As Australia tumbles from summer into the heat of a four-month election cycle, we can look forward to political reporting dominated by seemingly endless critiques of the performance art that is electoral politics.
It’s not what we need. Nor, judged by declining news consumption, is it what media audiences want.
Political journalism exists, so Fourth Estate theory goes, to empower citizens to make an informed vote at elections and to hold governments to account in-between. Instead, political reporting is a running criticism of the political theatre coupled with a meta-analysis of how much the audience is hating the show.
It’s cool: disengaged from the audience, inside-out, ironic, balanced with a both-sides-do-it seasoning. It tells us all about the political sausage-making (and particularly its packaging) without giving much thought to the actual sausage.
At least arts and entertainment criticism has a use — it gives us an idea of what to watch. The continual critique of the performance style of dorky-dad Morrison or dorky-geek Shorten doesn’t give the audience much idea of who to vote for — and it’s not supposed to. It’s supposed to explain how they’re going to vote. Best guess is the winner. (#Notalljournalists, of course: there are some who dissect the sausage — although that’s what got Emma Alberici into trouble.)
It’s rare that the reader, the listener or the viewer gets asked if this is what they want. Worse: politicians (yes, both sides) hack this journalism, turning reporting into a daily meme exchange, designed to distract, not inform.
Under these norms, political reporting is judged by how “smart” it is about the politics, not the policy — New York University’s Jay Rosen calls this the cult of the savvy. This ideology of “savvy-ness” is profoundly disempowering: look at how it was used by the Liberal government to blunt the excitement of the Uluru Statement from the Heart. Savvy tells us that referendums never succeed, so there’s no point in trying.
Or look at how political reporting of that “great moral challenge of our time” — climate change — is boiled down to reporting legislative manoeuvres in the Liberal Party backbench and the Senate crossbenches. Savvy builds an Overton Window of acceptable discourse around itself and pulls the frames in tight.
Political reporting as theatre criticism was essential to mass media. When you want to build a mass audience, you need supporters of all parties who want different things from government. A both-sides-do-it theatre criticism entertains. It may infuriate, but it doesn’t challenge personal beliefs.
As a result, through this election, again, the day-to-day political reporting agenda will be largely set by critiquing what’s happening on the stage: the Libs will waffle on about boats, Australia Day, African gangs (with journalists being “led by the nose” as the Washington Post‘s Margaret Sullivan says) interrupted by the harrumphing from the right-wing 24-hour media resentment machine.
Reporters on the road with individual leaders will be required to take the performance before them and push the plot along or push back; to ask politicians to feed it or fight it.
As media fragments and journalistic resources became rarer, journalists have an opportunity to break this paradigm. A fragmented media demands a journalism that’s hot: listens to audiences, interested in what they’re interested in, outside-in, passionate, constructive.
How about shaping reporting resources around what our audience says it wants — or needs — to exercise their democratic vote and allocate resources accordingly?
Perhaps start with the regular polls that ask what people consider important. Here’s one from Essential last November: “Ensuring a dependable water supply. (31%)” (This was before the Murray-Darling tragedy.) Have a reporter follow the politics of water as intensely as they’d follow a party leader.
Back in 1991, one of Australia’s great political reporters, Peter Bowers, broke the Overton Window on Murray-Darling policy when he reported the algae poisoning of the system. He followed the water, talking to the people who lived around it. Asking them.
It was probably the most important story of his long Canberra career. It made it into his obituary. Now it’s a pointer from the past about what the political journalism of the future can look like.
What would you like to see more of in political journalism in 2019? Write to boss@crikey.com.au to let us know. Use your full name if you’d like to be considered for the comments section.
Excellent notions, Christopher. I’d love to have competent, regular reporters on (say) water security to read.
Have you any further thoughts on how to monetise single-issue journalism to make it as lucrative as political gossip?
My primary beef of so-called balanced political reporting is how politicians (Libs in particular, but obvs not limited to them) can mouth off their talking points that are often gross misrepresentations of the facts (and often outright lies) without being challenged. The current status quo is such that most mainstream journalists report what they say verbatim (often with the key message in the headline for them) without any fact-checking or context. And you can forget any of them ever being challenged on the spot at their presser. This election, I would like to see journalists boning up on the topic and data relevant to the topic being covered in the presser in order to pre-empt and actively challenge politicians on the spot with any misrepresentations, obstructions, and lies – with other journalists in the pack backing them up and restating the question if the politician tries a dodge.
Good points. Exasperating to watch the media pack let politicians get away with dodging the question and hurling red herrings. Since Lateline was abolished by the ABC the only decent forensic interviewing is by Elise Morgan on The Business. I’ll leave Bazza Cassidy alone, Insiders works.
I agree with you regarding both Lateline and Insiders. Its worthy of note that in the US CNN, MSNBC and TYT, just to name a few, all have several programs like Insiders every day! The Drum and 7.30 have a go, but one half hour a day is not enough. None of the commercials are serious contenders. It could be a natural extension for Crikey, but it would take far more commitment than at present.
I agree the quantity of reportage has increased but the quality has fallen dramatically, where is the analysis??
Most political reporting is just public dissemination of which ever political partys propaganda.
Embarrass a Limited News Party politician with questions that need straight answers (and persisting is such a pursuit) and risk being cut-off from the hand-feed – as well as open yourself up to needling from Rupert’s subjective partisan Muppets (from their over-inflated share of the market) trying to influence the perceptions of enough of the majority of the swinging demographic to vote for Rupert’s Limited News Party to deliver government :- meddling in our democratic/political process.
I often wonder how long it’s going to take journalists to grasp the only implication of the internet that matters to them: that their entire trade – profession, vocation, whatever – is fatally redundant. It’s over, gone: the brief window of viability for this weirdest of contrived gigs has slammed shut.
It’s no mere failure of the business model, either – that mass advertising + mass circulation = viable staff/content budget equation. It’s way more irreversible than that: it’s the epistemological shift. It’s the death of the ‘third person omnipresent authoritative voice’ as anything other than an amusingly quaint affectation, one that 2nd, 3rd…4th + generation digital natives dismiss as a glorified Instagram duckface pose, as a matter of instinctive deconstruction. It’s curtains for the J Writer at last, several thousand years after some anonymous genius figured out the neat authorial trick of writing the lie ‘It was said’ (and the even cleverer ‘Someone said that it was said’)…rather than the truthful ‘I just said it, here in this very sentence’.
Nobody really believes a word a single journalist produces anymore – unless they are already disposed to do so, obviously, which is a very different kettle of authorial self-importance to the one journos routinely boil up for their bylines – not because of bad journalism, or #FakeNews, or even Rupert or the ABC…but just because the mode journalism operates in is now fundamentally shot, fundamentally unworkable, fundamentally ersatz. It’s no-one’s fault, it’s just the inevitable consequence of communications technology shift. It’s another case of ‘the middleman’ becoming redundant: we don’t need a weatherman to tell us which way the wind blows now, just as we no longer need a professional Scriv to scratch out our wills. We’re all journalism-literate now.
Journalism as a monetisable ie ‘professional’ gig used to be viable… because it was all we had, and it was a vocational closed shop, a guild – but for banal tech reasons only. We wrote sentences like:
‘…. Instead, political reporting is a running criticism of the political theatre coupled with a meta-analysis of how much the audience is hating the show…’
…because the best mass media technology we had still demanded generalisations just like that – meaningless, really, once stripped of any context or specificity (Which political reporting is all of that, Christopher? All of it? Some of it? Sometimes? Why not name names, link to examples…because you can now, you’ve got the space and the tech)…so much easier to be a (definably capital J) ‘Journalist’ when you ‘had’ to extrapolate the specific to the general, you ‘could only’ universalise individuality into a general ‘narrative’…so journos, bless their little opportunistic frustrated novelist pretensions, shackled themselves to the mass media glamour machinery and appointed themselves, to the brink of fetishisation, as our societal ‘story tellers’ (vomit, vomit).
Fun while it lasted. Great gig. Hugely entertaining, too.
But that’s all over. When it comes to the material world, the non-fiction of our politics, policy, civic administration…as frantically as journos will assure us we somehow still ‘need’ them to make sense of it all, interpret the politicians we ourselves elect back to ourselves…we actually…don’t. We just do not, Leigh Sales and Paul Kelly, so stop telling us we do. Get out of the conversation…because you just get in the way now. You tell us meta-untruths about who we are, by your continued gate-crashing domination of our political conversations alone, even if you’re a good journo. Probably especially if you are a good one.
And of course…most of you aren’t very good. Most of you are just…meh. Wordy fodder. Churn. Noise. And a significant number of you are, of course, toxic, vicious, destructive nihilists with a catastrophically disproportionate leverage.
Don’t you get it yet? Journalism…is done. Its net contribution to humanity is now a solid negative. Put away your keyboards. Turn off your cameras. Shut up. Go home. You’re not wanted here any more. We don’t need your ‘narratives’. We don’t need individuality ‘universalised’, we don’t need specifics generalised and we don’t – oh, please god, please god – need any more self-appointed story tellers to help us engage with our politics, (especially not when they are too-ambitious, artificially self-jaded careerists obsessed most of all with getting a foreign correspondent gig so they can collect a few flak jacket selfies.
Why don’t we need that?
Because the internet lets US go to source. If we want (and if we don’t, which most of us don’t…then what you shovel at us is even less relevant). The internet lets US tell our OUR OWN stories. And our pollies, theirs. We’ll figure them out as we choose. The internet lets the specific STAY specific. It allows this or that or any single detailed story ‘mass circulation’…yet without it being compressed and tweaked and deadened into, usually, the same set of ‘universal’ platitudes journalism churns out (all most hacks are capable of, with their rote formats, their deadlines and tight spaces, their modest writerly talents, their quaking fear of defo suits and D notices and offended advertisers…their utterly cocooned and stunted worldviews…).
An entire workforce eloquently and loudly and relentlessly insisting on its own vital role in society…doesn’t automatically make it so, make it true. Everywhere, professional journos are screeching ever more loudly about how critical ‘journalism’ is to life as we know it…but it’s the sound of those who are terrified not that their trade will disappear and the civilised literate free world will implode….but that journalism will die…and the world won’t. That with the death of this most contrived, faux-‘objective’, self-promoting pantomime of epistemological free loadery, the rest of us will be able to start talking productively and honestly among ourselves again.
Journalism is dead. Hooray. We will all be just fine without it.
Shorter Jack – if all journos vanished off the face of the Earth, would anyone notice, let alone care?
Would it matter?
Yes it would matter. We need them to keep our bureaucrats and pollies in line. Now if Murdoch’s ‘journos’ vanished…
Longer Jack, Shorter Jack…See, AR, we can have both now and no-one gets hurt or needs to care (you wait til you see Really Trying Hard Loooong Jack)…we can have seven billion Jacks every day and still noone gets hurt, huh. Or needs to care.
‘Journalism’ was always a b/s information contrivance, shaped entirely by the banal imperatives of its technical forms. We read the papers and mags and watched/listened to the TV/radio made by ‘professional journos’ solely ‘coz that’s all there was: good, bad, indifferent. That’s all been made politely redundant, now. You can now read good, bad, indifferent Jack – or AR, Klewso, etc – and be just as well (and certainly more diversely) informed.
Also: yep. Quite so. As usual. Trying to ration my dumps to one every six months.
Hope you’re well.
Good points. Exasperating to watch the media pack let politicians get away with dodging the question and hurling red herrings. Since Lateline was abolished by the ABC the only decent forensic interviewing is by Elise Morgan on The Business. I’ll leave Bazza Cassidy alone, Insiders works.
Perhaps political journalists might engage a bit more with citizen bloggers who have a deep interest in a particular problem. I have been blogging for several years about the national disaster which is the National Fire Ant Eradication Program. The program has been a boon to Qld politicians on both sides of politics, at the expense of the public good: $500m of public money wasted so far and the infestation is 10 times worse. My blogs are at http://www.swepson.com.au