Why is most of the news out of Canberra these days reporting on the danse macabre of Brendan and the Walking Dead, when we actually have a government that like, does stuff (or so I’ve heard), and which the newspapers are supposedly there to investigate and report on?
Murdoch and Fairfax are able to report at length on the fascinating intricacies of inter-office emails between senior members of the not-government, and whether said members of the not-government support a not-policy that will be not-implemented some time in the next 3 years. But we basically have no idea what’s being cooked up for the $40 billion of our money that’s been earmarked for various ‘future funds’, what’s in store for superannuation, corporate taxation, state-Federal relations, and so on.
Not a clue. Not a whiff even of speculation. Just…silence.
Are the press gallery off the drip-feed? Were they so cosy with the Libs that they forgot to ask Rudd for his telephone number? Are they disinterested in finding out any of the important stuff, or have they lost the ability to distinguish what is important any longer?
Anyone have a pet theory?
Ruddkin: Everybody be cool. This is a new Government.
Honey Swannie: Any one of you pricks leak, and I’ll execute every motherfucking last one of you…
Schadenfreude?
My pet theory: the journos who made their name in the Howard years ought to think about retirement, too. Another lot of fresh faces will turn up, encouraged by insider contacts or flirtations with politics (journalism and politics are linked by public relations skills) and then you’ll see some serious reporting. Milne et. al. will just have to become hands-off meta commentators like Laurie Oakes or public fools like Ray Martin and leave the real reporting to a new generation.
To defend the journalists for a minute, I suspect part of the problem is that Labor aren’t leaking much yet. I’m very surprised the solar panel thing wasn’t leaked in the hope of killing it pre-Budget, for instance.
What happened to things like FOI, cultivating sources in the bureaucracy and business and interest groups, pouring over the enormous amount of information publicly available, asking searching questions of press secretaries, etc? Admittedly, it might be much more difficult to get a “scoop” on the budget, but Mercurius is also talking about the general business of day to day government. Don’t journalists have other techniques for finding news than waiting for leaks?
I suspect it’s a bit like watching a train wreck, too. You know you shouldn’t but the whole anguished horror slowly unfolds before your very eyes, and it’s compulsive viewing.
Possible reasons
a) train wreck, as skepticlawyer said
b) announcements of inquiries and talkfests may not give much meat to dissect [but I'd like to see a dissection of the current TAX system, how it's changed since 1970 (say), what effects the Asprey Inquiry (circa 1974) had - if any]
c) laziness
d) editors looking for “human interest”/ celebrity/ TV / fashion angles?
e) lack of contacts
f) lack of imagination
g) ALP MP’s, Ministers much more disciplined than in the past {under the Blessed Gough, Ministers rolled in Cabinet sometimes tried to whip up support in Caucus to get a decision reversed: leaking on the scale of golf course sprinklers}
h) public servants still in awe, not leaking yet?
i) or public servants jockeying for favours
But I agree, it’s been a dull NEWS year so far.
OTOH plenty of cheap laughs from the Coalition of the Willing: some of them getting very willing indeed.
Hard to pick a winner, but the anti-Ted Baillieu website has to be a finalist.
With trite comments, Kevin postions the ALP carefully for the Gippsland byelection: http://www.theage.com.au/articles/2008/05/21/1211182847252.html
With “embedded journalism” you get this result, eventually, Mercurius.
And why, given the choice of a backbencher who will be there for the long haul and actually has some power and a has been like Alexander, do they always plump for Alexander??
Why interview backbenchers at all?
I don’t remember the airways post Keating overflowing with interviews of former Ministers, but perhaps my memory is faulty.
It SEEMS like habit – the mobile phone number under ‘Foreign Affairs’ is still set to Alex’s number and noone’s got around to changing that.
I would also think that Rudd isn’t encouraging anyone to rectify the situation, either.
I’m with skepticlawyer.
Road accidents are always so much more fascinating than road works.
It is the spectacle of the kill that seems to inflame journalistic passions. I am sure that they’d like to think that they were part of the hunting party snaring the prey. The fact that all of this is far easier to report upon than all those damnable numbers and ideas!
Watergate has a lot to answer for!
Pissweak lazy journalists.
It’s that simple.
There are plenty of big things in the works in Canberra. Some departments were given 1 month or 3 months from the date of the elections; others were given 6 months from the start of sitting this year.
I understand the government knew they were in a holding pattern until rates peak within days of the election, hence the focus on the second half of this year.
As per the Possum theory of Rudd government, the decisions and actions will go unnoticed unless the journos start talking to people instead of waiting for a ministerial presser
They think the Libs are still in Government?
Maybe the journos still haven’t accepted the fact that the Rodent is an ex-Rodent. Never again will he muscle up to the bars after a long squeak! Ha! Ha! Ha! The Rodent King is dead, long may he stay that way! (Grabs arm and slinks off, stage left.)
“Don’t journalists have other techniques for finding news than waiting for leaks?”
Sure, they have plenty of other techniques. The main ones are copying and pasting press releases and stories from news feeds. Then there are the investigative techniques like asking each other what they think about the stories, or asking politicians what they think about the stories, or writing stories that are purely speculative and then asking each other what they think about the speculation.
Hell, reporters are regular bloodhounds.
There was a bloke on last night’s ‘7.30 Report’ with a story from the centre of the China earthquake. It took me a while to realise he was actually reporting news, just like in the old days. No spin about the problems the earthquake had created for the Chinese government or the implications for the US presidential campaign … just straight reporting of what had happened.
I turned it off. Boring as.
17 haaaaaa!
Saw the same thing. We in my house assumed he’s got a Walkley sewn up for that.
Couldn’t they just have asked a Chinese citizen to turn on their web cam and shown that?
Ken,
yes, soooo old-fashioned.
I think he was the same chap I heard on ABC radio yesterday. He said in the hardest-hit area, a very young Chinese girl approached his cameraman, and offered him a packet of 2-minute noodles. Touching indeed. A human story, told quietly and directly. Parents burning the clothing of their dead children on the banks of the river, before departing.
The “spin” story seems to be that after 1 week of open reporting, the head of Xinhua Newsagency read the riot act, and coverage in China has now become bland and happy.
(Like in Canberra, except they didn’t require to be chastised by Xinhua. It just came naturally to our Aussie jokers.)
Ken @ 16, absolutely bollocking spot on, in a laugh-out-loud-then-sober-up-and-cry kind of way.
Corrections department: Ken @ 17, I meant.
I think Ken & onimod just about nailed it. Add “dumbing down” of the media during Howard’s reign, and that the Pætorian Guard was much closer to an hysterical teenage fan club than genuine journalists. I’d also add that I’m sure almost all of them really felt that, no matter what opinion & vox pop in shopping centres, trains, trams etc said, Howard was going to pull off Election 2007. Think how many workplaces, clubs & friendship groups has sweepstakes / “Calcuttas” & the like running on what gimmick / scare / incident Howard & the Libs would pull – BTW, did anyone anywhere tip the Lindsay Caper? Pro-Howard media, journos & “colour writers” didn’t bother cultivating the ALP, because they thought it would stay irrelevantly in Opposition.
“In denial” applies more widely than the demise of Dear Leader and Dear Party; it encompasses the whole context of new media. With most of the world’s newspapers on-line, the savvy, the well-educated, the political junkies – and students, from kids doing primary-school projects to postGrads, read from “papers” around the world. Even ABC’s venerable Peter Crundall says he starts the day by reading the world’s papers on-line, and in this regard, he’s not even an unusual member of generations brought up on “papers”. Dennis Shanahan’s first post on Rudd’s European trip was hilariously inaccurate; and for over a day (but mostly two or more) no MSM reporter picked up on the kudos Rudd gained by insisting that Chinese Torch Relay guards would be kept under control, their roles limited to Torch Relighting. It was all over the blogsphere before bone-lazy MSM journos travelling with the PM reacted. I admit to having a ball saying so (with quotations & URLs) in numerous “comment” spaces. DOH!
A decade ago, state broadsheets were still dedicated to Serious News; today, only The Age & SMH try to be. TheOz sold its soul to brown-nosing Howard, & Tom Switzer turned good critical-investigative journalism into “OpEd” pro-Howard gush. Over that decade, the WWW grew from a seedling just rising from the frustration of making coffee while one’s computer saved a few pages and coding in frustrating HTML to today’s Blogs, Boards & multi-media YouTube & streaming (if, that is, one has fast broadband) while paper journalism dumbed down into tabloid gush. Janet A, Piers A, Bolt, Blair, Milne, Overington, etc etc are not journalists, not even hacks; they’re not even the print equivalent of “Shock Jocks”. At best they’re Vanity Opinionists.
If I want journalism – or to know what (besides celebrity gossip)is happening beyond these shores – I click on my fave UK, USA etc on-line papers (oh to have an Oz paper with journos of the calibre, but not necessarily the political stance, of The Independent’s). I also click on ABC’s “Unleashed”, with its broad sweep of writers, opinions and interactive comments; but I spend most time on blogs like this, New Matilda, Blogocracy, OzForums and so many others – usually to browse, sometimes to post, occasionally to have a good argument. The journalism is usually what good journalism should be; the comments range from stimulating & incisive, through inane & rabid troll, to wonderfully funny.
Thanks for a stimulating challenge, mercurius! Long may ye STIR!
Why would Labor feed any of these buzzards anything except their own entrails