Struggling to understand what’s going on in Australian politics right now? It’s simple: Australia’s right — both its political and media wings — has pivoted hard to the playbook of Republican far-right tactician Steve Bannon: they’re flooding the zone with shit.
It’s a tactic seen in the No case against the Voice to Parliament and the campaign against Brittany Higgins, designed to disorient and overwhelm the media (“the real opposition”, according to Bannon) by drowning its critical instincts under the gusher of stories, feeding its addiction to conflict and gamifying its performative, defensive crouch of “both-sides” reporting.
In Australia, as in the US, there’s a purpose-built spillway: News Corp’s pages get picked up in Liberal Party talking points and pushed on through the amplification algorithms of social media. The Higgins campaign alone has been kept alive through the daily cycle of story-shaped objects on The Australian’s front page.
It’s hard to avoid being swept along. When Nine started to step out of the flood, it too became a target from within — by 2GB’s Ray Hadley (giving The Australian another “story”.)
From the outside, the obsession with relitigating the 2021 scandals seems odd. Reminding us of the grubby details all over again won’t make the Liberals look better, but the opposition will count it as a win if they spread enough shit around to make everyone look as bad as them.
And as the flooding carries all Australian politics down to their level, it meets a deeper purpose: washing the public square clean of diverse voices, particularly those who bring a moral clarity that threatens the right’s vision of the status quo. Even professional journalistic voices such as Lisa Wilkinson or Stan Grant have found no one is immune. But there’s a bigger story we risk missing: all those less well-known — unknown, emerging — voices being pushed out of public debate.
One of the most accessible places for First Nations voices was, once, the IndigenousX Twitter feed. Each week, a different Indigenous person — some already with a media presence, most without — would host the feed, telling their stories from their unique perspective. Last year, it stopped when escalating racist abuse made it just too unsafe. It lives on now in the Reconcile This anthology. (Read it. It’s free. Donate.) Similarly, last month, National Indigenous TV canned its Twitter feed saying it’d “had enough of the racism and hate”.
The right (in the US and in Australia) reckons it’s found a culture war opening in the demands for practical action over discrimination. When #MeToo (and Black Lives Matter) forced a political recognition that sexism or racism is systemic, calling for change, the right saw an opportunity to tag action as “woke”, pushing back against the significant social changes it has hated all along.
The media is being flooded with controversies around the Higgins case, as well as the No case on the Voice. As Wiradyuri man and research fellow James Blackwell told The Saturday Paper earlier this month, it’s shifting the Overton window: the range of publicly acceptable political discourse.
But the right isn’t just trying to make its own once-repugnant views suddenly mainstream. It is working just as hard — maybe harder — to black out the views it opposes, to move the entire window back to somewhere around where it was in, say, 1955. In journalism, it’s found a surprising ally: centrist traditionalists in legacy media who hanker for a past world where they, too, could shelter behind woolly ideas of “objectivity”. Not so long ago, it looked like the “moral clarity” school was winning out.
This past January, the Walter Cronkite School at Arizona State University produced a major report, “Beyond Objectivity“, on “how to produce trustworthy news without ‘objectivity’”. In April, Wesley Lowery, who coined the phrase “moral clarity” in a 2020 tweet, urged journalists through the Columbia Journalism Review to abandon “performative neutrality, paint-by-the-numbers balance, and thoughtless deference to government officials”.
Now the traditionalists have hit back, with calls to reclaim old-style “objectivity” from Lowery’s former editor at The Washington Post Marty Baron, and recently retired New York Times executive editor Dean Baquet who described journalistic “objectivity” as “a process that was created to make sure everybody’s baggage did not skew coverage”.
There’s history to the debate: back in 2019, when Baron was still editor, he censured Lowery (then a Pulitzer prize-winning reporter on the masthead) over “overtly political” tweets. After Lowery left the Post, he tweeted over a later internal row at the paper: “Reporters of colour shouldn’t have their jobs threatened for speaking out about mainstream media failures to properly cover and contextualise issues of race.”
When Opposition Leader Peter Dutton dismissed The Age’s Indigenous affairs correspondent and Birpai man Jack Latimore as “some activist journalist” — in order to disregard a report that Liberal members were misquoting former High Court judges on the Voice — he was, wittingly or not, nodding to the trope that journalists of colour, unlike white journalists, cannot be professionally, journalistically, “objective” when writing about race.
It was just another indicator that there’s no dry land in objectivity from the bad-faith flooding of the media zone.
Yet another iteration of He Who Must Not Be Named……………..
………….and one more reason why he and his toxic brood must be banned from media ownership.
He Who Must Not Be Named sits near the apex of wealth and power, doing what those of wealth & power have always done, attempt to persuade their underlings that their interests are shared. The confluence of interests with others of wealth and power is transnational (nobility have always shared more interest – and genes – with their fellow nobles than their country folk), and has various religious overlays and common interest in seeing a placated and subservient populace, kept in fear and in need of salvation, with prospects of you-too could be a winner, if not with wealth in this life, then in an after life.
The culture wars “it’s-all-down-to-wokism” is so transparently a tactic to divert attention away from real issues I’m amazed that so many fall for the ploy. As Warren notes, this is lifted directly from the US, and Aussies are primed to swallow the same gumph due to absorption of ‘Merican culture. The dangers of a society going horribly awry from this obscurantism are manifold and writ large in history. Ultimately it is not in the interest of the averagely wealthy to follow the mantra of the squillionaires, as they will be the ones to suffer if the plebs ever wake-up to the manipulation they’ve been subject to. ‘Othering’ of Indigenous voices is cynically employed to keep common folk turning envy upon their fellow underlings.
I can only agree.
I hope more than Crikey listeners are listening.
Bit a huge thank you to Crikey and the team including the gusty Bernard for calling out Murdoch Media along with many other fantastic contributors, Mauve, Cam, John, David and Stephen, to name a few. we love your work.
Joined at the hip with imported ideology of environmental care via immigration restrictions &/or population control, free market or libertarian (deep south) socio economics; nativist authoritarianism or eugenics.
The tactics are not new, but the recent actors e.g. Bannon, Stone, Cummings, CTI et al. have influenced the media, how to manage and game (under resourced), especially in Oz and UK.
In social media, there are ongoing campaigns to denigrate liberal democracy, left through centre right, institutions, norms etc. by dog whistling and encouraging citizens not to vote (inc. voter ID/suppression tactics), while energising the above median age voter a la ‘pensioner populism’ in regions; not voting gifts the right a distinct advantage.
It’s absolutely true what the article is saying. However, after the 2022 2nd Danslide in Vic state election that saw Fairfax employ anti Dan radio shock jock Neill Mitchell as a columnist and both Fairfax and the ABC were both complicit in pious anti Dan rhetoric that backfired after also both outlets led a withering miscall of the federal Labor victory it makes for conjecture whether it’s only a
” vast right wing conspiracy”?
So, we can’t outflood this crowded zone, not least because it only adds to, justifies, pulling the debate back half a century into their territory.
Sticking with the analogy, it means we need to shoot feom the perimeter – which requires linguistic sharp shooting. Academic discourse just doesn’t cut through beyond our progressive echo chamber.
Also, we need to develop Our zone – there should be more cross pollination of progressive platforms – together, united etc because they, if nothing else, certainly are.
Our cleverness may ripple the public service water cooler but Murdoch owns the public bar bluster, he speaks their language back at them.
Maybe, hopefully, Crikey can develop an alternative platform that fires targeted shots into this space from the perimeter.
journalistic “objectivity” as “a process that was created to make sure everybody’s baggage did not skew coverage” – very, very well put.
Thanks for the donation suggestion – shall take it on board.
“but the opposition will count it as a win if they spread enough shit around to make everyone look as bad as them” – Finally something positive about Trump. At least he believes himself to be superior to everyone else (while Bannon’s flooding the zone with shit). No wonder the Libs are sounding so vicious – imagine going through every day trying to make the others seem as bad as you are. They’ll all be on antidepressants by the year’s end.
‘Flooding” it? They own/edit/promote within most of it. They pay/promote their influencer sausage makers, along owners’ ideological lines within that closed shopping maul.
And complicity – again, Sunday’s Insiders?
After the week that was, in that Limited News media character-shambles/-knocking shop = first time, in how long, there hasn’t been at least someone (or two) else from the Limited News stable (beside Speers), guesting on their ‘Insiders Revue’.
Previous two weeks it was the “Sam & Dave (“You Don’t Know Like I Know”) Show”; with Maiden – ‘political editor for news.com.au’ – called back for an encore from the previous week. But not last Sunday? …. No ‘in for a penny…’?
No one from there to discuss that ‘insider’ trade.
There was Karvelis, but she’s like Speers – as some see :- ‘domesticated’/absolved after being brought up in Mudroch Mews, having been ‘taken home by Auntie’ from that Rupert shelter.