful media institution in Australia. He probably thought he was future-proofing himself against attacks on LNP ‘patriarchal sexism’ by elevating a woman, too, so there is at least some very satisfying irony in Cynical Scotty from Marketing’s power play blowing up in his face.
But the ALP will get theirs, in turn. Princess Tingle is on the Board now, accelerating the process by which the ABC’s ‘name’ journos – brutally narcissistic careerists/opportunists without a clue about public broadcasting principles and zero public service ethos (except as a vehicle for their personal byline) – are hijacking the place. It’s a profound failure at Board level. An oversight gig at the ABC is one of the relatively few public institutional Board roles that has real executive-strategic clout: the Parliament-enshrined Charter represents both a powerful Board management tool, and a ferocious obligation on directors to use it. Properly applied, the destruction of the ABC’s credibility at the hands of narcissicist-egotists like Stan Grant et al that has been long underway…would have been nipped in the bid decades ago.
Çrikey there’s a lot of hate here, l would like to think that amongst it all is a bit of fact reporting rather than misinformation. The Speers show worries me though.
Yes, Speers is the quintessential ‘New Ideal’ of the aspiring public broadcast ‘serious political journalist’. Too slick, too smug, too incredibly pleased with his own political acuity, too in love with his own voice and rodomontade, too perpetually-default-set to Knowing Irony, too nowhere near as good as he clearly thinks he is, too vanilla, too overpaid, too underworked, too visible, too ubiquitous, and too too too too much a Certified Product of the worst kind of Molochistian schooling.
Karvelas, Grant, Milligan, Tingle…commercial media just produces a certain me-me-me journalistic mindset. The antithesis of public interest journalism. Sad to watch.
I haven’t watched it other than a few short “looks” at the beginning.
I think it’s inexcusable what they were party too (some for years, at ‘editorial’ level even), exacerbated by their own incapacity, after having ‘left’, to bring themselves to a commentary on the what ‘duress(?)’ they were under within that organisation, to contribute to that overall biased, subjective, partisan propaganda output (with it’s social consequences) – the passing up of the chance to denounce what’s going on there now : or maybe they flourished, given voice, for their personal opinions, in that environment?
What has been seldom commented on so far re Stan is his less than impressive body of work in the form of analysis and opinion about contemporary Chinese politics. He has a habit of mentioning a couple of big names in western philosophy and then goes on to apply them to his analyses of Xi, China, or whatever, and then comes up with sweeping, often off-the-mark views. Yet, he can publish these on the ABC and nobody seems to challenge him. He has been a correspondent in China (an outdated slice of experience that he keeps drawing on), so he believes he can speak with ‘authority’ on China because his ABC colleagues know even less! I just hope that he won’t go back to work with ASPI – he was a fellow there earlier.
Yes, indeed. I agree with you 100%. In fact, until his – to my mind, searing words during the Troglodyte affair called The Coronation – I couldn’t stand the sound of his smug voice. I recall him ejecting somebody from Q and A because he attempted to point out some basic facts which Western Media treats like shit, about the real truth about the US Proxy war on Russia. But his China rants put him in the same rank, to me, as ASPI, Hartcher, Trump, Biden, and all the other racist lunatics who want war with China.
For a self-professed kindly and loving individual, I don’t know how Stan reconciles that with his China bashing, arms loving, US arselicking CV.
It’s Grant’s Western liberal ‘individual sovereignty’/’freedom values’ ideology which fans his hatred of China. The idea of ‘common prosperity’ doesn’t compute.
Could be the massacres and oppression of minorities, the lack of press freedom and extrajudicial and arbitrary incarceration and killings, but then again China isn’t alone there.
Wasn’t he also on the board of Thales?
Not sure it will make any real difference if he goes back to ASPI or not, to be honest. In a sense, he never really left, did he? You can take Stan out of ASPI, but you can’t take ASPI out of Stan.
A superb and painfully accurate analysis, I think. It is now many years since I watched or listened to ABC news or current affairs with anything but dismay and increasingly, contempt. It is all narrative management and propaganda, and, substantively, no different from the “reactionary, spite-slum TV station with 30,000 viewers“. I keep wondering if the opinionated mouthpieces really believe the garbage they spout – in which case they are fools, or if they know that it’s garbage, in which case they are liars – and know themselves to be liars. And as their public credibility erodes, their abuse of anyone and anything they perceive to be outside the bounds of the narrative becomes ever more hysterical.
Beautifully put Griselda. And News Breakfast has become mind-numbingly lightweight and facile.
I struggled to listen when Fran presented. It’s unlistenable now under Karvelas.
Not a bad effort (loved the PK pile on) but I think Grundle needs to read up on ockham’s razor. The main reason the voice will fail is because the lnp have no purpose outside the pursuit of power. Hence they split the vote no matter what the issue. Counterfactually, if the lnp took the Leeser line the voice would be on a much stronger footing. The reason the voice will fail is because of racist dogwhistling not high brow chatter.
Sorry, too highbrow for me. WTF does this have to do with Ockham?
Occam. Occam’s Razor.
I know who Ockham is. I just can’t see why it’s relevant
The simplest and most obvious explanation is usually the correct one, hence the Coalition’s opposition to the voice is about power