In politics it’s dangerous to be caught changing your mind in public. In political reporting, it can be more dangerous still. Over this past weekend, we’ve watched Australia’s commentariat grapple with the fact that the two absolute certainties it brought to the campaign are turning out dead wrong.
Pre-election, the groupthink of Australia’s political press corps revolved around two immutable beliefs: Morrison? Master campaigner with an almost magical ability to divine the narrow goat track to victory; Albanese? Nice guy, but not really up to it, is he?
It’s taken five weeks of campaigning for the first handful of commentators to wonder why those beliefs have crashed into the stubborn refusal of polling to demonstrate that the Australian people agree.
Those beliefs delivered the traditional media’s campaign a bad start. The first-week “gaffe” by Albanese, “pounced on” by Morrison, gained traction because it reinforced everything the press corps thought they knew about the two men.
They brought the same “gaffe-pounce” narrative to the real wages debate this past week, at least until it was brought up short by a more permanent campaign truism: never get in the way of voters and a pot of money.
Nine media has given air to appalling transphobia dog whistles out of a conviction, encouraged no doubt by the Prime Minister’s Office, that master campaigner Morrison sees something in the electorate’s inner psyche that ordinary mortals miss.
The beliefs — and the failures of reporting they’ve generated — demonstrate just how deep System 1 thinking has penetrated journalism. Identified by Nobel Prize-winning economist Daniel Kahneman, System 1 thinking is what we all usually do: instantaneous thought shaped by instinct and prior learning. (As distinct from the more deeply thoughtful System 2, which is what we think we all do.)
At its best, it’s the skill of pattern recognition that journalists bring to new events to power necessarily quick news judgment for a fast-moving news cycle. At its worst, it’s seeing what you expect to see. When you expect the “gaffe-pounce” dynamic, it’s irresistible to hurry it along with gotcha questions and prodded responses.
In the AFR on Friday, Phil Coorey’s weekly column demonstrated that even some of the best gallery analysts can be trapped in “gaffe-pounce” thinking: “By any objective assessment, Albanese has had a poor campaign … Apart from his period in isolation, he has pretty much averaged a gaffe per week, but the polls have stayed solid. By comparison, Morrison has campaigned well in that he has been disciplined and relentlessly on-message.”
Those pesky voters! Good news: Bertolt Brecht has The Solution:
… Would it not be easier
In that case for the government
To dissolve the people
And elect another?
So far, the commentariat is readier to jettison its confidence in Morrison’s skills than admit it was wrong about Albanese.
In The Australian on the weekend, Paul Kelly asked in a headline: “The Albo experiment: is he up to the job?”, answering deep in the text with a tentative: “Maybe.” The paper’s foreign policy guru, Greg Sheridan, grumbled that he guessed Albo would be OK, probably better than Labor leader Doc Evatt was in the 1950s. High praise, by Oz standards.
The failure of this entrenched narrative was not (or not only) that it misjudged the two men. It missed the fundamental changes within the media environment in which this election happens to fall.
Hurried on by the pandemic, the media mix — traditional, digital, social — has changed so radically that this election is dramatically different from 2019, fought in the last days of linear free-to-air television mixed with peak Facebook.
This election, it’s a far more contested media space. Facebook is a more discredited and age-constrained platform (and algorithmically hostile to political news). Linear television has ceded ground to streaming.
Political news now comes all jumbled up across new digital media (including youth-focused media), TikTok, YouTube, WeChat, Instagram, Twitter. In his defence of Nine’s “The Great Debate”, Chris Uhlmann (usually a social media critic) revealed just how legacy linear television has become: “YouTube accounts hit 814,000 engagements, Facebook, 1.2 million views and 250,000 views on Twitter.”
The then largely unknown Morrison persona worked in the media environment of 2019. Albanese has built a career out of being underestimated. His more humble, more scaled-back persona seems a better fit for campaigning today.
Not sure why you have described Phil Coorey as one of the best gallery analysts, he is just a has been right wing hack
Beat me to it. Mumbling Phil is one of the most shallow and blatant LNP-supporting hacks going (breaking news: Morrison caught lying again about corrupt government rorts, submarines and Christmas holidays – ‘storm in a teacup’, says Phil Coorey), just the type to get gigs on ABC programs, as he does too frequently on Insiders and RN Breakfast. He’s really a fool, as demonstrated by Chris Warren’s quote.
Beat me to it too. He is just a hack. Remember when he got the numbers wrong way back when Gillard was PM and facing Rudd challenges? Think his sources are not up to scratch.
Spot on Amark. Apart from the stellar contributions from the likes of Keane, Mayne, Rundle, Dyer and others, I am often taken aback by the apparent shallow knowledge base from some Crikey writers. I might be overly anal, but to write for this political journal, Crikey writers should know the political landscape and those that toil in it like the back of their hand. And certainly know the mindset of their competing journalists across the void. The small throw away line that you mention here is a good example because it is stated as absolute fact. Well I disagree with this writer’s glib assertion and I see many other readers do also. For me it calls into question the value of the article..
Spot on, Christopher. I am still waiting for a paid pundit to state the bleeding obvious: that Morrison’s choice of a six week campaign gave him maximum time to demonstrate his nasty, calculating character. Genius indeed.
I thought Karvelas spoke for the media, pretty well, the morning the election was called – chairing Insiders she just about went orgasmic about how she loves an election :- they don’t have to think, they can just go onto automatic, and bring all their “experience” to bear, telling the rubes what’s going on?
Unfortunately more of us rubes are a bit smarter than the ms/views-media are wont to credit.
Well I never!
It always seemed to me that the “Media” ALWAYS felt they could dictate the election results.
They control the information received by the masses, then condition it using the sage and informed Seers, called columnists.
This is then repeated ad-nauseum at their Master’s ( the owner’s ) behest. To achieve the desired result.
“The Media” seem to get very unsettled and angry when this system does not work.
Thanks Christopher. The world has changed. I used to have to write letters to newspapers to try to inform the opinion writers. These days I can jump on to Twitter, Facebook or Instagram and, lo and behold, sometimes I get their attention. Didn’t seem to happen much in the old days. Journalists need to come to the realisation that they no longer control the message. Hopefully, after a period of introspection they will come to appreciate that we do need them to report, we do enjoy their analysis but we will expect them to operate in a professional, unbiased manner.