A weekly look at media spin tactics. Given the hung parliament, there’s plenty of spin being given a run right now! The non-election spin doesn’t stop for the campaign period, either.
So, as usual: what stories did various PR people tried to bury in the tail end of the news cycle before this last weekend? What are they hoping that we won’t talk about this week because it’s old news now? Let’s give those stories some oxygen, link to blogs discussing them, and reanimate their shambling zombie corpses.
Also: what stories are the headpieces stuffed with straw spinning for us first thing this week, and what particular advantage do they hope to gain thereby? i.e. is it just about winning the news cycle for this week only or is a longer play building strategic momentum?
em>N.B. please stay on topic – this thread is for holding up a mirror to the tactics of the spinning Hollow Men. Breaking news stories and/or policy debates based on them should generally be discussed in the latest open thread or roundtable if there is no post dedicated to the topic.
The Murdoch press is running with headlines such as
• ‘Labor too divided to govern’
• Gillard asks independents to save govt
• Libs back from dead
Lenore Taylor in the SMH: Labor needs to face the fact that its position is down to an endemic weakness
SMH Editorial – The message is clear: stop all the spin
Let’s assume Labour wins 72 seats and LNP 73.
If Julia manages to cobble together a government with the green and independent, expect the Murdoch Press to cry foul . They want their hardnove liberal Abbott as PM , they’ve been working hard at it!
IMHO, Julia should not press too hard to remain as PM. She should just step back, run a strong opposition and watch Abbott self distruct. You can rely on his blunders and lack of negotiating skills to just do that. On top of that, he will soon be frustrated by the Senate and hopefully the Australian public will open their eyes!
Letting Abbott run with the ball is a very bad idea. Once he gets frustrated enough by the Labor/Green Senate he will go straight to a double dissolution. In the meantime the Murdoch press will have been softening up the public with horror headlines about the evil of the Greens and the economic malevolence of Labor. Abbott would win in a romp.
If you don’t think that this will work just remember Rudd lost his job because people were convinced by a fairly basic propaganda campaign that taxing mining company superprofits and using the money to give tax cuts to everybody else would induce economic catastrophe.
If you can sell that you can sell anything.
Graham
I get your point. So you think Julia could turn the situation around if she ran a minority government? Wouldn’t it be worse with the Murdoch ptress trying to convince people they have been robbed of their “legitimate ” representation?
I expect Murdoch and Abbott wont stop undermining the ALP until they govern for the billionaires
I think Abbott will hang on with a similar tenacity to hoWARd
Let’s assume Labour wins 72 seats and LNP 73.
I for one would like people – the media in particular – to stop counting Tony Crook as a win for the Coalition. He defeated a member of the Coalition (Wilson Bloody Tuckey, woohoo!). NationalsWA are not in a coalition with the Liberals, or part of the Nationals. He says he’ll sit on the cross benches. Even if he ends up supporting a minority Coalition government, they lost O’Connor and it should not be added to their total as a Coalition seat thereby slightly bumping up their legitimacy as a possible government.
There are four independents (unless Wilkie doesn’t actually win), 1 Green, and 1 NationalsWA in the parliament, and the LibNats and Labor divide up the rest. People should stop pretending otherwise.
Given the probable make-up of the next House of Representatives, negotiation skills and the ability to compromise will be at a premium.
When the climate change legislation was put before the Senate the National Party refused to discuss it. The Liberal Party began negotiating a deal but reneged after the extreme right wing of the party mugged Malcolm Turnbull, cheated Joe Hockey of what he saw as his turn at being leader, and installed Tony Abbott. Thereafter they blocked everything in the Senate!
Perhaps Andrew Robb could stop talking about what he thinks is going on in the Labor Party for a moment and explain how the Coalition intends to reform and manage it’s extreme factions.
Information rather than breathless schoolyard tittle-tattle would be welcome!
The highlighting of Chloe Bryce’s marriage to Bill Shorten seems like a good attempt to spin any ALP minority government formed at Gillard’s request, as tradition allows her to attempt first, as a personal partisan favour by Quentin Bryce to her son-in-law.
Tigtog, guys, I dislike Rupert M at least half as much as the average Lefty (and that’s quite a bit), but as a regular reader of the Hun and a regular listener to the Fairfax-owned Merlbourne commercial talk station 3AW I have to tell you people that the hourly news bulletins of AW have been the main repository of anti-Labor spin in Victoria this election cycle, not the Newscorp tabloid.
And those news bulletins have quite a bit of overlap with the Age’s personnel—Latika Burke is both AW Canberra correspondent and Age soft politics writer. While Channel 7 TV reporter Nick MacCullum has been repeating a lot of Coalition talking points during his bits on that same radio station since election eve, despite the friendliness of 7′s Mel and Kochie towards Team
KevinJulia.What we’re seeing at work here ain’t your daddy’s Murdochism, and I think it’s coming from all the elite media (King Barrie of the Sunday Morning Couch is a bad offender).
I even disagree with the meme from around here that it’s all about Newscorp values spilling over into the ABC et al (“it’s their ABC”).
There’s an elite media culture backlash of some sort at work, and Rupert M’s people haven’t started it, even if they are pretty egregious.
Graham @4, I don’t think hysterical meeja spin about the evil Greens & Labour in the Senate hurting poor little Smuggles’ feelings will wash with either Greens or Labour voters.
In fact, I’d think it would render them helpless with laughter and make them campaign even harder to get the idiot chucked out of government in the case of a double dissolution.
Surprised if this hasn’t been spun yet, but to put Saturday’s likely result into some perspective, remember that Howard’s first term government was returned to office in 1998 after a similar swing against it and without a majority of the two party preferred vote. In fact, the Coalition was preferred by barely 49% of electors, the lowest in the five post war elections where the winner did not receive a 2PP majority. The other difference of course was that Howard had a massive majority to play with from the ’96 election – which also puts into perspective his ‘courage’ in going to the electorate with the GST as against Rudd’s decision not to go to a Green-favouring double dissolution with his ETS.
She isn’t the only offender by a long shot, but I would like to single Annabel Crabb out for some criticism.
As much as I like her articles, I think she is in danger of going too superficial.
Twitter seems to have turned into one giant competition to be funny/witty (i’m guilty of this myself), and the key tweeting journos get into it as well.
I think it is a bit sad really (not least because 9/10 attempts at humour on twitter fall flat).
Annabel wasted an unfortunate amount of time analysing and lampooning Julia Gillard’s hand gestures this election. It was kind of funny at the start, but she kept it up for over a week, and it spilled out of twitter and got a mention during her spot on Gruen Nation. Should serious journalists really linger on such trivialities beyond a single passing observation?
And she has a penchant for trying extremely hard to create and popularise silly pet nicknames for the politicians e.g. People Skills for Tony Abbott and La Gillardine for Julia Gillard. Yes, its mildly funny, and yes, they aren’t the first politicians to get nicknames, but still – do you really want to be putting effort into this kind of stuff, while presumably trying to be a serious commentator?
This kind of trivialisation blocks people from thinking intelligently about what they see and hear about politics, and instead catches them up in the alleged wit and the caricature. Maybe if the whole “People Skills” joke hadn’t become so entrenched, more people might have been open to the actual capacity to be good with people that Abbott must have, which helped him get to where he got this election.
I worry that Annabel (and other journalists and bloggers who buy into this whole lets be witty on twitter business), will lazily become a kind of Tim Blair-esque or Mike Carlton-esque type of columnist: big on witty headlines, quips, and jolly yarns but completely and utterly superficial when it comes to actual analysis. I think she could do better.
Did not a previous incumbant of the highest position acquire a nickname in direct contrast to his then behaviour? Yet look how “Honest Johnny” was spun in later years … “People Skills” acquired the nickname because he didn’t have any, yet I’ve been told this last few weeks the direct opposite by several different people.
Not just the commercial meeja should be under scrutiny. How successful have the Liberals been putting the frighteners on the ABC? Like to see an analysis of the less than flattering lead stories about the ALP hanging around hour after hour on the ABC website vs its coverage for the Coalition.
@Curi-Oz –
Absolutely – are people forgetting the fine old Aussie tradition of giving people topsy-turvy nicknames? Redheads called “Blue”, my very dark-skinned uncle nicknamed “Snowy”, shortarses nicknamed “Stretch” or “Lanky” etc?
Sure, topsy-turvy is not always the inspiration – my neighbour nicknamed “Rolls” did indeed have horrendously bad luck with car crashes, and my boyfriend nicknamed “Hooter” had a perfectly proportioned nose unlike his proboscisly-enhanced older brothers and father, but he inherited the family nickname nonethelesss.
One simply cannot take an Australian nickname at any automatically face value.
Not forgetting the tradition at all. I perfectly understand that Annabel was giving TA an ironic nickname when she dubbed him “People Skills”.
But just because it is a (lame) tradition, doesn’t mean journalists should work so hard to create these nicknames, not if they want to be regarded as serious journalists. And as I said – if we didn’t get so caught up in the joke of calling Tony Abbott “people skills” because of his alleged lack of them, we might have noticed that he does in fact have some actual people skills. He must have, to have got his party to where it is today.
Look I was just providing a few examples. My general point stands, that I reckon Annabel Crabb (and plenty of other commentators and twitterers) are devoting a lot of effort at trying to be witty and funny, and risk their analysis tending towards the superficial as a result. Wouldn’t want Annabel to end up like Tim Blair, the king of quip with not much else to say.
@SCPritch – certainly there’s a risk of people going overboard with the quippery. I don’t however agree that there’s anything especially problematic or symptomatic of some great canker on the body of journalism with making quips on Twitter per se, as part of letting off a bit of steam through one’s working day, or with re-using some of those quips on a show like Gruen Nation.
If one does get too attached to incorporating one’s quips into what is meant to be thoughtful political commentary, I agree that this is indeed a problem. I’m just not sure that Twitter is doing anything more than amplifying what used to be quips traded competitively amongst colleagues in the press pack for past generations of journalists.
Have a lot of sympathy for SCPritch’s position here.
Whether it’s damaging to democracy or not – it certainly is annoying. Such a smarty-pants blogosphere-circa-2004 ring to it. Hopefully just a phase while we all get used to the new internet news medium. It’d be alright of she was a sidebar columnist or worked for the commercials – but she’s billed as Chief Online Political Reporter or some such. Wost part of it is, it’s provoked Uhlmann to try to be funny as well. Which is worse because unlike her, he’s got no gift for it at all!
I see your point too tigtog, I guess it is just a matter of degrees. Quips are good, so long as they don’t dominate.
Maybe my problem is that I just spent too much time on twitter over the election, and got jaded with all the witter banter.
“I reckon Annabel Crabb (and plenty of other commentators and twitterers) are devoting a lot of effort at trying to be witty and funny, and risk their analysis tending towards the superficial as a result. Wouldn’t want Annabel to end up like Tim Blair, the king of quip with not much else to say.”
The day after the Labor launch she spent 80% of her time on Richard Glover’s show talking trivialities. There was only a brief moment when she spoke about the substance of the speech.
I was waiting for her to tell us the colour of Julia’s frock!
Well you wouldn’t want to distract people from the major issues of spending, great big new taxes and boat people by announcing a dud housing policy, would you?
Sorry – forgot to link to the source.