The recent media focus on the toxic male culture of Parliament House has demonstrated something remarkable in the press gallery: the A-team is overwhelmingly women. This A-team is changing what gets considered “news” and how news events get hammered out as the political narrative.
It’s caught the government by surprise. The old tactics just don’t work; whether it’s dismissing unfortunate “one-off” events, hiding behind the “no one told me” defence, or even playing the “as a father” gambit.
The narrative is now out of their control. This is a broad-ranging critique in how patriarchy works in Australia’s parliament and elected government. As women, the members of the press gallery A-team can bring their own lived experiences to the story. And they’re not buying the lines fed out by the boys in the government.
This shift matters. It matters how the press gallery acts or reacts to the political agenda. It shapes the nationwide news agenda.
Not so long ago, news stories like Brittany Higgins’ rape allegation would have been simply treated as a story about a crime — not a story about politics and culture in their deepest sense. It’s deplorable, sure, but it would fall too far outside the personal understanding of the gallery’s male opinion makers to be fitted comfortably into the news narrative of the moment.
There’s still a bit of a shrugging “leave it to the coppers” (safely ignoring that only one in 10 complaints results in a conviction). That was Morrison’s messaging before his “Jenny and I spoke last night” epiphany. But it’s a message that’s out of sort with the gallery leaders’ experience and understanding of sexism in workplace cultures.
Gallery leaders set the agenda, break the news and influence opinions. They scare politicians.
While there are still some blokes in the current A-team (and not just out of affirmative action!), the gallery leaders and rising stars are now predominantly women, largely working in digital and new media or the ABC.
With apologies for oversight, this includes journalists like news.com.au’s Samantha Maiden; Katharine Murphy and Amy Remeikis at Guardian Australia; Ten’s Tegan George; Karen Middleton from The Saturday Paper; Michelle Grattan from The Conversation; and Laura Tingle, Patricia Karvelas and Shalailah Medhora from the ABC.
You can see it on Insiders. When the panel features the A-team, it can sparkle. When not, well… not so much.
Partly, this reflects a broader trend in journalism. A longitudinal study of the journalism jobs crisis in Australia published last week found that a majority of working journalists are now women. (Of course, management remains overwhelmingly male and pay inequities endure.)
Newsrooms have changed dramatically. Just 20 years ago, only a third of journalists were women and they were likely to be excluded from high-status rounds like politics (although plenty of the current influencers have spent decades building their skills). This discrimination endured even though most new starters in the industry — as cadets, as students — have been women since the late 1960s.
Graph journalists (or any profession) by ability on a Gaussian normal distribution curve and you’ll see women are more likely to fall right of the average than men. Structured discrimination means women just have to be better to do as well as their male counterparts.
This experience means that just about all journalists see the overwhelmingly male-ness of the post-2013 governments — along with politicians’ apparent blindness to that culture — as, well, odd.
And this is why Morrison works so hard to bypass the gallery leaders. He uses his own personal photographer to build his daggy dad schtick on social media. When he wants to be interviewed, he’s more likely to be offered up to Sky after dark’s Paul Murray than, say, Leigh Sales. Why would he want clips shaped by the ABC’s social team rather than the more supportive News Corp?
He avoids the A-team. As Katharine Murphy reported on the weekend, his press conferences are marked by “smug silence and dogged stonewalling”.
In the midst of a workplace culture crisis, that smug silence clearly isn’t going to cut it anymore.
If you or someone you know is impacted by sexual assault or violence, call 1800RESPECT on 1800 737 732 or visit 1800RESPECT.org.au.
Oh Christopher, if only the A team was not just female, but also determined and effective. The fact is that for years this sleazy, corrupt, secretive government has had cheerleaders rather than independent journalists in the press gallery. As soon as journalists start to get too inquisitive they’re gone. Yes, there have been a few brave souls but most reporters are more interested in maintaining relationships with the movers-and-shakers than rocking the boat.
Andrew Elder has quite a lot to say about the insideriness of insiders in the Press Gallery.
https://twitter.com/awelder
Kerry O’Brien, Barrie Cassidy, Tony Jones, Emma Alberici. All paid the ultimate price for hard questioning the Liberals. Emma’s crime? Alberici wrote a news story for the ABC website stating evidence that only 1 in 5 large companies pay Australian tax. A crime that was worthy of dismissal.
Bit surprised to see Michelle Grattan in the list. Never had a good word for PM Julia Gillard.
Both Laura Tingle and Katharine Murphy have written informative Quarterly Essays in the last year. And when she was reporting on what Jen had advised the PM on how to view the Brittany Higgins case, Laura did drop in a telling photo of another man’s two young Australian-born daughters – Tharunicaa and Kopika Murugappan who have been held on Christmas Island for 1,100 days.
Plenty of evidence of an A-team of women journalists for those who have been watching carefully.
Grattan is a dinosaur and Murphy is her student. Both are more obsessed with how things “play” than any substantial discussion of how we are governed.
How many of this “A-team” have been cheerleaders for this and other Coalition governments in the past -> leading those politicians to think they could get away with most anything; rather than calling them out and to account when they should have?
Maiden was in that Murdoch front line doing PR for the Limited News Party. Smethurst similarly, ’til she happened on that scoop that ended up with her treated like “normal” media.
That “Yes the LNP has been caught out : but remember what Labor has done similarly, or worse….” mitigation of Coalition embarrassment; with no reciprocal recollection of LNP transgressions when Labor is caught short – leaving them to swing on the breeze.
The boundaries that remain – so that access to their “sources” is maintained.
Does anyone point to the history of certain women in parliament – eg Cash and her “Chalice of Blood”?
Bishop?
All you hear about “St Julia of the Banks” is how good she was – never about how she condemned the poor, when she said she could happily live on welfare?
That roll call at the “Ditch the Witch” rally?
McKenzie?
Those that can stand toe to toe with men when it comes to dishing the bad behaviour?
How many will go back to their old ways of barracking for the Coalition, when this is past and the election is called?
This is what the press gallery should have been doing all along – without fear or favour. That a large lump (of both sexes) has failed (preferring instead to lead with their own politics and prejudices) to do that, is a condemnation of their actions.
Look at the ABC nowadays.
[Insiders “A-team sparkle”? Rosie Lewis? Hewett? Costello apologist and devotee Savva? Viellaris? Put Crabb in front of Turnbull and you’ve got an overheated marshmallow.]
The Insiders has become a Murdoch podcast.
The weasels and stoats have taken over Toad Hall.
Watching Spivsy flit around the set where he had a Labor politician land – trying to catch a Gotcha!, with his butterfly net.
Yesterday they were going on about “poor Nicole Flint” – ‘copping it from social media, Extinction Rebellion, GetUp! and Mike Carlton’? No one, no one reflected on what Gillard had to put up with from the Abbott government, the Murdoch press and it’s shock-jock dependents up?
Including “Ditch the Witch” – if Flint had been in parliament then would she have passed up the opportunity, to attend with the rest of Abbott’s rabbit rabble?
No one countenanced the possibility that part of the Reynold’s breakdown might be down to the way Morrison had thrown her under that bus – that perhaps he knew a bit more than he was letting on : while letting her carry that “night-soil” can?
And Lewis running with the government’s line of “$1100/week JobKeeper was a disincentive to work” – early in Covid when jobs were being shed on the industrial size they were?
“… industrial scale ….”
And no one commented on the m.o. of Murdoch’s press, that, rather than have his “men” accused of “misogyny” – they (were?) held back to let his own “Sisterhood of the Chalice of Blood” tear her to pieces, with gusto, from dress sense and anything else they could get their teeth into.
That’s vs Gillard of course.
Surely the Australian nation’s Attorney General could advise the Prime Minister of Australia on this matter ?
Morrison is guided by Christian values.
What age is the attorney general?
Born 1970.
Imagine his disappointment if he’d ever hoped to be Prime Minister by 50, then.
I wish every female journalist could preface questions to all the cabinet ministers with “are you the alleged rapist “.
In the case of all of them admitting to the event how it differ to no one admitting to the event ?
You really think they’d admit to rape.
In the same way as admitting to the Whitechapple murders.
Yes. I also meant to say “alleged rape”. They would all have to stand aside if they all owned up to it and that wouldn’t work either. What a sorry state of affairs.