Australian journalists are close to the centre of the political spectrum, but their editors are more likely to take a party line, according to new research from The Australian National University.

The study, conducted by ANU economist Professor Andrew Leigh from the Research School of Social Sciences and Melbourne Business School economist Professor Joshua Gans, used a number of different approaches to measure ‘media slant’ in newspapers, radio and television.

Professors Leigh and Gans used three approaches to test for media slant; reviewing media mentions of 100 public intellectuals, rating election stories and rating newspaper headlines. The researchers found that although most media outlets showed no significant slant in reporting, there were some notable exceptions.

“In terms of content, Australian journalists seem to be a centrist bunch”, said Professor Leigh. “Using the first approach, only one out of 27 news outlets had a significant slant. This is ABC Television News, which had a significant slant towards the Coalition in the period 1999-2007. All other outlets (including six ABC radio stations) were essentially centrist.

I can’t say that the findings about the pro-Coalition bias of the ABC television news are greatly surprising to me, though they seem to have ruffled some right wing feathers.

The full paper can be accessed here.

But, anyway, the lame duck President made his ritual obeisance to the virtues of American leadership and the glories of the free market. One imagines there’s some personal and political imperative there, but the reality of his governance is better disclosed in the fate of the TARP funds which Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson was given by Congress – it appears that crony capitalism and socialism for the rich is the name of the game according to American blogs such as naked capitalism, Obsidian Wings, firedoglake and naked capitalism again.

But Bush will soon be fading into history, and Barack Obama sensibly declined to act at the summit without executive authority, so what emerged from the G20 is more in the nature of a directions statement for the way forward, as The Big Picture foresaw:

Hopefully, a long term agenda for regulatory cooperation and communication can be set with the next meeting’s agenda decided upon. Far better to talk then not, but no real decisions will come out of this meeting. There will be gnashing of teeth and venting of rage at the mess that excess securitization has created, and the international regulation of and accounting for such derivatives will probably be a focus.

Planet Money looks at what transpired, and links to the text of the communique here. SocProf is right, in my judgement, that we’re seeing the eclipse of the Washington consensus, but the shape of what will replace it is still a work in progress, and some yardsticks to measure the work of the G20 have been provided by the Guardian. Bretton Woods itself was the culmination of some years of intellectual work and economic diplomacy, and if there is to emerge something we might call Bretton Woods II, it isn’t a bad thing that the interregnum in the US presidency implies that decisions won’t be made on the run.

In forming a judgement on what does emerge, I think we as global citizens could do worse than to keep in mind the choice posed by one of FDR’s brains trust in 1932, Adolf Berle:

Between a political organization of society and an economic organization of society, which will be the dominant form?

Elsewhere: Peter Martin has helpfully posted a link to John Quiggin‘s presentation on how the global financial crisis transpired, which should provide some necessary context.

Tim has some reflections on the role online media plays and its value and potential vis-a-vis the mainstream media which I think are clearly heartfelt and incredibly important, so I’m going to take the liberty of quoting his last post at some length. In particular, I want to endorse Tim’s sentiments about the necessity of supporting and growing the independent online mediaspace, and I want to point out how those comments have direct implications for the sort of work we do at LP, and how that work could be enhanced. But more of that later.

As difficult as this decision is, there is nonetheless something apt about the timing. The blog began life not long after I moved to the US at the end of 2001. It got up and running in the strange twilight period between the events of September 11 and the disastrous decision by the Bush Administration to launch a war in Iraq in March 2003. With the election of Barack Obama to the Presidency that period has come to something of a natural and symbolic end and thus, for me at least, some of the central motivations for this sort of writing has dissipated. This blog, and others like it, have seen off the end of the Howard Government and the Bush Administration and on that score I couldn’t be happier.

This is not to say that there isn’t now a role for the sort of work blogs do, only that I, personally, am not in position to take on that sort of commitment at the moment. In fact, the need, especially in Australia, for wise independent voices to discuss and dissect the great issues of the day is as great as it has ever been and so that’s what I want to go out with: a plea for people to support — genuinely support — independent media in this country.

The fact is, Australia’s mainstream media is moribund. Although there are great journalists and other contributors out there, the institution itself is stuck in a hopeless, self-serving, tenured cul-de-sac and is failing in its job to properly inform, discuss, debate and entertain. Not to mention, reinvent itself. The form is dominated by a handful of insiders who have grown so content with their own lot that they are immune to sensible criticism and lack the self-awareness to reassess what it is they are doing. They are supported in this self-satisfied loop by a political class that is happy to exploit the status quo, feeding them leaks and other tidbits to keep the whole charade ticking over in such a way that nothing really changes.

The narratives, the memes, the discussions of our political and social life are set in concrete and endlessly recycle. We have learned to accept the daily, largely manufactured, controversies of political and social discussion in lieu of genuine examination. The same voices — and there are only about 20 of them — continue to define what is important or useful or worthy of discussion and the few organs of the mainstream media keep churning them out. Their lack of seriousness is only matched by their lack of courage.

To say that a fully-functioning independent media is the answer is glib. It is not that easy. And yet, there it is. The idea is not for such independent groups to replace the mainstream media but merely to get them to lift their game, to lead by example.

The situation as it currently stands is not completely hopeless. For all their failings, there are some new voices out there trying to make a difference. Some of them are thinktanks, some of them of grassroots organisations, some of them are blogs or other forms of online media. None of them has really “broken through” in the way that is necessary to make a real difference, but they are a start.

At the end of the day, though, they will only succeed if, firstly, they can organise themselves and offer a genuinely professional product and, secondly, if we-the-people properly support them. That means not just reading them and cheering them on but, by and large, financing them. And I don’t mean a few bucks in a tip jar once a year: I mean serious ongoing financial support. For as long as I have been blogging I’ve been hearing people tell me how wonderful blogs and other new media are and how much they enjoy and appreciate them. But I have very rarely seen those fine words and sentiments backed up with hard cash. It is about time it was.

I don’t mean you should toss a whole lot of cash at some guy with a blog. But at some point, enough of you are going to have to take a bit of a risk and invest a decent sum in this or that site so that they can genuinely operate as independent media. And the online media itself is going to have to get organised to the point where they can offer a product that is going to attract that sort of contribution, as well as money from other sources, advertising, or whatever.

Until this happens, stop whinging about the mainstream media. Spare me the heartfelt cries of how much you love this blog or that blog and just accept the fact that if you really want a functioning independent media you are going to have to pay for it. It’s that friggin simple.

Tim goes on to thank everyone for the support given to his various online endeavours, and I want to thank him for them too, but I’d mainly like to riff off these comments I’ve excerpted.

First, I really don’t think that anyone could disagree with his diagnosis of the media, and of its multitude of failings. One could add to that the observation that Australia fails to support many outlets for writing on public affairs outside newspapers themselves – while there are some exceptions such as The Monthly and Overland, we have nothing like the rich culture of magazine journalism and commentary that exists in comparable countries. That’s not just a factor of the distribution costs involved in a big country and the relatively small market. It’s also a product of the monopolisation of public space – and here Fairfax are equally at fault with News Limited – and this is why the dumbing down of ABC news is so lamentable. But it’s also a product of our own culture – a failure to engage publicly which is one of the worst aspects of the Australian political landscape.

If you wanted to make a living as a freelance writer in Australia, you could do so by writing about gadgets or travel or writing for teen mags (and I’m not knocking…) – but it’s just about impossible for anyone bar a very small hermetic circle to do so in writing about public affairs. And that’s one of the reasons why our “public intellectuals” are largely such a lacklustre lot – the “marketplace of ideas” is literally anti-competitive because of the lack of viable pathways for anyone to put the time and effort into breaking into it.

Ideally, online should be the place where this can be remedied. To some degree it is, but Tim’s quite right to say that there are barriers to the improvement and progress of what we’ve got (whether we’re talking about things on the internet like Crikey or New Matilda or the blogosphere.) I’m constantly thinking about how we could make LP a much better place in terms of all sorts of features and depth of analysis, but what blocks us from doing that is time. And therefore money. In trying to “monetise” the site, we’ve discovered that it’s possible to maintain our current readership levels and earn enough small change to supplement the income of one of us – me. But we’ve been set back by the state of the economy and the decline in advertising sales and the price at which ads can be sold, and that’s also made it more difficult to go ahead with the various strategies we have in mind for expanding the reach of the joint as quickly as we’d like (though there will be some movement on this front in the new year). I’ve always been of the view we could relatively easily triple the size of our readership just through some straightforward marketing, but that costs.

But – not to put too fine a point on it – if we really wanted to try to provide the sort of independent media we think we deserve in this country, we’d need several people working full time on such an effort. There is just no other way.

The frustrating thing is that I know we’ve collectively got the expertise to do it, but we can’t, because we don’t have the seed money to even get started. (And I very much include the LP community in that “we”.)

Now that I’ve got more time post-PhD, I’m planning to take the work I did on how we could grow online independent media a couple of years ago (and as some will know, quite a lot of dosh and about six months’ work was put in to mapping this out) off the shelf and see what we can do with it. At this stage, it might be necessary to find an “angel” or two to fund startup costs, but while I’m convinced that could be done, I think that process in itself might be quite a lengthy one.

So what can you do if you want to see a better and enduring online independent media?

If you like what we do here, please do take the opportunity to promote LP to friends and colleagues. If you know of anyone who you think might want to support an expansion of the online mediasphere, get in touch with me! And please consider unblocking ads on this site, and/or giving us a donation.

I’m sure LP will be with us for a long time to come, but we need to think about whether we want to grow and expand, do a holding operation, or scale back to amateur blogging. The latter always has a bit of pull, because the amount of work that goes into multiple daily posting, and making sure that quality is maintained (though it could be improved with more time!) is considerable, and carries an opportunity cost. Although I’ve flirted with the “blogger cherry-picked by bigger media” thing in my time, I’ve become increasingly convinced that’s not the way to go – it’s much better if we can collectively decide that we want to provide a bigger and better online alternative to the mainstream media. But I think Tim is quite right about this – if you don’t show you love it, you could lose it!

Elsewhere: Surfdom’s end is also noted by Terry Flew.

Update: Some excellent reflections on this topic from Guy Beres. Gary Sauer-Thompson at Public Opinion.

Update: Guy Rundle in Crikey.

Update: An Onymous Lefty and The Interpreter.

Update: Robert Corr. John Quiggin.

I think what’s more significant here is a recognition from Crikey of a shift from a relatively static form of internet publishing to a more dynamic and interactive one. It’s a better model in some ways than cherry picking bloggers to write static articles, because it encompasses the whole context of the form.

There’s obviously also a commercial element in the decision – frequently updated sites with lively and long comments threads multiply the page views and thus the advertising revenue. And, as with the general trend towards blog networks, it should be possible for Possum and the rest of the mob to earn a modest living from what they do without all the hassles of being their own advertising agent, and to concentrate on the content and the community without being their own tech support. What will be interesting is the degree to which there’ll be a crossover from Crikey “readers” to Crikey blog participants/commenters.

What does this imply for the independent blogosphere? I doubt that there’s any dimunition in independence – having written extensively for Crikey in the past myself, writing for them is very different than writing for the MSM. Having said that, I do think there’s value in preserving a space for blogs which don’t affiliate with other media organisations, and it’s not the sort of move I’d ever want to see LP take. I personally am not averse – as everyone knows – to the occasional gig doing something I consider to be different from the sort of blogging that I do here at LP, but LP and I are not synonymous. I think there’s a lot in the ability to post on whatever, whenever, without any editorial guidelines from above, and to get silly and anarchic from time to time, and also from the continuing engagement with a very site specific community. Part of the fun of blogging – and this is where amateur has its own original meaning and carries that connotation – is teh lerve and also not taking it all too seriously too much of the time.

For my own part, then, I can only offer lavish congratulations to Possum, The Poll Bludger and Andrew Bartlett.

Elsewhere: Lyn Calcutt at Public Opinion.

The caveat I want to enter before proceeding further is that there’s a real sense in which I don’t have a dog in this fight. I’m not a journalist or a journalism educator, and I don’t think “citizen journalism” is the best way of conceptualising what I do in my online writing, even when it most closely approaches reportage. My stake in all this is really that of a citizen and that of a media participant, and precisely because participation is a better model for engament in/with the media now than “audience” or “reader”, I don’t regard myself as being a privileged participant in these conversations, let alone in some way representative of the figure of “the blogger” which is in a real way a mythical one. A lot of what I bring to all this is probably more to do with my background and worldview as a sociologist.

That takes me to the first point I want to make – as I argued previously, I think the “bloggers v. journos” stoush is badly framed and misses most of what’s actually going on. It’s also worth noting, as I did at the outset of the session yesterday, that the debate as it plays out in the opinion columns and (ironically) the “blogs” at The Australian is more accurately seen as a subset of the culture wars and a struggle for hegemony and control over information and analysis than anything much to do with either the conditions of media work or the “fourth estate” role that the media supposedly plays. But more on that later. A lot of actually existing journos aside from columnists and right wing editors aren’t actually suffused with antagonism for blogs. It’s also interesting, and here I’d refer to the paragraph above, that some bloggers or “web evangelists” have an equal stake in continuing the “journos v. blogger wars”. (But for those interested in the latest series of “blogs are no longer the future of journalism” pronunciatos from the “fact and balance” crew, see this post from Stilgherrian, and my previous post.)

Cameron Reilly, for instance, appears to have perceived an antagonism in the session that he was a panelist in which entirely escaped me as someone watching it from the floor. He also takes an unjustified swipe at QUT’s Jean Burgess, who I think totally correctly debunked the “catastrophist” narrative, as I later dubbed it, about the death of the newspaper. And that theme is reproduced in another key by another participant Perth Norg‘s Bronwen Clune, who also recently wrote the obituary of the (Fairfax) newspaper. I don’t want to be reductive about the contribution that Reilly and Clune have to make, and the latter in particular had some interesting things to say which I’ll come back to, but this “web evangelist” stuff does seem to me to unhelpfully define itself against its Big Media Other, and to need sustaining through constant boosterism which then moves on to some “new killer app” almost at the same speed as the permanent revolution fails to deliver what’s claimed for it, and as the media empires resist their predicted collapse into ruins. Self “branding” and entrepreunerial writing bring in their wake real costs as well as benefits, and citizen media is not the transparently democratic exercise it’s purported to be.

But one good point Clune made, and one which was echoed by other participants yesterday, was that the “control media” have missed the boat and been swamped by the tide. This is where I think the concentration on media ownership is misplaced – it’s certainly not unimportant that there’s a concentration of ownership in the Australian MSM (and Axel Bruns is right in my view to question whether that’s not a large part of the reason the Australian media have been so resistant to, and inept in, the web 2.0 takeup), but in many ways it’s a debate of the 1980s and the 1990s. I’ve never understood the focus on Rupert Murdoch as teh evil that seems to obsess so many. As a social democrat, I don’t expect capitalist corporations or media “barons” like Murdoch to act in the public interest or to be without a political agenda, and the recent Fairfax shenanigans surely put to bed any residual sense that Fairfax was or is some sort of temple of fourth estate goodness. A simple proliferation of papers – which all define “hard news” in the same narrow sense of crime and day to day politics – never provided us with the golden age of journalism some like to wistfully misremember, and there’d be a better bang for the buck from initiatives other than starting an ABC newspaper or whatever.

I think Jason Wilson was the first to make the point last year at the height of the Government Gazette vs. blogosphere wars that the angst that accompanied the pseph blog dissing was a reflection of the fact that the ownership of opinion and analysis had slipped from the proprietorial grasp of the punditariat. That sort of ownership is gone, and it ain’t never coming back, and that’s a really important shift. And there’s a broader shift at work where media corporations can no longer control their audiences, which does totally disrupt the equation of a conversation among pundits at the summit of the media heights with a representative role for a unitary public. That point was made by MEAA secretary Chris Warren. That was never true, and it’s clear that it’s increasingly impossible to maintain the pretence that it is true now. A democratic public sphere needs to privilege participation over representation by a putative fourth estate.

And that’s a problem with a lot of these debates about the future of journalism. They’re based on pretence and a threatened professional identity. Again, Clune and others had some worthwhile things to say – particularly to many of the young and student journalists in the audience – about the need to focus on interactivity and a different conception of “sources” than is captured by the traditional models – a point also made by Edmunds on our panel. But for someone who’s not actually part of the media industry, what’s striking is the degree to which a groundswell of workplace change has come so late to the attention of journalists.

A lot of us have been working in an environment for many years now where the “nine to five” job is totally a thing of the past, where it’s actually vital not to identify too much with one employer, and where fluidity characterises work practices and career patterns both. Industrial realities and workplace restructuring driven relentlessly by the bottom line seem suddenly to have jolted a lot of journalists into a realisation that this is not the hypothetical way of the twenty-first century or something (for instance something happening in “society” outside the media workspace), but the reality of the present. It struck me that the distancing from “society” proper to a certain conception of the journalist as a professional, the reification of change, and a mindset that privileges the observer are actually huge barriers to both a constructive approach to change and to resistance to its more deleterious dimensions.

A lot more could be said about all this, but I was left thinking that the first steps towards mapping out a future of journalism involve a rigorous and probably unsettling confrontation with the harsh realities of the changed conditions of possibility for professional practice. I think that also entails – paradoxically – a stronger identification with the profession itself (and a weaker identification with employers) and a shift in disposition towards radical questioning of what entails doing “being a journalist” in the world we now live in.

Note also: Related posts at LP from Kim and dk.au, and from Lyn Calcutt at Public Opinion.

Update: Ken Parish on the future of newspapers at Troppo, Derek Barry provides a comprehensive summary of Margaret Simons’ session at FOJ, and Andrew Elder responds to Christian Kerr’s “balance and fact” rant and Mark Day.

Update: My fellow panelist Marian Edmunds has her say.

Update [by Kim]: Derek Barry has now posted his notes on the third session at which Jean Burgess and Cameron Reilly spoke.

But there’s something more at stake here. Colless’ mind dumps very often give readers an insight into what passes for thought among the managerial minds of the press. Perhaps precisely because no one is reading his stuff, he’s departed from the News Limited correct line and failed to decry the Fairfax cost-cutting as a threat to the quality of journalism. What you can make of this tangled paragraph is probably up to you:

McCarthy cannot afford to be blindsided by sweeping and emotional claims that change, of itself, will necessarily destroy quality journalism. Quality, after all, often can be the exclusive prerogative of the creator. But at the same time he should be careful not to confuse muscle with fat as he wields his cost-cutting scythe.

But, unwittingly, with his union bashing schtick, Colless has actually exposed a fault line that bedevils and cripples the quality of the quality journalism debate. It’s still too much about ownership – either a faceless public company with corporate buccaneers focused solely on cost cutting like Fairfax, or a private(ish) media fiefdom run by an almighty Proprietor like Murdoch’s News Limited. According to News, the latter allows quality journalism to be funded, while the impersonal mavens of corporate capitalism sacrifice the fourth estate to the lowest common denominator – the bottom line of the buck. And indeed, there’s another irony in the defence of Fairfax – for several years the venerable mastheads have been the go to place for celebrity trash on the intertubes while their print editions have increasingly adopted a tone narrowly tailored to an inner city and Eastern suburbs audience.

What we really need to be thinking about here in the new media landscape is less about ownership and more about an information and analysis commons. Part of the argument in the journos v. bloggers wars is often a reiteration of a tired meme that bloggers are parasitic on content created by journalists. Maybe so. But that’s actually ignoring something central to the information architecture of an innovative and creative economy – value is added by re-arranging, analysing and deconstructing bites of information and opening them up rather than acting as a one directional transmission point from authoritative reporter of “news” to “consumer” or “reader”. There have to be viable options other than a dependence on either the God Proprietor or the corporate megalith which professional journalists of good will and citizens can work together on facilitating.

Maybe some of these issues will be discussed at the Walkley Foundation’s Future of Journalism shinding on Brisbane on Saturday. There’s some discussion of the event here from Axel Bruns, and as Mark is one of the speakers, I’m sure he’ll be writing something about it too.