Jay Rosen’s keynote address at New News 2011, part of the Melbourne Writers Festival (August 26).
Photo Source: Melbourne Writers Festival on Facebook | Credit: Carla Gottgens
I’m going to concentrate on three impoverished and interrelated ideas that (I say) have too much influence in political coverage. Then I will present an alternative scheme that might improve the situation.Three impoverished ideas:
1. Politics as an inside game.
2. The cult of savviness.
3. The production of innocence.
After elucidating on those three points, Rosen offered his alternative scheme for analysing and reporting political events:
Bottom left: Appearances rendered as fact. Example: the media stunt. Top left: Phony arguments. Manufactured controversies. Sideshows. Bottom right: Today’s new realities: get the facts. The actual news of politics. Top right. Real arguments: Debates, legitimate controversies, important speeches.
Jay’s addendum (published yesterday?) is also worth reading:
After Matter: Notes, Reactions & Links…
I was on the Australian Broadcasting Corporation’s Lateline to discuss many of these themes with host Tony Jones. Watch it here.
On Twitter, the ABC’s Helen Tzarimas gave a bizarre summary of what I said: “In this Lateline interview (from 1.13 to 3.05) the media is blamed for lack of govt policy.” I have no idea how she got there.
David Bernstein, a political reporter for the Boston Phoenix, said on Twitter. “If anyone cares, I’ve read Jay Rosen’s big politijourno speech and I think it’s idiotic crap.” I asked him to explain what he meant and he produced this post: Jay Squawking. His main point is that I’m not really talking about journalism at all. I just don’t like the way politics is done, and I am displacing my dissatisfaction onto the press. So that’s why this speech is crap and I’m an idiot for writing it.
Well, yes, he makes so much sense that he must be vilified and misquoted at all costs
We can’t have sense, it undermines the non-sense that we are actually employed to generate….
Tony Jones was in full denial mode when he interviewed Jay Rosen on Lateline. All Jones wanted to do was insist that the Australian political media was above reproach and anything wrong with the system must be the fault of the pollies. Rosen obviously picked up on Jones’s sensitivity, as he threw in a couple of flattering remarks about the ABC and Lateline just to smooth things over. All in all, a pathetic performance by Jones.
There is nothing more journalists hate than being criticised. I once presented
this
at an academic seminar in the presence of several BBC people, and by the end one reporter was interjecting and, literally, shouting at me. It was fun.
I thought the deceitful and/or deliberately stupid tweet from Helen Tzmaris and Ton Jones’ studied “I’m above it all” indifference were very telling and rather proved Rosen’s point.
The media really can’t admit to its own agency in politics. It believes it is essentially an invisible actor whose behaviour has not impact on what passes for political debate.
It’s the politicians that are stupid, they complain. All we’re doing is reporting on it. No, all you are doing is setting the rules of the game and then faulting the politicians when they fail to follow them to the letter (hence, the pouncing on ‘gaffes’ and ‘backflips’, accusing politicians of failing to say anything of substance and then jumping all over them when they do).
Most of the journos probably don’t fully understand Rosen’s points, as they require a bit of thought beyond the usual talking points and modus operandi of the journalistic fraternity.
So I’m not sure if Helen Tzmaris was being ‘deliberately stupid’.
adrian, I think the majority of journos (subconsciously, perhaps) understand Rosen and recognise themselves in his description, and immediately stick their fingers in their ears, put a doily on their heads and shriek, ‘Lah, lah, lah, I can’t hear you!’ I think this was amply borne out by Tony jones’ behaviour the other night.
So, yes, Tzmaris was being deliberately stupid.
What struck me about Rosen’s chat with Tony Jones was that Jones didn’t realise how much Rosen – smiling, polite and deferential – was humiliating him.
Jones, one of our supposed “top” journalists, came over as small-town, petty-minded and (if this is compatible with the other two traits) full of himself. When Rosen asked Jones a question, Jones felt it necessary to put Rosen in his place. A confident interlocutor would have engaged. Jones fell back on the old “I ask the questions here” tactic because, to Jones, journalists should always be in charge, even when interviewing other journalists.
Rosen’s quiet, sensible demeanour and clear advantage in intelligence, was almost embarrassing to watch, as he carved Jones up and spat him out for all to see… except Jones, of course. I doubt whether Jay will be invited back in a hurry.
But for the sickening journalistic highlight of the week, I have to nominate Insiders on Sunday. As they discussed just how far they could push Craig Thomson, the subject came up as to whether he might try to top himself in reaction to all the stress and mockery going on. The Insiders all agreed that another suicide attempt to add to Nick Sherry’s over “Oh Possum-gate” a few years back, would definitely be a bad look.
For all the world they reminded me of torturers, figuring out just how much pain their victim could stand before he died on the wrack.
A truly awful moment, even more disappointing to me because George Megalogenis joined in enthusiastically, which had me reflexively reaching for the old glass ashtray we used to keep next to the sofa, so I could hurl it at the screen.
I think that they may well understand that he’s blaming them in a generalised sense, hence the defensiveness, but you’re crediting them with more intelligence than most of them have, if you think they understand the details, or could be bothered understanding them.
It’s a pity that the Journos seem to reject what Rosen is saying. His scheme for analysing political coverage seems to me quite worthwhile.
I found myself thinking of recent events and popping them into various sections of the above graphic. Rather depressing how many end up in the top left.
And further to that David Irving, any examples of MSM political journalistic intelligence beyond the odd exceptions of Laura Tingle, Peter Hartcher (occasionally) and maybe GM would be much appreciated.
For my money, bloggers such as Andrew Elder and The Piping Shrike display a far deeper understanding of the issues, and also write more interestingly than the majority of their MSM counterparts.
I thought that Jay Rosen was criticising the “he said, she said” school of journalism which gives equal time to opposing arguements regardless of the established facts and credibility of the commentators, although not mentioned I thought good examples would be climate change and the American deficit brouhaha. Rosen mentioned the manufactured stories, yes Tony Abbott we are looking at your media stunts.
I disliked ‘The Insiders’ from day one because of its title. Shouldn’t journos be Outsiders?
Cop this grovel from The Oz to Gillard.
http://www.theaustralian.com.au/correction/story-fn6nj4ny-1226124242214
Someone has been a very naughty boy over there. As Gillard said; “Don’t write crap. It can’t be that hard”.
ABC’ s NewsCaf, as its known inhouse, has always been very arrogant and up itself. The division considers itself way above the rest of the ABC. Jones is an exemplar of that. You can see he just loves being the Silver Fox and leaning into the camera. The trouble is; they consider themselves as stars, not journos.
Great reads.
The Lateline part where Jones claims journalism has never been so good as it is today did floor me – wow.
On innocence – Jay explains it well – although I can’t get past Dara O’Briain “There’s a kind of notion that everyone’s opinion is equally valid. My arse! A bloke who’s been a professor of dentistry for 40 years doesn’t have a debate with some idjit who removes his teeth with string and a door!”. Sadly, I think O’Briain’s quote would escape most journos ability to understand today.
I’d really like to read a reporter from time to time. No-one under 50 ought to be allowed to be a journalist. The esteemed Tony Jones behaves himself with all of the confident aplomb a senior public servant who has had one employer, usually known as THE department, all of his working life. From Newington College to the public teat for a whole career, and it shows, Tony, it really shows, in the overweening sense of entitlement that betokens a man who has learned to kiss up and kick down.
Jay Rosen was part of several New News panels. He complemented Greg Gericho in looking at Outsiders v. insiders in the media and was in the audience for Australian Media Leaders Held to Account (where I was privileged to take part on behalf of Our Say). Melbourne Press Club has video of New News sessions. Rosen’s keynote address will posted soon. His answers to audience questions are well worth seeing.
On cue Glenn Milne today in The Australian:
http://www.news.com.au/apology-to-the-prime-minister/story-fn7djq9o-1226124281624
Glenn Milne in action at the Walkley Awards a few years ago:
So, what’s this all about??
Correction
The Australian
From:The Australian
August 29, 20119:26AM
THE AUSTRALIAN published today an opinion piece by Glenn Milne which includes assertions about the conduct of the Prime Minister.
The Australian acknowledges these assertions are untrue. The Australian also acknowledges no attempt was made by anyone employed by, or associated with, The Australian to contact the Prime Minister in relation to this matter.
The Australian unreservedly apologises to the Prime Minister and to its readers for the publication of these claims.
Ambigulous, see the Spotlight the Spin post for further discussion of Milne’s escapade.
I’m not sure how relevant the Milne-Gillard thing is to what Rosen’s talking about anyway.
It has the appearance at least of an attempt at actual story-breaking, with actual sources and stuff. Ideologically motivated, sure, and careless with the facts if the Oz’s retraction is anything to go by, but hardly just another round of the spin cycle.
Rosen’s quadrant could be 3D with the other axis being transparent/open at one end and opaque/murky at the other.
If I were the prime minister I would sue The Australian for libel for publishing stories that News Ltd lawyers determined to be false 4 years ago. Evidently Hawke and Keating got handsome libel payments that allowed them very comfortable retirements
@billie – most of the discussion re Glenn Milne has been in the Spotlight the Spin thread – can we keep it there please so that the conversation is not being repeated in two threads?
It amuses me that journalists insist on their special status because they supposedly tell the public about how the political system is operating, and yet consistently fail to recognise their own role in that system. If Insiders, for example, was true to its name it would report as much about the spear-carriers in the commentariat as their favourite pollies; as much about the agendas driven at the behest of media magnates, corporations and other extra-parliamentary centres of power and their PR systems of “thinktanks” and astroturf, as about the soundbites coming from the politicians; and break the kayfabe about how information about politics comes to the journos in the first place. (I acknowledge it would be far too much to ask them to acknowledge the institutional features of media that makes it a factory of bien pensant* bourgeois orthodoxy.)
*I believe this phrase is Tony Jones’ middle name.
Hear, hear! Elder is brilliant.
Elder is good value – because he’s one of the few commentators who genuinely understands the Australian Liberal party.
this,for example, is fantastic, and all should read upon it: http://andrewelder.blogspot.com/2011/08/next-federal-coalition-government.html
That’s a great post, LE @ 26.
Phillip Adams talked to Jay Rosen last week. No defensiveness there, but then Adams is not a journalist.
The poison dwarf really over reached on that one. If it’s good enough for Abbott to sue for libel, it’s good enough for Gillard.
I agree on both Elder and Piping Shrike
weaver’s point was a good one – they aren’t even genuine insiders, merely regurgitators of pre-digested pap masquerading as insight.
You could diligently stay in the bottom right hand border of the graph above and still produce some incredibly biased reporting. Think about limiting discussion re Libya to education, treatment of women and sharing the oil wealth.
That’s a limitation with just about every two-axes graph though, isn’t it – that it covers a very limited subset of the possibilities? It’s meant as a jumping off point, not an exhaustive plot of every single aspect of an alternate model of coverage.
P.S. Since Rosen’s main goal is to offer an alternative to the cozy insider journalist habit, I suspect that he feels that such bias as you hypothesise would be more easily called out by other journalists working from his model, compared to the current model of horse-race reportage. That’s what I would expect, anyway.
Well that’s excellent. I’m so impressed Mr Rosen has become aware of the political compass and decided to graft it straight onto news reporting and public relations.
It would be far more useful if we started speaking in the terms the political compass has given us. That way we’d realize that the vast majority of politicians are in the upper right-hand box and that the rest of us are scattered about.
But no. Instead let’s apply it to some simplistic and axiomatic dichotomy any competent 15 year old could muster and arrange it so that it looks really groovy. ‘Appearances’, ‘realities’? Well d’uh. There are armies of people who spend every working day convincing us that one is actually the other. And there’s lots of money in it to. You won’t stop that by applying one idea to something else. That’s a hackneyed trick from the 19th century that doesn’t work. Don’t believe me. Try reading a Cubist novel sometime.
Sheesh, Adrien – it’s not like the Political Compass was the first mob ever to use a four-quadrant graph to look at a social phenomenon, and particularly not the first mob to use a four-quadrant graph to present an alternative model to the “dominant paradigm”.
In all such models, the four quadrants are jumping-off points for further analysis. Their impact lies not just in how they present alternatives to the current/traditional way of doing things, but in how they show that current practise is often clustered in only one quadrant of the range of possibilities, as you correctly note with the Political Compass.
tigtog@33 – exactly! Rosen seems keen to move his analysis well away from the concept of bias, which is such a dead-end anyway.
Thanks Robert M, and apologies to Jacques for my repetition of a fact he’d already reported.
The compass diagram is a heuristic device, here as much as in its use when thinking about political orientations. It’s not an ethos, method, taxonomy, argument, formula, agenda or concept.
In the past, when discussing this issue here at LP, I’ve drawn the attention of folk to the work of Galtung & Ruge on News values. There’s a fairly simple (and more recent than those I’ve used) summary of this to browse here. (G&R from here)
In order to keep this post manageable, I’m just going to radically simplify what is at the link (assuming others have read) it and try to map it to the kinds of concerns that Rosen and others have raised in relation to reportage.
The first thing to keep in mind, IMO, is that although most of us tend to speak loosely of “news”, as if this were a self-evidently unproblematic category, this is a mistake. News is as much a product of human contrivance as any other mass produced commodity and many of the same questions ought to be insistently asked of it. Perhaps we ought to adopt the practice of always calling it news product in order to remind ourselves of this. It only takes a moment’s thought to note that other banal commodities — canned beans for example — can only be consumed by us after the structured and witting collaboration of large numbers of humans. But news (product)? Not so much.
G&R (simplified) spoke of four key predisposing factors in creating news.
1. The matter concerns elite people/interests
2. The matter takes place in elite nations
3. The matter can be presented as a consequence of the acts of specific individuals
4. The matter is negative
(At least that was the rubric as it stood in 1981 when I first came across it). The page link above has a more nuanced and developed set of predisposing factors, but the above will largely suffice. To these I’d add a further constraint:
5. The matter can be seen as an instantiation of a wider narrative/concept with popular currency.
It’s clear when one considers these ‘meta’ conceptions why talk of ‘bias’ and ‘balance’ in the media is at best facile. The very structures of news production predispose a product in which individuals are more important than collectives, presenting events more important than their underlying etiology, the interests of privileged stakeholders more significant than non-privileged ones, and from the perspective of those of us living in the first world, stuff happening in our own or other first world countries much more grievable (hello Judith Butler) than events happening elsewhere.
It’s easy to see why, in our 24-hour news product cycle, that a strory such as “Kevin Rudd — last man standing” is not only news, but presented in that form. It ticks all five boxes, including the meta-narrative of the significance of polling to leadership and to some extent the ALP’s parlous poll numbers, NSW ALP’s defeat etc. There is a limited amount of time in the news production and publication process to define terms and offer explanatory information, so schedule feasibility matters demand stories that acquire meaning from an established paradigm. This would be so even were colours reversed, and Kevin Rudd a member of an LNP regime in the same position. What wouldn’t be different is that the structure of news would still remove all of the important processes attending governance that was producing this result, including of course, the role of media itself.
Developing this thought, if your brief is to advise a politician or a political party, then it’s clear that you are going to be seriously inclined to ignore all attempts at explaining public policy in terms of complex processes and tempted to present them in terms of Manichean dichotomy, of important political actors, their impact on elite interests and so forth. Visiting steel mills with a fluoro jacket and hat, or a fruit shop for a photo op, gives images that can be inserted into an ongoing narrative — the continuous election campaign; is a new election in the offing?; the government is illegitimate etc.
Conversely, many of the things we on the left would like to talk about are simply passed over when they can’t be shoehorned into the categories above. Poverty/inequity, biodiversity, climate change, human displacement and so forth are far too big to be persistent stories in themselves. While they can certainly be the ‘meta-narrative’ for a story that makes the headline, they can’t be the story except that the above filters are passed. Decomposition of the WA/Greenland ice sheets is only a story to the extent that it is associated with waterfront property being threatened. Cyclone Yasi was a story because people’s homes and livelihoods were assailed, and to the extent that anthropogenic climate change was a factor, Yasi is given meta meaning. Refugees are a story to the extent that “boats” are on the horizon. This is why there are few if any headlines about people applying for asylum after overstaying visas. That’s really just another step in a fairly opaque process. These are merely ongoing statistics. Boats involve a visible event in which the first world is “invaded” by the developing world, and this invasion may be a harbinger of an existential crisis. Boats, by being putatively existential, define refugees as a question of border security in which specific actors — the government, DIMEA, AFP, people smugglers — are salient and refugees are not, except as manifestations of the acts of these primary stakeholders and the existential meta-narrative. A ‘balanced’ coverage of this issue will look almost exactly like an ‘unbalanced’ one, minus the most abusive terminology.
As long as news remains a product, (and most especially a commercial product), it’s hard to see how the media can avoid reproducing and iterating a process that kisses up and kicks down. News product is really little more than reasonably formulaic near real-time gossip, and like interpersonal gossip, fundamentally beholden to those either with power or close to acquiring it.
That’s why it is broken, at least from a public interest POV.
it’s not like the Political Compass was the first mob ever to use a four-quadrant graph to look at a social phenomenon, and particularly not the first mob to use a four-quadrant graph to present an alternative model to the “dominant paradigm”.
True, but methinks this is a simulacrum of the political compass. Methinks likewise it’s simply a re-presentation of what is axiomatic. We all know about the degenerative progress of propaganda.
Might be wrong.
It sure is similar to the political compass, but I don’t think it’s supposed to stand in any necessary relationship to it.
The question of its being axiomatic is a good one. Part of Rosen’s argument (apart from which the quadrant graph means nothing much) is that this way of seeing things is far from axiomatic in the practice of journalism. How important is a heuristic like this even when the people who should be using it “know it all already”? It can be very important, I think.
Political coverage is ‘broken’, really it ought to be called irrelevant, because criminality and corruption are an unacknowledged element of democracy at precisely the moment when they are the dominant structural factor in democracy. Monday’s 4C shows Murdoch’s empire to be neither more nor less than a criminal enterprise – threatening Police, corrupting Police and politicians, threatening citizens and politicians with ongoing harassment in the protection of its criminal connections. Political ‘coverage’, in so far as it does not address corporate criminality, is not political coverage but a component part of corporate criminal activity. It’s not political reportage, it’s crime.
HT: Deltoid:
The Australian does it again:
http://scienceblogs.com/deltoid/2011/08/the_australians_war_on_science_73.php#comments
Wow. Two retractions and apologies in the space of a week. I wonder if this is The Australian’s new strategy: deliberately publish defamatory material and/or material that potentially endangers someone they dislike, then arse-cover by quickly issuing a retraction and apology?
Thank you for the kind comments folks.
The other reason why it’s broken is the lack of a link between politics and policy, i.e. a means of quantifying the degree to which what was announced will have any basis in fact.