There’s nothing Australia’s political reporters enjoy more than a good wedging: that delicious moment when they can manoeuvre one of the big political players into a cleverly constructed “damned if you do, damned if you don’t” moment.
But after nearly five years of media salivating over seeing Albanese trapped by the oh-so-clever Morrison tax cut wedge, it’s the traditional media that finds itself caught in the vice between what they’re convinced themselves is “news” and what, it turns out, Australians want to know.
The social and fiscal time bomb that was the Morrison stage three tax cuts has long been hiding in plain sight. The media has long been busy priming themselves for a political explosion, with its cunning rule-in/rule-out questions. They expected New Year’s Eve-level fireworks. They got a damp squib.
The traditional media approach to politics is broken — and in this country, it’s broken in a peculiarly Australian way.
The “liar, liar, pants on fire” reporting construct is an eccentrically Australian conceit. In the age of social-media-powered disinformation that’s roiling journalism worldwide, the delicate parsing by Australia’s elite media would appear almost quaint, if it weren’t so destructive — of journalism, more than anything else.
The practice is not, as the media likes to tell itself, a dose of much-needed journalistic accountability. Rather, it’s a journalistic choice of a political narrative that spotlights the clowning in the main ring of the circus. It comes with a self-importance — a hubris — of the journalists as ring-masters, directing the political performers around the public stage with a reverberating “Is your word your bond?” demand.
With its fumbling of its reporting on the government’s tax pivot, that hubris has, inevitably, turned to nemesis. Turns out voters like a government that adapts and adjusts. No surprise: we’ve got nearly 50 years of evidence that voters judge campaigning commitments with more nuance than the gallery likes to think — since Howard earned his “Honest John” moniker in 1977 when his pre-election fistful of dollars promise went unredeemed in the post-election budget.
While the politics of governance — all that guff about the players and the games they play — adds colour (and clickbait) to modern journalism, it’s a poor substitute for the substance of policy and decision-making.
Too much of the modern press corps lacks the lived experience to write about politics knowledgeably, having never been through the hard doing of trying to make things happen through organising and campaigning. Worse, there’s a rarely-hidden contempt for the people who have — and this includes many of their most engaged readers and viewers. In Bowling Alone, US writer Robert Putnam called the reward of community engagement “social capital” which, he found, correlated with heavy news habits — the sort of people that subscription-based news media need.
This lack of experience shows in changing work careers. Once, the revolving door between ministerial offices and the gallery turned both ways. Some of the best of an earlier generation of political journalists went over to what the craft calls “the dark side” before returning to reporting with a far deeper understanding of how government actually works.
One of the things that they would learn on the inside is that even with all the work on game theory or behavioural economics, no-one really knows what shifts votes and public opinion on any particular issue, or from election to election, other than a tentative pattern recognition and a shrugging “what happened last time” recency bias.
In Australia, the press corps, too, regularly miss the shaping of the “all-politics” news choices by News Corp driving its political narrative of choice. Through its selective reporting of its own Newspoll across 2022 and 2023, for example, the US company successfully created a journalistic consensus about a government — and a prime minister — in trouble.
Right now, it’s trying to hammer the “broken promise” meme into that discourse, from the Telegraph’s front page “Albo’s word sold for $28b” when the pivot was first announced to “Cost of PM’s duplicity yet to be fully measured” in this past weekend’s Australian.
Based on what we know of news consumption, here and overseas, engaged readers aren’t having it. In the US, publishers are winding back their investment in the political circus, with big mastheads like the Los Angeles Times and The Wall Street Journal just the latest to slash their Washington bureaus.
Without a pivot to the substance of the news that readers need, don’t be surprised if 2024 brings a similar thinning of political bureaus in Canberra.
Has the media misread the national mood when it comes to the stage three tax cuts? Let us know your thoughts 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.
The oligarch media and their fawning sycophant, the cowardly ABC, have a shared narrative from which they never deviate – even as the supposedly infinite market they once believed was theirs forever shrinks daily, and the narrative catechism the endlessly repeat has an ever-diminishing correlation with the lives of the public they despise. When they talk about a “cost of living crisis”, or a “housing crisis” it’s almost as if they were reporting on a famine in some benighted foreign land – they are not making agonising choices in the supermarket or living in their cars, and their uninterested disconnection from those realities simply confirms their irrelevance.
Hi there, I agree with your concept about MSM reporting, and their shrinking audience. However, given the media landscape, I don’t believe the ABC is cowardly. You either read the daily tabloids or balance the news with a dose of ABC. Newspaper tabloids are a menace to democracy.
I bravely do a daily dip – for 30 minutes if I can bear it that long – into Nien’s Today Show to get the gist of what the populist media is currently touting. The talk of Australians ‘doing it tough’ was rabid & relentless until last week when the tax cuts were announced. Ah ha, the penny began to drop with the person in the street that this would be advantageous for the overwhelming majority of taxpayers.As much as Karl Stefanovic & Sarah Abo attempted to bait their guests to deride the amendments, only Coalition MPs & a couple conservative shock jocks were on board.
They’ve pushed the broken promise line but it appears that Nien’s audience doesn’t give a rat’s. Not sure how much longer Karl & Sarah can doggedly persevere with this but there comes a point when one must stop hitting one’s head on a brick wall, surely…
Watching the transformation of Sarah Abo (an ethnic Syrian) from being a good reporter on SBS to a ventriloquist’s doll for the LNP on Nine, it has made me wonder if the journalists actually have their own thoughts or are paid just to parrot the company line as determined higher up the food chain.
I’d love nothing better than to bang Carl’s head against a brick wall.
30 minutes of commercial morning tv Bloody hell you are a crazy brave individual. We salute you
Of which about 12 minutes are childishly, annoying ads!
Good call!
Crikey, Crikey are you saying Murdoch is losing its grip on the duopoly, especially Labor? Might Australia actually end up with some semblance of a democracy, where oligarch(s) controlling easily manageable Lib/Lab don’t get to set the policy agenda?
Crikey! I like to see that
I quite agree, I cannot even tolerate looking at our corporate meda (and abcnews), but Crikey did not exactly cover itself with glory in this case, despite trying to claim meta-analysis it get out of it. This has however improved. The coalition jumping horses today like circus clowns was hilarious in many ways. It’s an indictment of the MSM when your audience has more sensible views than your professional reports.
Hey I do like Christopher Warren’s broad international register and ambit. Tis good. But maybe the internal focus on the media and the media circus needs to be simplified. Let’s simply deal with the politics and the politicians as they present. Otherwise we might get caught simply basting the goose while the gander gets off scott-free – ie. without sufficent discernment and judgment.
To point, Dutton in his press conference (6 Feb) today quibbed in these terms, ‘We’re supporting this change[the re-booted Stage 3 taxation measures], not to support the Prime Minister’s lie but to support those families who need help now because Labor has made decisions that have made it much harder for those families and that’s the position that we have adopted as a party room.’ This is arch-disingenuousness. It’s Labour led by Anthony Albanese who ‘has made decisions’ for these tax arrangements which he, Dutton is now supporting. You can’t have it both ways mate, is what Dutton ought be told. In the final analysis what Dutton’s duplicitous words indicate is a regard of patronage and condescension toward the public. That is, toward you and me. His naval-gazing and that of his Liberal colleagues and party-room ought be called out and could be reported in the media.
I’ll be waiting to see if any of the Insiders membership (Amy Remeikis excepted, as would have been Katharine Murphy) has the nous to report that, in supporting the S3 tax renovations, Dutton has effectively validated the “broken promise”, and thus the reasoning that drove it. If he agrees with the destination, he can hardly quibble with the journey.
I doubt you can speak for another journalist in what they would have said. That is not only wishful thinking, it’s childish.
Past behaviour is a good indicator of future behaviour. Maybe it’s a lesson you and the rest of cons-spruiking droogies need to take on board ?
Agree but for someone to catch Dutton out like this in a press conference would require a level of critical and logical thinking most journalists don’t have, at least at speed. It would also require them to have support from editors to pursue it. Narratives tend to get set in editorial meetings at the beginning of the day and journalists are told to go out and fill them in. Across days of an issue group think tends to set in, which is where Newscorp propaganda as agenda setting comes into it. In media conferences something similar happens when the first halfway decent question gets others following. What made Oakes powerful was he ignored others and asked pointed questions, albeit many gotchas.
All these media tics were in ample display during the long Andrews’ Covid media conferences where he just played the gallery into intellectual exhaustion, exposing their groupthink, lack of policy knowledge and all too frequently, innumeracy. Not surprisingly most of the politically engaged found it cathartic.
Spot on, except their inability to think critically and logically outside their own echo-chamber doesn’t just apply ‘at speed’, unfortunately (as the rest of your comment correctly attests).
Thanks for your observation. They are mixed bunch but some are quite smart, while being quick as well is rarer, for all of us. But I do think the editors are a key. Journalist self-censorship is very real and operating in the commercial media means any critically informed observations of conservatives are far more likely to be perceived or labelled as biased and thus career limiting. This despite, or because of, the fact conservative lines and “arguments” usually have holes for which a truckload of evidence exists to expose. Groupthink and following editorially decreed lines is safer.
Maybe it is conscious prostitution to earn an income, as you say. But I fear that they have sold their soul as well as their labour, and they end up believing their own BS to avoid the cognitive dissonance.
Why didn’t he think of changing the tax cuts?
Interestingly the concept came from the Public Service, imagine how much that would have cost if one of the high-profile accountancy firms had come up with the concept. Unfortunately, The Libs have nothing in the tank except creating the next brawl to turn attention media attention away from producing actual policies