Some time ago, I made some observations on the significance of Kevin Rudd and Julia Gillard’s attacks on various News Limited papers, and on The Australian.
The thrust of that commentary was that – the immediate antecedents of the stoush aside – there had been a recognition in Government circles that the damage newspaper campaigns can do is much over-rated, and has significantly diminished with a change in the mediascape. This is often ascribed to the internet, but in fact – as with the misconception of the problems facing print media (which lie more with advertising income than declining sales) – its causes are both more profound and of much longer lineage. It’s more that a tipping point has finally – and belatedly – been reached where perception has caught up with reality.
Over the fold, I’ve excerpted some paragraphs (with permission) from Bernard Keane’s piece on this in today’s Crikey. It’s very much to the point, particularly the comparison with Fox News – rather than the “heart of the nation”, the News Limited flagship actually increasingly operates on a business model where a small minority of hardline partisans get their worldview catered for. Politics – in the sense of the partisan stoushing that dominates political coverage – is the concern of a very small minority of Australian voters. For all the claims about “spin”, Rudd’s message is resonating not because of some particular cleverness in its conceptualisation and execution (though that’s there) but because he’s speaking to a mass electorate using the only mass media available – radio and tv – and speaking to concerns that are real. That needs to be recognised.
The broader context to the feud, however, is that this is a Government which has learnt from and gone well beyond the example John Howard set in his media communication. Howard, who was burnt by the incessantly negative coverage he received from the Press Gallery in his first stint as Opposition Leader, refined the art of going over the heads of the Press Gallery and communicating directly with voters, primarily via AM radio.Rudd has gone much further, embracing any medium that allows him an unfiltered opportunity to convey a tightly-constructed, and highly repetitive, message. FM radio, long essays and light entertainment programs, as well as regular appearances on AM radio programs like Neil Mitchell, are favoured by Rudd. Rudd and his team are focussed on ensuring they control the content of the handful of seconds’ attention most voters give to politics each day — and shape events when voters are fully tuned in.
There’s also the basic media reality that newspapers carry only a fraction of the significance of commercial television news. The Australian sells around 140,000 copies each weekday. The Seven, Nine and Ten network news bulletins, which all use the same Canberra-generated political content no matter where the licensee is located, can offer audiences many multiples of that each night; in Seven’s case, up to 1.4m people on a weeknight.
It was instructive that on the night of Monday 22 June, after the Grech email had been revealed as a fake, Rudd went live on Nine News, and then Today Tonight — another million-plus audience. It gave him a mass audience platform to get out an unfiltered message attacking Turnbull.
Newspapers are influential with other journalists and “inside the beltway” but are no longer a viable means of mass communication for politicians even if they were disposed to use them. They’re a wide-scale boutique media form, a relic from a more literate and less visually-oriented society.
One of the traditional roles of the media in political journalism — in some ways, the entire raison d’etre of the Press Gallery — is to act as intermediaries between politicians and voters. That role is being rendered irrelevant as this Government, even more than its predecessor, pursues a communication strategy in which the Press Gallery is only one of many communication tools and, having a mind of its own, generally not the preferred one.
In that mix, newspapers can offer specific benefits — they can run long-form essays, for example — but don’t even provide a mass audience anymore. Moreover, the audience they deliver, being better-educated and better-informed than most voters, are far less susceptible to spin and propagandising.
It may be that Rudd shares the view of Jeff Blodgett, the Obama campaign director who visited Australia to speak at the ALP National Conference at the end of July. I asked Blodgett about the impact of conservative media. His view was that they simply fulfil their business model, which is to serve a conservative base, and have minimal impact beyond that.
Blodgett had in mind Fox News, but the same reality check applies to The Australian, whose readership is smaller, older, richer, more white-collar and more male than even other newspapers. The Prime Minister may feel having an ongoing feud with a media outlet like that is never going to hurt him.
“a relic from a more literate”
Sorry, stopped reading there.
Seriously though, whatever problems the mainstream press has, it’s not because we’re less literate than we used to be.
Yep, but I think it’s just a poor choice of words by Keane. What he actually means, I’d suggest, is a more print-centric culture.
Interesting that the conclusion is that The Australian can’t hurt him! I’m not so sure I can agree with that!
During the dying years of the Keating govt a colleague of mine, ALP Arts hack type, commenting on the granting of Murdoch even more marketshare of this country’s news laughed at the left-wing objections to this.
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He said: What they don’t realise is if you never get in bed with these guys you won’t get elected. And I though: And if you do?
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I think the News Ltd crew will be undergoing a Spring Clean shortly. I imagine the GFC will prompt Murdoch to rid himself of a layer of overpaid columnists especially considering that they’re out of date. If Rudd persists in his success then News Ltd will adopt a populism freindlier to a Neo-Socialist ethos.
I should add that, whatever one’s opinion of Obama and Rudd, anyone who believes in a free press and a democratic govt should be happy that they have managed to beat the News Ltd crew at public perception politics. It was getting really silly for a while.
hmm I tried to teach a first year journalism unit based around what Bernard Keane is saying about newspapers. The students didn’t like it partially because I can be an asshole, but also because they couldn’t consume the myth of one day being a hardnosed print journalist any longer. If the journalistic function is to survive then it’ll become much more fragmented, working across ‘platforms’.
I also asked a famous media academic about the hegemonic relation between the then-Coalition government and the popularist press, how one served to reproduce the target ‘market’ of the other, what can we do about it. The academic replied that we just have to hope for change or something. It is hard to combat the distributed collective individuation of a population effected by a multi-channel media ecology.
Keithy @3: I agree. All it takes is a damaging scoop of Utegate proportions, But of course, such stories require that endangered species: the investigative journalist. While ever the press hires newswire churnalists, no governemnt is in danger of anything of significance from a newspaper.
Glen @6: If you’re an Aussie, then you can be an arsehole. Leave being an “asshole” to the Americans. They invented the role and cannot be bested in that regard.
yeah, nah, US exchange students. I was an asshole.
Mark B. says:
How does News Ltd’s unanimous spread of Right-liberal pundits differ from the Fairfax presses almost equally monotonous spread of Left-liberal pundits? Both “increasingly operates on a business model where a small minority of hardline partisans get their worldview catered for”.
Much the same can be said for blogs which increasingly act as echo chambers for party line ideological thinking.
No names, no pack drill.
At lunchtime today Malcolm Turnbull was berating Rudd for destroying our relationship with China (yes, he is that desperate). Now comes the biggest energy deal in Australian history:
Australia signs $50b gas deal with China – ABC News (Australian Broadcasting Corporation)
What’s really happening here is that the media (and society too, I suppose, by proxy) have been co-opted into this fantasy that big money deals are good for everyone, and a “win” like this is good for all Australians.
Meanwhile, far away in Venezuela, people are enjoying cheap energy bills as a result of plentiful natural resources.
Why are Australia’s natural resources being flogged off overseas, why are we still paying exorbitant energy costs every quarter, and why are we all cheering on these mammoth sales as if we have any personal stake in the profiteering madness?
The thing about The Australian that particularly grates, is that you don’t have to read it to get force fed its latest talking points – just listen to ABC radio (in particular) and TV news. The Australian is constantly referred to on ABC radio mornings as though it was some sort of oracle, and its journalists the sole communicators of the truth.
And if there’s a way to turn whatever Rudd has done into a negative they’ll find it. This morning the success in apparently avoiding a recession was shown to be a negative because Rudd was displaying ‘triumphalism’ whatever that is. Straight from The Australian I imagine.
gandhi @10 asks: “Why are Australia’s natural resources being flogged off overseas …”
Simple answer: because there is a huge and seemingly limitless market for it at just about whatever price we can set on it. It’s a no brainer to dig up stuff and ship it O/S while ever people keep paying us to. We’ve been doing it with one commodity or another ever since the colony was first settled.
Now, if suddenly nobody wanted anything we could dig up or round up and stick on a ship, then heck, we’d have to become what the rest of the world knows as entrepreneurs and work out smart and useful ways of adding value to that previously shippable raw shit and find new markets.
“why are we still paying exorbitant energy costs every quarter”
See answer above.
Reality is a not the just the domain of the passive centrist majority that lives according to the oracle of mass media but hey at least those people don’t actually have to think for themselves! With a media industry dedicated to entertainment rather than information and ruled by the profit motive Australians, much like their cousins in the US have got buckleys chance of actually knowing what’s really going on. Rudd and Obama are simply products of the established order whose only real agenda is a maintenance of the status quo.
As for the loyalty of the ABC to the Oz, it extends to having Rupe give the 2008 Boyer lectures and Planet Janet does sit on the board of the ABC.
Keithy, a fight with the Australian is never going to kill Rudd. At best, not having a fight with the paper will give his dying government (that is, in a decade’s time) an extra term. But if he fights with it and wins, he can completely discredit their inevitable attack, so he may have that extra term anyway, and save his successor Labor Prime Minister in two decades the trouble. And the only way I can see him losing is in the context of losing the Australian people’s confidence; he’ll have had his two terms and his place in our history books by then (as Australia’s most yellow-bellied PM ever).
In either case, it won’t make a difference until his government’s struggling anyway and that’s not happening for another few terms. (Well, unless he has to start fighting two-fronted elections, fending off the Greens from the Left as well as the Coalition on the Right.)
“As for the loyalty of the ABC to the Oz, it extends to having Rupe give the 2008 Boyer lectures and Planet Janet does sit on the board of the ABC.”
Yeah, the ABC board has been stacked with far too many literary types of late — journos, ex journos, publishers. It fairly reeks of print. Time for a healthy gust of fresh air.
I propose Sam Newman for the next available Board position.
Planet Janet, it should be noted, is on the ABC Board because the Howard Government appointed her. The board’s composition isn’t a decision made by the ABC in any shape or form.
“there had been a recognition in Government circles that the damage newspaper campaigns can do is much over-rated”
Surely that recognition applies specifically to the Australian? (and there, I agree… what an irrelevant closed shop of elitist insiders).
OTOH, the VIC govt wouldn’t scratch their bum without checking how it played with the Herald-Sun first.
The difference? Quite a few people in the electorate read the Hun.
“The board’s composition isn’t a decision made by the ABC in any shape or form.”
Hence my use of the word stacked.
Yep.
I wish I could find the reference, Lefty E, but I recall some research done in Sydney – in about 2004, I think – which showed most readers of the Daily Terror were amused by the beat ups, rather than taking them as gospel.
And let’s not forget all the research on political communication has shown for a long time tv, political advertising and word of mouth are all much more powerful influences on voting and political opinion formation than newspapers.
They’re paper tigers, on the whole, tabloids included.
Even tabloids? That’s good news. But seriously, someone should tell Brumby et al.
I have it on unimpeachably good authority that the VIC cabinet (at least in the Bracks era) were exclusively obsessed with the how they travelled in the Hun.
I can’t see them as being paper tigers: word of mouth comes, largely, from information from the front page.
“political advertising and word of mouth are all much more powerful influences on voting and political opinion formation than newspapers”
I’ve never once been swayed by any form of political advertising to change my voting intention. As far as I’m concerned, political advertising exists to keep the faithful just that.
Do you think perhaps that you might be underestimating the extent to which the newspapers often lead the news cycle or break stories that then go on to influence opinion? That would still allow most people to have their political opinions influenced by word of mouth, or TV, but allow for important sources outside of those media. Take the fake email affair. The story was broken in the newspapers. If it had turned out not to be fake, most people would have received their information from the TV or word of mouth, but the latter two media may have taken their cues from the press. I could think of a lot of other examples where the newspapers have the ability to lead opinion in that way….
… or take creatures like Alan Jones, who take the short cut and lead politicians rather than opinion.
Gerrard, Paul and Miranda would agree with you Jack but I do not.
“..there had been a recognition in Government circles that the damage newspaper campaigns can do is much over-rated, and has significantly diminished with a change in the mediascape.”
I have no reason to disagree with the general thrust of the argument, apart from one neglected element – the last minute beat up. Results may not be influenced by the editorials of newspapers, on the campaign eve, but in a closely fought election a News manufactured bombshell or even a well-timed smear may help the favoured team, almost always conservative, over the line.
And if something is cooked up, strategically, via the newspaper it will inevitably spread through to radio and tv. ABC would normally eat it up as voraciously and uncritically as all the commercial media. Sometimes, later getting the record straight, does not undo the damage already done.
On the subject of ABC Radio National hourly news bulletins just reading off the front page of The Australian, I have tried to find transcripts of these news bulletins, but cannot. They are worthy of continuing analysis and rebuttal, and I for one am up for it. Does anyone know where they are on the ABC website, or is our national broadcaster unwilling to provide public transparency, and unwilling to listen to criticism, on its news broadcasts?
Observant Australianologists will notice that the Oz editorials praise Gillard as often they criticise Rudd, and its political columnists often write that Gillard is waiting for Rudd to slip so that she can slip the knife. Perhaps they think they can get under Rudd’s skin, or more ambitiously, make it happen.
Grace @ 28 In theory the ABC news bulletins come out of a “news system” which is can produce text versions of everything for the web or for print. Around the world most news organisations employ similar technology. However the ABC management probably considers text versions of its TV and Radio bulletins as internal documents meaning not for general public use despite the obvious anomaly that it is paid for by the public and its message is broadcast to the public.
The web end of the ABC news uses these scripts but mostly they are re-written by web editors to fit the web medium, which is one of the justifications for the missing by-lines on the ABC web content.
Its quite likely that continued analysis and rebuttal is intrinsically risky for the ABC in the sense that you, the public, might actually get a better idea about how your ABC shapes the news which in turn might undermine its reputation as an authoritative news source.
Thank you David H. I quite understand the putative “risks” inherent in detailed public analysis of hourly broadcasts. It is the same argument used by bureaucrats the world over to resist FOI legislation, hence the “internal documents” exemption. But these are usually granted only on the basis that they are “policy development” documents, containing unformed or speculative thinking, or have privacy implications, somewhat different to a public broadcast in my view. More likely, the argument would be that hourly broadcasts will inevitably contain mistakes of fact, for which the broadcaster should not be crucified, and with that I agree. My concern is with slant, tone, selectivity etc (and even grammar) for which the broadcaster should be publicly responsible and able to weather constructive criticism, and thence better able to fulfil its duty to deliver “authoritative news”. Right now, after a decade or more of right-wing assault on that authority, the ABC is failing badly, in my view.
Sam@29, I thought the angle was that Julie would take over the top job here once power hungry Kev moved on a position as head of the whole world at the U.N.
But I think it depends on who is making up the bullshit on which day.
@24 – LO, the research is incredibly consistent.
Yes, newspapers can set the news cycle going, but the points Keane makes about responding and reshaping it via essentially unmediated communication are salient.
Less mediated, I should say.
Ie when Rudd pops up on the commercial tv news, he gets to put his point across with much less editorial framing.
During elections, I always make a point of watching, say, the Channel 10 news. You get a much better read on which messages are actually getting out.
The Oz has had a series of dishonest headlines of late and starting from last week it seemed to be merely writing headlines that could be used in question time by the Libs.
As a result, question time became a sad procession of lame questions from Turnbull down on taxing the family home and dredging up quotes by Tanner on something he wrote 15 years ago. It was pathetic. As Tanner said if this is the best they can come up with the Government will sleep easy.
Today’s Oz has another dishonest headline
Experts reveal stimulus doubts. When you read the story they do nothing of the sort. They agree that when the government brought in it stimulus package we were staring at a smoking ruin of a world economy and the pulled all the right levers.
Now if things are getting better then maybe the package was too big. But has all the money been spent? probably not and the latest Gorgon deal shows how a few deals gets the ship back on track. The Oz can be the best paper in the country when it wants to be,. Its stuff on indigenous housing in NT is first class. But the ego maniacal behaviour of its editor in chief who thinks his role in life is to run the country and attack people who don’t do his bidding ruins the paper.
His personality is encapsulated in Cut and Paste and the toxic waste dump that is their op ed page. Have a look at Cut and Paste today and ask yourself what is meant by the first two items. To me it seems to be saying Paul McGeough is being subversive by report truthfully what is going on in Afghanistan and is a supporter of the Taliban.
I wouldn’t write off the low figures for the Australian. As the Town Hell meetings in the US shows, it’s not about the ammmount of voters, it’s about the right type of voters.
A small numbers of voters can shift government given the right policy lever.
Just to add a little to my post @31 and in further response to David H above, I am not suggesting that the ABC publish “bylines” for its news broadcasts. I am more than happy for the newsrooms to remain anonymous collectives, just like the public service, otherwise we would be setting up personalised targets, and that would be far from appropriate.
But let’s just admit that anyone with the time and technology could easily tape and transcribe the hourly broadcasts. My question remains, why can’t the ABC simply provide this as a public service on its website…
I would like the opportunity to test my own hypothesis, through a weekly scan of the transcipts, that the ABC newsroom has changed signficantly over the past decade for the worse, and it is no longer the authoratitive news source that we once respected and cherished.
Where once it was robustly sceptical, informed and educated, it is now limp, silly, and rolling around looking for “balance” where none can be found. Hence the bland repetition of a government media release followed by some nasty nonsensical and negative soundbite from the opposition, or the selection of news items from the front page of The Australian, whatever has got Chris Mitchell’s knickers in a knot that morning, when other significant news is entirely ignored, the oxygen stealing non-news about the latest train crash in argentina, followed by acres of football and cricket, and reams of financial blather.
At least the weather is interesting, and at the moment that is the only authoritative news worth listening to.
This was a lurk I really enjoyed. Got nothing to say though. Seems youse have all said it.
A silly meme promoted by the less reality-linked anti-Labor mob back in 2007 was that a vote for Kevvie was actually a vote for Julia. Rudd was just a frontman for the dreaded unions went the loopy rationale of the usual suspects who purported to understand what was REALLY going on, and the unions would get rid of Rudd as soon as he won office so Julia could get on with the business of converting Australia into the new Cuba.
It’s quite natural for the freaks at News Ltd to keep on with the same derangement, especially the ones who were convinced they could somehow manoeuvre Costello into the Liberal leadership. If you’ve spent years suffering under the delusion that you are the ones who really determine what happens in Canberra, you’re unlikely to be bothered by anything that happens in the real world.
From the perspective of personal self-image, taking into account their huge egos, you can understand why the prospect of their newspaper’s demise would fill the News Ltd hacks with such horror. Where on earth would they find any kind of job at all, let alone one that got them on the TV occasionally? No wonder they are in a state of total denialism.
Socratease said:
F**k that!
Warnie!
Grace, regarding your question about the ABC, there are no transcripts that I can find but you are welcome to make complaints as I have done and wait about a month for a detailed non-answer.
I also complained directly to mornings host Deborah Cameron requesting that she correct a statement made by Michael Brissenden quoting from a front page report on The Australian as fact, which was later found to be incorrect. I got a polite and cheerful response but the correction was never made.
So like hundreds of other lies told by The Australian and passed of as factual by the ABC, it was allowed to stand.
Speaking of the weather, maybe I’m getting paranoid (who me?) but on the radio the only seem to mention above/below average figures when the temp is below average!
Ah so adrian, you have been there and done that, thanks for letting me know.
Perhaps this is one for the tertiary sector to pursue in union. Surely those teaching journalism could swing some lead to get the ABC to publish their own transcripts…
Re the weather, I find it absolutely rivetting, but must admit I pay most attention to the television bulletin in the evening for the full glorious coverage, with our very own completely loopy but very loveable weatherman here in Canberra, Mark Carmody, who wears a fresh flower in his lapel every night, and gives a full botanical run-down on its merits, and always manages to totally discombobulate Virginia Hausseger, bless him.
And speaking of Julia Gillard, who the News Ltd hacks simply cannot deal with intelligently (she is a woman after all), I watched Burn Before Reading again last night on DVD (I just love watching Brad Pitt getting shot point blank), and there she was! Limited News’s worst nightmare! Tilda Swinton with red hair, sharp features, and a confident air! Yikes, its the Red Fox!!!
Dear Grace,
Julia is funnier than Tilda Swinton. And poor old Brad; he was hysterical in that movie.
If you watch Julia in question time she rarely gets a question and the opposition rarely interject on her. Tony Abbott is in awe of her and you see her eyes light up when she gets Pyne in her sights.
She is the best debater in the house I think it was a pity she was off on that junket to Israel during utegate. Would have loved to have seen that one. I always feel safer when Ruddy is off overseas and Julia is in charge.
Me too, DC
See comments @ 44 and 45 for OMG IT’S TRUE TEH LEFT REALLY DOES INTEND TO REPLACE RUDD WITH GILLARD!!!
Yuk yuk, you mean you don’t believe it will happen Ken?
Oh and DC, yes, Brad Pitt is truly hilarious in Burn After Reading, his best evah role. Next starring role is as Mayor of New Orleans, that should be good.
Yes, Burn after Reading was a lot of fun, particularly when I realised I was listening to The Fugs for the first time in nearly 40 years as the credits rolled past.
I’m no fan of the OO and its right-wing bias. But it annoys me that I can’t find an American national newspaper – just a collection of state-based newspapers that fail to convey a sense of the national discussion. We have one here and, for all its faults, I hope it survives.
The Australian conveys a sense of national discusion? I don’t think so unless it’s a discussion taking place in a cubicle.
Isn’t Ken (46) wonderful thinking teh left can make St Julia PM?
If he understood who Durutti was he would know we have no such aspirations. We are incapable of pulling something like that off. It will be the right who elevate St Julia while the left sits on the sideline shit canning her and then splitting into sixteen different factions each trying to elect an unelectable candidate.
Socratease @12: “It’s a no brainer to dig up stuff and ship it O/S while ever people keep paying us to. We’ve been doing it with one commodity or another ever since the colony was first settled.
Now, if suddenly nobody wanted anything … we’d have to become what the rest of the world knows as entrepreneurs and work out smart and useful ways of adding value…”
Totally agree with you.
The second comment sent me off on a related tangent – the second-rate technology that we pay others to operate here, namely our car industry.
Has anyone else noticed that Rudd (i.e. Australian taxpayers) paid Toyota to make hybrid Camry’s in Australia from 2010 using superceded battery technology (Nickel-based), while they will be making their hybrid Prius’s from 2010 using the latest battery technology (Lithium-based).
Which would you buy, assuming they are a similar price – old inferior technology or new technology? Good for the Japanese – maximum return on their R&D investments into that older technology, while maintaining their national competitive advantage with the new technology.
Looks like Rudd paid for the cast-offs. Don’t you just love Aussies being taken for suckers?
As i get older my eyesight produces some very telling freudian slips – to wit, i read ‘hardline partisans’ in Mark’s post as ‘hardline parasites’! I wonder if this happens to others.
Absolutely Elise,
It is the usual story about the ‘clever’ country, all the way on coals/gas back to become a Nation of Crazy Clarks shoppers. Strange the Oz is not picking up the theme to clobber Rudd for his penchant to mediocrity for political gain. Oh well…
Agree with Jenny, it would be nice to have a national paper. I’ve given up on the Oz though, for low relevance to dead trees ratio.
Absolutely, Matilda, and some of them are even funnier.
Yep!
Sam@29: My take is they can’t pin anything on Julia or Kev and the aforementioned drama is all they can do with it…. I don’t see Julia slipping a knife at all as I’m sure she will get her chance in term 3 or 4 if she wants it. The point being that the only way is up for this rock solid looking relationship the more the media mention anything about it. Julia may be asked to delay her ambitions until term 5 or 6 depending on whether Kev holds his popularity this long or what but I think she recognises the good wicket that needs no hasty shots to be played off of it at this point in time!
Re Cut and Paste and Paul McGeough, I seem to recall the print version being different to what’s on the web.
I do wonder if Fox News have managed to have more influence then this piece implies, especially on the health care debate over there. The town hall yelling has been to Hannity and Beck’s talking points and has bled into network news and the political centre as a result. I suspect Mr Blodgett was a little less cocky when he got home and caught up on the US news.