ACT Chief Minister Andrew Barr
“I hate journalists and I’m over the mainstream media”. Declare this to anyone but your best mates only in the case you seek a walloping from mainstream media. Otherwise, those in public life would do far better to sing from the Oprah book of common praise, “I value the press more than ever before as we try to navigate these complicated times”. Big outlets love this stuff. So, provide them with that and perhaps some blandishment about the courage/integrity of high-profile journalists in the face of power/deceit. This will be swallowed very gratefully by the beak of corporate press, then disgorged over all us hatchlings.
It’s likely you’ve read some critique of that first statement, uttered last week by ACT Chief Minister Andrew Barr, then leaked and reported widely yesterday. It’s possible that you share some, if not all, of the press revulsion for it, unanimously expressed in outlets from Sky to The Graun. And, why not? First, that it is the work of press to hold political power to account is, surely, manifest. Second, that Barr made unfavourable statements about an essential institution not only in a fairly private context — even Trump makes his loathing public! — but to an audience of professional communicators, AKA the spin sector, is proof only of his corrupt self-interest and aversion to the truth, etc.
Oh. Come on. Fairfax publication The Canberra Times, a publication singled out by Barr for its ineptitude, can find a scholar to compare the Chief with Joh Bjelke-Petersen all it wants. None of this changes the fact that many of us are, in fact, “over” a mainstream media that we believe will fearlessly defend truth about as ardently as a politician. There is, in my view, but one thing that large and corporate outlets will fearlessly defend: themselves.
We can see this play out implicitly in the #MeToo journalism of the present. Yes, the particular kinds of abuse to which many women workers are routinely subject is an urgent matter. No, you do not serve many women workers by electing to focus, for six months now, almost entirely on women who work in or with the media, or related elite sectors. Six months! It should not be true that readers will become impatient with such an important discussion, but, it is true that they will, including the many women workers who have been subject to abuse of an everyday sort not yet broached by Tracey Spicer.
I understand that high-profile journalist Virginia Trioli means well when she declares on social media that “a woman’s best weapon against vile harassment” is a filing cabinet. I also understand that persons of her class have simply forgotten that most women workers, largely employed in the care and retail sectors, do not have the opportunity to “file” their experiences of abuse anywhere but their memories. In #MeToo, as in many other kinds of reporting, journalists now see their own interests and lives as utterly indistinct from those of their audience.
We can see this play out more explicitly any time there’s a labour dispute by salaried journalists. A walk-out by ABC or Fairfax workers will gain coverage disproportionate to any other labour protest, and even journalists normally hostile to the very notion of worker organisation will briefly remember the value of solidarity when “press freedom”, AKA press jobs, is threatened. We saw such unanimity when Oprah gave her very mediocre speech at the Golden Globes, with Janet Albrechtsen praising this much-needed praise along with the “opposition”.
There is no opposition in press. Sure, Australian journalists spend all day shit-canning each other on Twitter and writing articles about other articles to prove the point that all journalism but that of their own outlet has gone to the latrine. We get weeks of attack from the Oz on Emma Alberici, understood as a symptom of a “left-wing” ABC that, in its craven turn, does so little to defend her, but so little mainstream discussion on the veracity of her claims. Mainstream talks about how crap media is constantly and expects us to be enchanted. And then it expects us to believe that being “over” it is an indefensible position. Oh, they’re all unified bravely against Barr today, who, although a politician, did accidentally say something true. Mainstream media. We’re over it.
Mainstream media friends: I understand the need any worker has to believe that they are important. I do get that you haven’t been freelance as long as some of us, and are now anxiously denying what you ought to have faced long ago: people don’t respect us much these days and don’t want to give us their money. Yes, it is difficult to leave a storied organisation and see that independent or crowd-funded media are where active audiences are now placing their trust. I remember how proud my parents were when they saw my byline in The Age or heard me on the ABC. I get it. I would say, though, that you should check the esteem in which your parents and their friends now hold those organisations.
I do not “hate” journalists of the mainstream. But, like many readers, I find myself unsatisfied by the narrowness of their work. That I happen to personally know the forces that produce this tripe doesn’t mean I’m any more inclined to swallow it than anyone in an era where “fake news” is not itself always an illegitimate charge.
So. A politician said it. Perhaps, for the wrong reasons. It remains true.
yes, all true about the press in general, but shame you picked Andrew Barr to hang your hat on. He is not liked in the supermarket queue in Canberra, where older women will lean in and say, sotto voce, he’s not a very nice person you know, very unpopular at Lyneham High, and now he’s pulling down the public housing complex where he once lived, looks like an act of revenge for an unhappy past .. and what about that smelly CFMEU land deal, and property developers running amok with town planning for their own profit .. they’re all bloody corrupt
The Canberra Times, for all its faults, has been running a series of exposures, based on reports from the Auditor-General, on his insider dealings. Most of us are grateful for the scribblers in this instance, and that’s why Barr hates them.
Canberra hardly ever votes for the Liberal Party and he was the last man standing in the ALP after Katy Gallagher left, so won the last election by default, but it is now clear he is totally in thrall to the CFMEU/Property Developer cartel, currently demolishing the city, and his own brutal and delusional vision of a Singapore of the South, with tall towers, already looking shabby and cheaply built, and concrete canyons to carry his $1Billion Old Tech Trams. Not a good fit for the Bush Capital, once with leafy boulevards and low-rise well-designed and constructed buildings nestled in among the trees, the Paris of the South.
Andrew Barr is no hero, and he will soon be for the dustbin of history.
I agree, SW. Not the perfect hook. But, I kind of think a perfect hook is an imperfect test of our hopes and dreams for a “free” press.
FWIW, I grew up in Canberra, and saw and felt the transition from Federal administration to the local kind. (The schools, which I was attending, seemed to me to deteriorate fast. It was nice to live off the federal fat as a kid.) My family still works and lives in Canberra and I am aware that Barr is generally better regarded by property owners than by those in insecure housing. Not the sort of policy that excites me, particularly in this era.
But, it’s an important and difficult question (and one I know to be on the minds of Canberrans, some quite frustrated that the Times is so often full of SMH content.) I totally get you, but I also think that the more difficult the question about open communication, the better and more thorough the answer is likely to be. When we’re forced to consider a point made by someone we don’t like, we think harder.
We must think: What stops mainstream press from delivering as well as we’d like? It’s really not Barr’s refusal to engage with it. As disagreeable as you and I might legitimately feel his leaked statement that he would *not* engage is.
Thanks, though.
> What stops mainstream press from delivering as well as we’d like?
The replacement of news with communications — a tension that has always been present, but which snowballed back in the Reagan era, if memory serves, when his veto killed the FCC’s Fairness Doctrine legislation in 1987, laid the foundations for conflating attention with relevance and set a corporate precedent throughout the English-speaking world.
I would say that there is more than one answer.
The way communication dominates the modern information economy, attention has more commercial weight than expertise. Journalists with hard-won and proven expertise are increasingly abandoning professional gravitas to snipe because they no longer believe that professional reputation beats attention-seeking. Editors whose ethical oversight should have reminded them otherwise, joined the dung-fight years ago.
An academic way of saying it is that mainstream news media have slipped from being a value shop (where reputation and expertise matter for a journalist as for a doctor or lawyer) to a value network (all about who you can connect with whom.)
That’s a retrograde step, reminiscent of the mudfights of Enlightenment pamphleteering. Because advertising is rewarded by reach and attention, I don’t believe market forces can restore it except in niche areas driven by (say) subscription models. Ultimately, mainstream, advertising-funded news is either re-regulated to be fair and relevant again, or it becomes what it’s becoming now: a war of pamphleteering.
No one believes that market forces can “restore” (I’d say reshape) media. It’s not “do a good thing and people will pay for it” anymore. Supply and demand went out with culottes.
I agree with you Helen, but the other side of your question above is why the publishing model *ever* grew ethically from ratbag pamphleteering to journalistic accountability, given that newspapers were funded by advertising from the outset, and sold on sensationalism.
There may be other views, but I think it’s because distribution was expensive, as it presently isn’t. That expense resulted in consolidation and rapid market saturation, which led to competition on expertise and ethics, rather than just attention. We might say something too about the middle classes needing reliable information on which to transact their business.
A hollowing out of the middle classes may have changed customer-side differentiation at the same time that deregulation replaced news with bread-and-circus entertainment. Couple that with globalised communications and slashing the cost of distribution and you’ve got a perfect storm of lightless heat.
For myself, I still value the information from which I make decisions. Hence, everything I get now is on a subscription model. Even if it’s free, I’ll pay for it by donation, and I get quite cranky when I think an organ is falling short. I realise I may be in a minority here, but please feel free to mentally dress me in culottes if you like. 😀
“When we’re forced to consider a point made by someone we don’t like, we think harder.”
You may think that, Helen, but I certainly don’t. When Morrison spruiks tax cuts for business, I don’t feel obliged to consider his point. His form as Treasurer and Immigration Minister means my first reaction is to disbelieve everything he says and thus reject it outright.
As a Canberran, I observe what Andrew “King of the Kids” Barr, a self-styled cool dude hipster is doing to the city and despair that the Liberals have been unable to lay a finger on him, and the sole Green, Rattenbury, sold his soul for a Ministry.
Barr displays no Labor values that I can discern – he is a White Shoe Brigadier in hipster clothing, a three day stubble consorting with the property developer spivs. You do know he is filling in part of Lake Burley Griffin for the building of apartments along its foreshore. Other cities try to link their prime natural attraction with the city – Barr is cutting it off.
So while the mainstream media is failing in a number of areas (eg Leigh Sales limp lettuce interview with Turnbull last night), in this case if it weren’t for the Canberra Times then we’d have no idea what the megalomaniac Chief Minister was planning to inflict on us next.
I haven’t conveyed my meaning clearly in the comments.
When we are forced to consider a point we had not before seriously considered. The matter of tax cuts for those who have the most is one you have already considered.
I think a good example of this (for me, anyhow) is when Trump said to Bill O’Reilly, who was asking him about the Russian menace, “You think our country is so innocent?”
For people who had not considered the past 70 years of US foreign policy, that was a possible “a-ha” moment. This guy we may not like, especially if we are anti-war types of the liberal-left, has said a true thing. He has said a thing that Obama would never have dared.
It is true that the US has done unspeakable things. That this man who is himself unspeakable (accidentally) revealed this truth is cause for good question.
PS I am no longer a Canberra resident. But, I would say that your description of Barr makes him identical with the “Labor values” of the present: look like you care. Don’t actually bother.
Helen – in full agreement with you re Barr’s Labor values. This was in yesterday’s Crimes. Waiting for Shorten to speak out.
http://www.canberratimes.com.au/act-news/anger-as-act-government-contracts-out-workers-at-new-hospital-20180309-h0x9an.html
Regarding Barr, I don’t personally know much about ACT politics, so the few stories that break into the Victorian bubble stand out. I remember the kerfuffle when he won the most recent ACT election despite the press gallery narrative that Barr was cactus, that the swing was definitely on and the Liberals were going to sweep in and about time too. Our media do like their narratives and greatly dislike it when those narratives are shown to be wrong in a way they cannot dodge- see also the last Federal election, the collapse of the myth of “progressive Malcolm Turnbull”, the collapse of the myth of “changed man Tony Abbott who is fit to be PM” etc etc etc.
Barr may be the 2nd coming of Sir Joh, I wouldn’t know, but geez if you’d been written off by all these journos right up to polling day and then they continue to act like they are the ones who really know what’s going on and the ones who really speak for the people, you’d be pissed off too.
What happened to the CFMEU, it has become the lapdog of vested property interests and the mining sector.
Who remembers the green bans of the old BWIU and the BLF? The projects they stood against would have given their members work but would have destroyed Melbourne and Sydney. I feel like phoning their executive and giving them a piece of my mind! What cringing snivelling pieces of effluent they have become. In the days when Union members and the executive had a social conscience. I remember when they supported the war criminal in the Tasmanian Federal election. Norm Gallagher would be turning in his grave. Not sure if Stan Sharkey is still alive.
The Union movement has denied its origins within the working class and is now only worried about its Stock Market investments!!!!!!
Sorry, my indignation and passion outran my logical sentence construction LOL.
The war criminal, Howard.
In the days when….had a social conscience we could all sleep peacefully.
Great stuff, Helen.
TY, G
Look at the public regard for how we think our factoid media do their job? Why is mainstream media withering on the vine when “entertainment/opinion = news”?
The Dum last night “discussing” this – van Onselen and Feathers Fanning going on about how good the press is; and Chung (one of the usual “Liberal/’independent?’ Sydney Councillors” they have on to hold forth in their “impartiality”) :- what a good job the media does on the whole – like he cops the slops that Murdoch hands out to political opponents, like Moore?
Too many of our media pack are too much like palm civets – they think
it’s their job to first digest our coffee before they pass it on. The self-indulgent twats think they have every right, to edit/withhold or embellish what we get, according to their political priorities – and the bulk of them are Murdoch’s.
They don’t “hold political power to account” – they do some (and that’s not always acccurate) and they indulge their Limited News Party. [Jethro was an aberration (held back for weeks) – an example of what the media can do if their government went ahead with laws that didn’t exempt them?]
They carry on like paid/professional social media – paid and promoted to express their opinions as fact – to nurture and influence a particular way of thinking – while those opinions run in accord with whoever is paying them.
While much of it will rail against elitism, is there anyone more “elite” than our media – gifted the resources to push their opinions and tailor what we get to see, to frame our news, to their opinions?
klewi – your agony is clear.
You haven’t written this many words in the last 12months.
I gave it to Ruv by several knockouts but MzRaz just won’t stay down. (She thinks the Black Knight was a quitter.)
I think that it was the early 80s when the number of ‘journalists’ working for gov/corp (in Ike’s sense) exceeded those in news when there were papers which reported… stuff.
My son wanted to be a journalist as a child in the 80s but by then it was wayyy too late.
I regret that I have no regret for the passing of the deadtree brigade but they brought it on themselves, after burying us in a shower of shite.
I do regret not yet finding a trustworthy source of information about our quotidian lives.
Until it too late, has come to pass or, like neoliberalisticalism, turning into a rotting corpse splattered by the defibrillator.
Loved the ‘palm civets’ comment. So very, very true. Except that after the civets have expressed their coffee beans it still basically remains coffee.
Once the Murdoch media mob express their ‘beans’ it could be anything.
“There is, in my view, but one thing that large and corporate outlets will fearlessly defend: themselves.”
I kind’ve enjoyed watching a very sheepish Greg Brown get booed at the National Press Gallery. But watching and reading Murdoch’s soldiers launch a counter-offensive was even funnier. All Tom McIlroy seemed to get for his defence was a big, ‘thanks for coming’.
Weird, right? I mean. Brown was asking a policy question. And this is seen as (presumably) sexist and demeaning? Asking the shadow deputy about a thing? (Which I think Plibersek later said she was happy to answer, her non-committal answer, typical for a pollie, notwithstanding.)
I felt like the “feminists” here were themselves a bit, you know, sexist. Like, all a lady can talk about is lady business. Especially on lady day.
And then, of course, News went for it. And, really. That’s an hour of my life that could have been far better spent. I begin to resent this disorienting inward-looking nonsense, which I am sure many others do.
In Western countries International Women’s Day was a non-event only celebrated by the left-wing; even though it was first commemorated in the United States.
Strangely, since the fall of the USSR Capitalism can now pay lip-service on this day. It’s become respectable. Luncheons, carnivals, speeches, yippee! Unfortunately, we women are still waiting for the most important gathering….to announce that we now have a salary/pay packet which gives equal pay for work of equal value.
Hi Helen, I often read your Crikey contributions with interest and benefit. However, in this piece, I think you’re addressing two discrete.issues. One is the present state of public print media. The other is the relationship of same to Andrew Barr and vice versa. This involves specific issues in ACT politics, and I think you need to consider these. There are particular reasons for Andrew Barr’s dislike of print media, notably of the Canberra Times: the Canberra Times, imperfect though it may be, is the only public medium holding Barr’s government to account. This on a number of issues, as other comments on your article indicate: 1. an unhealthy relationship between the ACT government and the Treasury, the CFMEU, ACTPLA, builders, developers, and real estate agents 2. the quality of “urban infill” building i.e. serious building defects, inadequate quality control, possibly corrupt land swaps, and inadequate flood mitigation 3. alienating and privatising the foreshore of Lake Burley Griffin at the West Basin 4. a whole series of concerns relating to the construction and viability of the City to Gungahlin Light Rail Network, and 5. inadequate planning for the Ginnindery housing estate, which comprises land in the ACT and NSW, to name just a few. Both Jack Waterford (Canberra Times) and Jon Stanhope (City News) provide incisive commentary on many issues relating to the ACT. I’d like to emphasize that the Canberra Times is the only public medium which offers a forum with information and often thoughtful critique about the national capital.
Hi, A. Yes. I do see your point.
However, as offered to SW above, the comments are worth considering for their truth. He may not have intended them as true in the way we would hope. I always find it makes for more headache-y thinking when this is the case.
Angela, I’d earlier posted a comment on the Canberra Times as an organ of accountability, but it got eaten. The CT has wrapped my fish and chips for the last 25 years, but I don’t remember it ever being strong on investigative journalism in that time. For instance, I can’t recall a lot of breaking issues first reported in the Canberra Times, that ever made their way into the national papers. To me the CT reads like a transplant of some country newspaper where the editor is related to everyone and doesn’t want to rock the boat. My household has never subscribed to it, and only ever bought it once a week for the TV Guide. I think you’re more likely to sharper and more current ACT info from (say) The Riot Act e-zine, where citizens tend to participate more.
With that said (also in my previous comment) Barr has no place criticising it. As a politician, he has no business making newspapers the subject of his commentary: he’s the story, and has no business making the CT the story. As we know, the ACT has seen a huge explosion of development in recent years, which has been problematic for integrity in many other jurisdictions. It’s a legitimate subject for hard questions, and the only appropriate response is to answer with transparency and demonstrable facts.
Yet as Helen also points out, his criticisms are valid. Had he only been a citizen, he’d have been right to make them. But as a politician they put him in a conflict of interest.