It was great to watch NYU Journalism Professor Jay Rosen (of Pressthink fame) on Lateline last night. If you missed his interview, the transcript is here.
Rosen argues that the media owe a duty to the public to provide reporting which they think is in the best interests of citizens. His argument is that if you report elections and politics as if they mattered to people’s daily lives, then that also creates a greater degree of civic capacity, as well as enlivening the public sphere.
There was a bit of irony in two comments he made to Leigh Sales:
JAY ROSEN: Horse race journalism is a reusable model for how to do campaign coverage in which you focus on who’s going to win rather than what the country needs to settle by electing a prime minister.
And it’s easy to do because you can kind of reuse it sort of like a Christmas tree every year and it requires almost no knowledge either.
And it kind of imagines the campaign as a sporting event, right? And everything that happens in the campaign can potentially affect the outcome.
And so you can look at it as ‘How is it going to affect the horse race?’ And every day you can ask, ‘Who is ahead and what is their strategy?’
And I think this perspective appeals to political reporters because it kind of puts them on the inside, looking at the campaign the way the operatives do.
By the way, I’m told that you actually have a program here on Sunday morning called the Insiders.
LEIGH SALES: We do.
JAY ROSEN: Is that true?
LEIGH SALES: We do.
JAY ROSEN: And the “insiders” are the journalists.
LEIGH SALES: That is right.
JAY ROSEN: That’s remarkable.
Sales’ response? “Hmm”.
And then there’s this:
LEIGH SALES: But do you not need both? Because, of course, you do need the stories that give context and explain what’s going on and is this true or not true, how does this all fit? But then how do you ignore – say for example today when we have a former opposition leader showing up at a particular event, you can’t very well just ignore that?
JAY ROSEN: No, you can’t. But what you could do is say ‘Well politics is also theatre, politics is also entertainment’, so in that segment of our coverage, we’ll cover Latham – is that his name?
LEIGH SALES: Latham.
JAY ROSEN: Latham – because clearly this is the entertainment portion of the campaign.
Spot on.
Elsewhere: Public Opinion.
Rosen describes the media malaise very well – only I’d prefer to call it horseshit journalism to better reflect the quality of the product.
Ms Sales totally out of her depth, but Tony Jones wouldn’t have been much better.
Hey Adamite … don’t knock horseshit. Unlike the “journalism” we are talking about, that has useful applications.
The “journalism” is useful too, Fran. If you buy the dead tree version, you can use it as garden mulch.
I don’t buy the dead tree version though, and I resent even the energy needed to transmit it electronically. Of course, that is nothing l;ike the carbon footprint of sending a full camera and audio crew out to an event to film some vacuous talking head standing where the equally vacuous talking heads Latham puts on his show.
Incidently, for those interested, I tracked down Jay Rosen’s Twitter ID:
@jayrosen_nyu
I sent him a short thankyou for his piece.
He is indeed spot on. The media has turned the election campaign into a “celebrity” frenzy like a report for “E” entertainment.
That Mark Latham’s appearance on the campaign trail is reportable, highlights the paucity of informed examination of policy from either side by the media and the poor quality of journalism.
I love the ‘insiders’ bit. Wonder if Leigh got it?
There was a very interesting Conversations with Richard Fidler today with John Nichols from The Nation, too, covering similar themes.
Spot on indeed, but news has been ‘just another show on TV’ for ages. So entertainment is the priority and field recordings are an important component in developing the show as they imbue the presentation with authenticity.
I just looked up Frontline – 16 years ago!!
Yeah great transcript. He’s right on the money of course.
When I trained in journalist 30 years ago, they taught us that every story has to answer the simple, but often neglected questions of who, what, where, when and why – the last of which was often the most important. Journalists have stopped ddoing that primarily because it would involve challenging the exhausted narratives they plough and the now transparent and anachronistic framing devices they employ.
@12 “Journalists have stopped ddoing that primarily because it would involve challenging the exhausted narratives they plough and the now transparent and anachronistic framing devices they employ.”
exactly –
news as comfort food
The only journalist I can think of who has stepped outside the Canberra mob or the media circus morons is Tony Eastley in his AM section on Radio National each morning.
Excellent stories from ordinary people living in a variety of communities in each State telling their stories….and what they expect from our elected officials.
Marvellous stuff and Eastley is offering a model of journalism which aspiring journalists would do well to study…..instead of behaving like TV celebrities or posing as serious, independent commentators when they’re actually pushing an agenda run by powerful vested interests…..
having just returned from several years o/s in journalism (mostly EU, then seAsia), it’s hard not to despair over how the horse-race elections coverage wipes out any debate over urgent policy (eg, oz’s role if any in a rapidly realigning region post-gfc… rather than all the noise in the equivalent of hat show punditry from flemington). Political ‘journalism’ seems poorly here when compared to even places like jakarta or delhi 2010 … all of which rosen so neatly snaps together in his commentary about the (oz) news media and public relevancy (as opposed to journos-playing-insiders, etc). But having done some time at the canberra gallery in the dying days of the howard era, it strikes me that trad media’s dwindling fortunes have got editors/managers spooked – thus drafting (cheaper) ever younger journos onto the c’trail, who’re probably struggling with unrealistic multiple dedlines while expected to humour management (and audiences?) with social media haiku. As an ex-colleague now in jakarta notes when wondering about we’d survive a return to the PG, there’s fewer battery chickens now having to lay ever more eggs round the clock… never mind the yolk, just marvel at the uniform size?
‘Basically what you’ve just described there is basically the day to day reporting of modern campaigns. What would be an alternative model then for reporting like we just saw on the news, the cut and thrust of what the leaders are up to all day?
JAY ROSEN: Mm hmm. Well, an alternative model might start with ‘What do the people of Australia want this campaign to be about? What are the issues they want to see the candidates discussing?’
Excellent idea, but so is world peace. How to achieve it?
The politicians will tell you they are discussing the issues Australians want them to discuss. They know this through their advisers, the polls, the talkback callers, etc. But of course (1) these sources can only ever give you part of the picture, and as a result (2) pols have the room to be able to avoid some crucial issues that fall between the cracks, chasms really, that these disparate and incomplete sources allow.
The massive fraud behind the Depression we have only just commenced and how we need to restructure regulation of finance and capital to avoid its recurrence and to lay foundations for the future; our part in the crimes of Iraq and Afghanistan and our support of Israeli ethnic cleansing – both symptoms of our continued fealty to a deluded empire in its death throes; our continued allegiance to a growth rather than a sustainability paradigm that will enrich the few at the expense of the many, and so on.
I have trouble focusing on local politics nowadays. It’s like watching the juniors in the warm-up match. Rabbits v big game. The tectonic shifts shaping the future’s terrain are only nodded and winked at in our debates, fixated as they are on minutiae rather than bigger pictures. I enjoyed the Dick Smith/QA discussion on population because it slaked a thirst for discussion of broad strategy for long term outcomes, rather than tactical advances and retreats on issues of the moment.
Really, the only way for us to be able to ask ”Well how did we do on advancing the discussion of the citizens’ agenda today?’ is to harness the power of the internet and utilise the ranking algorithms used in social media and browsers, but to do so under the aegis of the Australian government. Each voter would have an account tied to their electorate and anyone could raise a query to be asked in Parlt. The ranking software (all transparently open source) raises the profile of the best crafted questions on the issues of most concern. Reaching a defined critical mass or percentage of enrolled voters in an electorate means the question must be raised in Parlt by the member; this would be a legislated part of their responsibilities.
In this way, wildfire issues affecting people across electorates are raised as a matter of course. As the data would be open to all, members could not shy away from the directive their constituents had given them. ‘Mr Speaker, could the member for XXxx explain why he has defied the will of almost 70% of his electorate in refusing to discuss XXxx issue’?
The agenda would be wrested away from the increasingly incestuous pollie/journo/special interest nexus – they would still be able to sway things not of especial interest or concern to us mob, but the moment our dander was up, we would be in control.
And then I woke up…
Another factor is that the game is fixed by the major parties as far as coverage is concerned. Third party candidates are pushed out of debates, etc, and it takes a lot of work to track them down. I coach talk show hosts and they find it very difficult to track down potential guests of this type and then the hosts are attacked by the major parties for covering “extremist” views, etc.
I’m a huge Rosen fan, and a journalist (gawd, this sounds like confession). When I talk about the pointlessness of horserace journalism, the other journos and news editors look at me like I’m a complete idiot who doesn’t know what she’s talking about. News – and therefore, journalism – should be useful to our audience, otherwise what’s the point of it? If it’s just going to be entertainment, well, there are loads of other things people can read or watch that are more entertaining. What we’re giving them these days is not useful.