Social media platforms demand an unending stream of content. Journalism has reshaped its message to meet that need and politicians have worked out how to keep the supply running.
The fact-free thought bubble
In the past week, John Howard troubling over multiculturalism, Scott Morrison nattering about China and Tony Abbott’s unsurprising repudiation of the climate emergency at the Alliance for Responsible Citizenship conference in London all hit their mark.
There’s nothing new or newsworthy in any of it, but once the comments were dressed up as news grabs, they fizzed and bubbled across social media before elbowing their way into the weekend’s serious commentary on both the right (“Reclaiming Western civilisation’s values”, pondered Paul Kelly in The Australian), and the left (“Pouring fool on the fire”, Jonathan Green punned in The Monthly’s politics newsletter).
It was left to Australia’s cartoonists to pull the media up. “Back by unpopular demand,” quipped Fiona Katauskas in Guardian Australia.
Why do reporters play dumb?
Remember back when Peter Dutton jerked the Voice debate into a fantastical vision of the future with his promise for a second, reconciliation-lite poll? It was, even at the time, bullshit (in the purely philosophical sense, that is) and didn’t last more than 48 hours past polls closing.
For those few days mid-campaign, the stunt’s pretence of seriousness lit up the news cycle with the power of its undiluted chutzpah. It’s the look-over-there political distraction painted as news. (By the way, did you see that Scott Morrison is in Israel?) Yet, as Judd Legum wrote in his Substack Popular Information last week, reporters do know better — they’re just playing dumb.
‘When you’re a star they let you do it’
That’s the man who broke the US media, of course, Donald Trump. He was speaking about sexual assault on the Access Hollywood tapes, but he could just as easily be talking about journalism, with his intuition that if a politically prominent person says something catchy, funny, clickbaity — true or false — it will get reported.
It was a lesson Trump learnt from Rupert Murdoch in 1980s New York when the (*cough*) Australian was becoming American and remaking US media in his tabloid image. Murdoch wanted celebrity news. Trump delivered, bringing the two together in a now decades-long parasitic symbiosis.
In Australia, the News Corp tabloids have taught the same lesson to Australia’s revolving door of right-wing political leaders. Much of the rest of Australia’s media have fallen into line — on the left with a headlined shock horror, on the right with a laugh-off suggestion to take it “seriously, not literally”.
In the US, the Murdochs have discovered their approach comes with a billion-dollar price tag (in Australian dollars anyway) with the failed defence that they were just reporting the false claims that allies of the US president were saying about Dominion Voting Systems.
No sense? No problem
How do you adapt into journalese that rambling, grammatically awkward, non sequitur-laden manner of speaking of the right-wing populist? How do you capture the hidden codes that hint at racism, misogyny and conspiracy theories?
By editing the rambles into the shortest of possible comprehensible grabs that render them fit for broadcast on television and radio and circulation through social media posts. The edits sand off (or just ignore) the coded edges or smooth their impact with after-the-event fact-checking.
Make me serious, but not yet
Australia’s media hunger for the serious politician, but reward politicians for the unserious spiciness of their takes. This week’s Insiders on the ABC tried to walk the line with the, um, serious journalists on the panel tut-tutting the lack of seriousness in the opposition’s “Airbus Albo” swipe, while the show rebroadcast the more social media-friendly unserious commentary from the opposition.
The ubiquitous hyperbole of the ever-present adjective
Twentieth-century journalism worked hard to drive the irrelevant adjective out of everyday writing: “Write with nouns and verbs, not with adjectives and adverbs,” thundered Strunk and White in the craft’s bible, The Elements of Style.
Still, I’ve always loved a good adjective, one that does its job of clarifying intent by modifying its noun — particularly the playful-multi-word-almost-phrasal-mock-German hyphenated adjective. But social media has cluttered up written language with the adjective of hyperbole that guts the power of the noun, making, say, an act of war too understated unless coupled with the adjectival “brutal”, “violent” or “bloodthirsty”.
The diminishing returns of empty calories
The result is too often a journalism of empty calories, where an ever-renewing snack buffet of stand-alone factoids get served up minute by minute coupled with a constant attempt to game the platforms’ algorithms into boosting the take through search engine optimisation (SEO). But as social platforms show increasing signs of quitting the news (and readers seem to be following them out the door), the news media seem to be getting exactly the wrong message.
Faced with diminishing returns, expect the media to keep doubling down.
It certainly is, and I’m probably not the only one getting indigestion from this diet of mindless hyperbole. Never mind the extreme circumstance of war, this is everywhere in journalistic and political blather. Is there any family in Australia that is not hard-working? Where can you find a community that is not tight-knit? Nothing is ever uncommon, unexpected, unpredictable or unusual, because instead it is incredible, or even literally incredible, not to mention unbelievable. (Some day I would like someone been told, ‘That’s incredible!’ after they have made some statement to react strongly against having their word doubted for no reason.) Books could be filled with examples.
That’s before we get to other related crimes against the language such as the repetition of threadbare clichés and the witless insertion of misunderstood or inappropriate technical jargon, trendy neologisms, metaphors, similes and analogies; sometimes indulged to the point where any intended meaning in the words is lost or obscured in ambiguity. Many words and phrases that were once useful for a specific meaning have been rendered down into meaningless noise by this process, like good fresh food boiled for hours into a slimy tasteless grey mush. Anyway, George Orwell wrote some brilliant essays on these topics several decades ago, and look how much good that’s achieved.
Correction : ‘Some day I would like someone who has been told…’
Not now, not anytime soon.
Capitalism has stripped the significance from everything. The end of the world is just another meaningless subject of ‘debate’.
Don’t forget the inflammatory adverb, SSR. Families become incredibly hardworking; communities become incredibly tight-knit, everything is incredibly this or incredibly that. But are words like this paradoxically meant to convince us somehow that these things are true?
Perhaps if journalists had a better understanding of grammar, and didn’t try and change the meanings of words through overuse, they wouldn’t fall into such traps.
More to the point is the meaning of ‘incredible’ – schmadverb adverbly aside.
How does it come about that everyone/thing – work or myriad other things – is now unbelievable?
Good grammar would be nice but a vocabulary of more than a dozen words might be good start.
Superlative inflation is AWESOME
The New Daily currently reporting the driver of the Daylesford tragedy is an insulin-dependent diabetic with the headline “Bombshell revelation …..”
The Yanks have the art of babbling words without thinking totally nailed; just look at the LITERALLY infinite list of things they COULD care less about…
Hey, be a bit sensitive! Don’t you know X community is in mourning? Elsewhere though, rain failed to dampen spirits.
Any journalist blaming social media for the worsening of journalism is likely part of the problem instead of accepting responsibility for their own actions which turned the people away from MSM. It’s not that journalist was credible before social media but social media made it easier for people reflect and see how bad and even how classist Australian journalism is.
People like myself who grew up in the outer western suburbs of Sydney remember how in the 80’s, MSM wrote storeis which pampered wealthy postcodes and ignoring the criminality of the people of wealth while painting the entire population of western Sydney as unemployed, drug addicted criminals, wrote stories about how dumb the children were instead of talking about the morally bankrupt NSW Government which underfunded State schools so much that some could not afford the text books which other State schools were funded to supply to their students. The classism of jouranlists who all write as if they have never ridden in a car of any less value than a billion dollars still shows today as they write their stories demonising the people of lower class areas while painting the wealthy areas as people of saintly matter.
And there’s the obvious fascism of MSM where MSM print so many wild stories designed to tear the fabric of Australian society apart for the benefit of the upper class.
Every journo who refuses to accept they are part of the problem instead of blaming the people for not accepting their propaganda is and always will be why journalism is a career which has no credibility.
Transcends media partially too, while also ignoring facts or reality i.e. hollowing out of MSM (but more micro outfits & influencers online), locally allowed to merge into a cartel, fewer resources, journalists, reporters, themes etc. while sport, national politics and RW talking points dominate, and with the help of RW MSM proprietor, importing US tactics or architecture of fossil fueled nativist authoritarians.
Jane Mayer of New Yorker explained well via her work ‘Dark Money’, she spoke of the Koch ‘Freedom Works’ audit or deconstruction of MSM and then creating an ‘architecture of influence’ i.e. ‘littering the world with RW think tanks’ producing reports masquerading as expert ‘research’, talking points etc. to lobby politicians, and flood more online media, inc social media, with talking points for reinforcement eg. repetitive headlines & language.
Stein, Democracy, Summer 2016, No. 41:
‘The Kochs’ Dangerous Game. What the Koch brothers have built isn’t a political network. It’s a trust. And it must be busted…. America’s two wealthiest brothers and their most intimate operatives have created a powerful, unaccountable, and unprecedented form of privately financed “political trust” designed and operated to lessen competition in the marketplace of ideas, restrain the functioning of representative government, threaten the integrity of democratic institutions and processes, and further enrich themselves and their allies’
I have no patience with the former politicians who can’t seem to let go of any illusion that they are relevant.
Really, I know Toned Abs will be welcome at his rural fire brigade, Smirko the dud is raising his profile so that he can join his mate Brian “whoeva”
on the US Southern Doomsday Preachers Circuit (perhaps that is why he went to in Israel).
As for the unflushable Howard, drop more paper on him, please.
Perhaps the unemployable Jerusalem Morrison will go into business with Pastor Houston and start a new church.
I know someone who was a member of the same CFU unit as Abbott. Welcome was not a word that I heard in the description of Abbott’s behaviour. Nor did I hear the word competent. PR-seeker, however, was repeated several times. As for the hangers-on of the msm, so desperate to capture action piccies? Expletives I could not possibly write BTL on Crikey.
The ‘Gotcha’ question seems paramount instead of informative journalism.
Watching Patricia Karvelas asking the same question multiple times, on Insiders, was cringe worthy.
Main stream media has dumbed down journalism to unwatchable depths.
Listening to Her on radio asking Malcolm Turnbull to comment on Speers and Riley story that Albanese refused to say if he trusted Xi Jinping just before he walked in to meet him!!!!
Was delicious as Turnbull demolished her lead story as an attempt to embarrass Albanese!
Did not Turnbull still had fire in him!
‘Gotcha’ questions seem to be the only questions Speers knows how to ask, and Karvelas is sinking to the same level.
With the smirk in the first one’s case
Wish I’d heard it.
I have to rely on social media to find out information that the mainstream media either hides or lies about. Thankfully there is a community of intelligent balanced people in one of the social media sites I use that can balance out the rubbish spruiker on much of the mainstream media these days. Independent media sites also provide the counterbalance and with these sources of information a more balanced and authentic analysis of events and policies can be sourced. Mainstream media doesn’t like social media because it takes away lots of its power. Far better for journalists to be good journalists not slaves to media barons and the powers that be.
Care to share the name of that social media site, please?