O’Neill is apparently an alumnus of some Trotskyist group or other, and like other leftie turned righties (or Euston Manifesto Decent Lefties), has remembered how to use his time honoured bag of rhetorical tricks.

This sort of argument, or very loud and repetitive non sequitur, is now the stock and trade of right wing columnists more generally.

Just as Christopher Pearson, for instance, can argue, apparently seriously, that the timing of Kevin Rudd’s aorta valve replacement is all about his continued leadership ambitions.

It’s this reductio ad absurdum set of debating maneouvres that takes on a life of its own, and sometime reveals more than it intends. This febrile ‘win at all costs’ mentality – characteristic of the culture wars – is now almost dominant across the mediascape.

So, last night, we had Brendan O’Neill arguing that journalists had to be allowed their illegality. They’re the fourth estate!

The problem is that it’s not just left libertarian gadflies who believe this. O’Neill, far from being a contrarian, is actually reflecting back at twice the size the emptiness of the Fourth Estate We Hold The State To Account excuses of the media as it thrashes around attempting to escape democratic accountability.

So, we had all the usual “ZOMG! Press Freedom!” stuff we’ve come to expect, before O’Neill was unwisely pushed into speaking the secret hidden in plain sight out loud. The press actually believes that the law does not, or should not constrain it. Or, rather, if it does, it ought to be some sort of question for pondering in newsrooms and in the arcanae of journalistic codes of ethics. “How can we get our stories?”

Sadly, there are some Australian media commentators, and I’m not thinking of News Limited ones, whose blindness to questions of democratic accountability is such that they’ve actually aired this professional view in public. It’s characteristic of a profession stripped of meaning, of future, and of purpose, a machine blindly hurtling in the only direction it knows.

It’s more charitable not to name these people. They should know better.

This is premodern.

If sovereignty is about the decision as to when the law applies and when it does not, then it must stand above law, and stand above democracy. The media seems to arrogate to itself the position of King Louis. The Enlightenment actually existed to counter this arrogance.

We’ve gone beyond ‘Quis custodiet ipsos custodes?’…

What O’Neill and his journalistic colleagues appear to argue is that it is they who determine law and right.

That is rubbish, and should be called as such.

It’s all very well to prattle on about holding the powerful to account, but the media needs to be judged by what it does, not what it says. “By their fruits you shall know them”: hacking phones, murder pr0n, tawdry celeb exposes, casual but relentless Islamophobia, ad hominem attacks on critics, “campaigning journalism” that lies and distorts. That’s what we have.

Nor is it about ‘freedom’ or ‘censorship’. A considered, judicious and measured conversation needs to occur, and might well occur by way of public inquiry, about the danger the press Leviathan poses to democracy itself. That transcends questions, trite as they are, of ‘the future of journalism’ or the prevalence of the right wing noise machine. What it goes to is how we can protect ourselves from dying dinosaurs.

It was interesting to watch, just now on ABC News 24, the press conference which followed the PM’s education policy announcements. I was somewhat heartened to see that all the questions focused on education policy, rather than on the usual “narrative” stuff. It was something of a rejoinder to Annabel Crabb’s claim that it was unduly difficult for journos to brief themselves sufficiently on policy, something I thought was far fetched, given that any intelligent listener who’s been following public debate can usually think up some salient lines of questioning (if they’re not too busy tweeting and texting).

Earlier, in the campaign, a post by GrogsGamut on the performance of the media stimulated an interchange between journos and bloggers on Twitter, something Mark wrote about here, and which journo James Massola reflected on in a piece published on Saturday.

There was less interchange on Twitter on Saturday, after a number of very forceful critiques were published in the blogosphere and alternative media of the appalling “body language”/Latham press conference in Brisbane (see Pavlov’s Cat’s guest post here, which entirely occluded any discussion of important announcements on seniors’ income support.

Some journos reacted defensively, but silence was largely the result.

I wonder, though, if the critique refracted by Twitter had some influence on the press pack improving its game today, and according to Bernard Keane, yesterday.

Update: Margaret Simons on the media’s coverage of policy.

I’ve been largely tuned out of the election campaign today, enjoying a friend’s visit and popping into town to buy a couple of books to read. So I’ve only seen two snippets of coverage – a journo, Nick Harmsen, on ABC News 24 proclaiming that Kevin Rudd and Julia Gillard’s body language at their meeting today would be “fascinating” (oh, really?) and glimpsing at my feed reader and seeing a photo of Mark Latham at the Prime Minister’s press conference. Apparently he’s a “guest reporter” for 60 Minutes.

No doubt he will be rewarded appropriately.

Contrast Latham’s involvement in this campaign with that of Paul Keating and Malcolm Fraser.

Keating gave a thoughtful and challenging speech in Melbourne this week on the media and the right to privacy. Malcolm Fraser chose the anniversary of the Hiroshima bomb to plead for better measures to confront nuclear proliferation.

Fraser, speaking on radio, indicated very clearly that he had no wish to discuss the campaign. Pressed for an answer to the question of whether he thought the Coalition ready for government, he responded with one word: “No”.

That one word received much more coverage than everything he had to say about nuclear non-proliferation.

There is a contrast here not just between individuals, but between two ages.

Anyone seeking to understand all that’s wrong with the circus this campaign has been transformed into needs to read this post by Pavlov’s Cat, which says it all, really.

Only one politician in this campaign has been honest enough to discuss the real possibility of a double-dip recession and continuing financial contagion. His name is Kevin Rudd. Otherwise, we’re oscillating between a dangerous complacency about the problems facing our nation and a crazed soap opera which is probably being tuned out by most voters.

There may well be a price to pay, one day, for our postmodern politics.

The ABC’s Annabel Crabb published a long, informative, entertaining piece at The Drum the other day, characteristically witty and meaty, in defence of journalists and their current behaviour and reportage on the campaign trail.

Much of what she is says is fair enough. But nothing she says can possibly excuse what I’ve just heard on the radio.

I got into the car and turned on the radio and there was Julia Gillard in Queensland, mid-speech, announcing the Government’s seniors policy, after what I imagine was a somewhat stressful morning meeting Kevin Rudd for the first time since she became Prime Minister. The seniors stuff sounded pretty good, mainly the improvements to the pension situation but also several other things. Jenny Macklin followed up. And then it was time for questions.

I listened for a total of just over half an hour, apart from the four and a half minutes it took me to duck into Dan Murphy on the way home, and I heard one, and only one, question, right at the end, about the policy announcement. Every single other question, asked mostly in an aggressive, smartarse, gotcha tone of voice by what sounded like a bunch of extremely young journalists (with the exception of — wait for it — Mark Latham, who was “working as a guest reporter for a commercial network”; is there no scrap of venomous f*ckwittery of which the man is not capable?) was about her meeting with Kevin Rudd, except for the ones about the presence of Mark Latham.

Wah wah wah shrouded in secrecy (actually, said Gillard, there was a TV camera and sound gear in the room) wah gotcha wah wah why didn’t you make eye contact (actually, said Gillard, just because you didn’t see something doesn’t mean it didn’t happen) wah wah gotcha blah are there really two leaders wah wah wah knifed blah blah assassinated wah wah doesn’t Mark Latham upset you blah not helping wah wah aren’t YOU having a hard time wah wah gotcha blah Kevin Rudd Kevin Rudd Kevin Rudd.

Gillard answered every single one of these aggressive, repetitive inanities with humour, patience and grace.

As someone with an 83-year old father and an older sister recently turned 60, I would have quite liked to hear some questions about the seniors policy. I didn’t think it was too much to ask. Perhaps the baby journalists thought Julia had spoken about it so clearly and in such detail that there were no questions left unanswered. But it seems more likely that they didn’t hear a word she said and were filling in time tweeting and texting till her mouth stopped moving and they could start yelling But we need to talk about Kevin!

Can anyone tell me what this appalling crap is all about? Has journalism become a matter of goading someone until they lose their temper or burst into tears? Exactly when did loss of control or bodily containment become the stuff that “news” is made of? Did any of them even realise that there were policy announcements being made? Is this the kind of scrum that produces the kind of rubbish we’re getting in the papers and on  the news? Do journalists really think that public life is a soap opera in which the only thing that matters is emotion, personalities and gossip? How much of this is being driven by the Rupert Murdochs of the world? Can you really blame the obviously extreme youth and inexperience of some of these journalists when Kerry O’Brien is doing more or less the same thing every night on The 7.30 Report? Now that journalism is something you need a university degree for, what on earth are they spending those four years teaching them? And is the Australian public really only getting the media it deserves?

Whatever the answers to these questions may be, I am bloody glad I’m not a journalist. I would be hanging my head in shame, mortification and sorrow at the untrained flea circus this once noble profession has become.

Update: [by Mark] Via Mobius Ecko in comments, here’s a link to the transcript of the press conference in question, posted by Bernard Keane at The Stump.

In her response to Oakes, Gillard batted the question away, reiterating that she never intends to discuss the events which led to her election to the leadership.

The audio of the interchange has been posted here.

One perhaps unforeseen result of the Labor leadership switch is that it increasingly appears that questions about the manner of its execution will continue to be aired in the press. A host of stories in the media this week speculate on whether Kevin Rudd is under pressure from Labor MPs to stand down from Parliament altogether, and question his future intentions and the significance of his attendance at the Australian-American Leadership Dialogue in Washington.

The media, as is their wont, find this sort of thing more interesting to write about than policy questions. And no doubt it will lead the tv news bulletins tonight.

Early signs are that it will be accompanied by a lot of moralising about “trading the Prime Minister-ship”, riffing off the Hawke-Keating deal. No doubt we’ll hear that echoed by the opposition in short order.

It’s already all over Twitter.

Talk of the contest of wills between Bob Hawke and Paul Keating is, of course, in the air at the moment, for a variety of reasons.

The danger, for Labor, is that the Coalition is promoting a narrative of instability, which reinforces their previous themes of government incompetence and backflipping. On cue, opinionistas talk up this narrative.

Joe Hockey’s appearance on Lateline on Tuesday night signalled an opposition sewing seeds of doubt about the stability of a re-elected government, and articulating this to a belief that Australians were better off under the Howard government. It’s an attempt to turn around the ‘risk’ factor that normally favours incumbents, and to negate the advantage the government has of providing reassurance and stability in a turbulent time.

Of course, the Liberal party has had four leaders in three years. But, perhaps, memories are short. Labor’s ability to remind voters of the fact that both Brendan Nelson and Malcolm Turnbull were fatally undermined, and that the spectre of a Peter Costello challenge haunted the Coalition through and beyond John Howard’s Prime Ministerial tenure, is somewhat nullified by their own leadership shift.

How does Labor counter this theme?

The extraordinary events that took place in the nation’s capital last week give us a good opportunity to get some purchase on the big questions of media. They allow us to look at what journalism is, the extent to which it has changed in recent years, and the implications for its future.

The speed and unremitting pressure of the 24-hour news cycle did play a part in the downfall of the prime minister, just as you could argue that it played a part in the rapid turnover of Liberal Party leaders that followed former prime minister John Howard’s ousting at the 2007 election.

The 24/7 tweet-now, think-later media omniverse is not the sole or even the biggest contributor, but it is surely part of the range of elements, along with the prime minister’s autocratic style, his disavowal of the ALP factions and his tendency to promise?—?and promise with religious fervour?—?more than he could deliver, that led to his demise.

Within the news cycle he was captive to the suite of competing news organisations’ opinion polls, which are reported and parsed in the kind of detail that literary critics have lavished on Shakespeare’s sonnets.

Read the rest here.

NB: I think we’ve had enough commentary on a host of threads over the last week on the merits of the leadership challenge. Please confine your threads to the specific issues raised by Ricketson on the media and its influence on politics.

Elsewhere: Tim Dunlop and Waleed Aly at The Drum.

Elsewhere: Guy Rundle.

Update: Possum has posted a stack of polling data about public views of the media.

How’s it looking by Wednesday?

I was asked on another thread about ways the government can talk over the heads of the media. I was thinking more about this, reflecting on how yesterday’s proceedings in Parliament appeared on the tv news last night.

The 125 000 readers of The Australian, as Mr Denmore observed, are a very small proportion of the electorate. They might include every single press gallery journo, but nightly grabs on the news have some considerable resonance to publics beyond the way they were framed.

Television is still, by far, the predominant source of political information for voters.

The ‘leadership’ narrative only resulted in vision of a series of Ministers and Labor MPs strongly defending Kevin Rudd. Meanwhile, the Opposition was bizarrely warning mining companies not to negotiate with the government, as Rudd pursues a more differentiated strategy to break the unity of the industry peak body and the Coalition. It’s pretty clear to anyone who thinks for a moment that the Liberals are pursuing their own interest, not the national interest. As I’ve previously remarked, they could well be left out on a limb if a deal is reached.

One other way of thinking about the recent polls, and the drift away from Labor (but not strongly to the Coalition) is of volatility in the electorate rather than a desire to punish, or vote out, the government. If that were the case, we’d expect a much stronger swing to the Liberals. Giving Labor the chance to deliver a positive message on tv is just one way the media narrative can backfire. And it’s worth remembering, once again, what Essential Research found about derisory levels of public trust in the media.

The political conjuncture is still very fluid.

And anyone reading Dennis Shanahan today would have noticed a slight shifting of the bar. It’s certainly not out of the question that the ‘media narrative’ will still collapse in the face of reality.

The holiday national road toll count was a godsend for journalists at the national news agency, AAP.

When the nation was asleep at the beach, news was at a premium. Thinly staffed radio stations around the country depended even more at these times on the steady flow of “rip and read” headlines from the wires.

So it was that the 24-hour news production desk at AAP, using a rudimentary chart on a wall, had responsibility for collating a national holiday road toll count from the individual counts of state and territory police forces.

This “death chart”, as it was called, became the hook for hundreds of largely internally generated news stories over the long, slow summer slumber.

Fresh angles could be created almost at will as overnight rewrite teams sought to freshen the file for the morning TV and radio bulletins:

* “Police are stepping up warnings over excessive speed after a spate of high-speed car crashes….”
* “The road toll is already closing in on last year’s record just three days into the holiday season….”
* “A fatality-free 24 hours on our roads has been welcomed by traffic authorities, but police say they remain on alert….”
* “A run of three fatalities on a horror stretch of road has triggered a slanging match between federal and state politicians over funding…”

It was an exercise in creating news out of very little. For sure, there were real human tragedies behind the raw death count. But telling those stories would require reporting resources and it was simply easier to conjure up a new lead by jamming together ritual phrases around the headline number.

The same effortless riffing is currently evident in the national media’s commentary on political opinion polls. It’s even easier in this case, though, because the event itself is orchestrated by the media.

Indeed, in the case of Newspoll – the most influential of the major polling organisations – a media company owns the poll. News Ltd can gear its entire editorial spin around a single number in a poll created by one of its own subsidiaries. In business, they call this vertical integration.

There is much discussion on Larvatus Prodeo and other blogs about News Ltd’s shameless political agenda. But the untold story is the economic efficiencies generated by “owning” the news.

The increasing squeeze on editorial resources in the mainstream media in the past decade is well documented. Legacies include an intensified focus on efficiency and shareholder value and a reduced sense of journalism as a “public good”. Event-driven news has been commoditised in an online world, leaving mainstream, capital-intensive outlets looking for new ways to create differentiated branded content.

These established outlets are filling the vacuum left by expensive reportorial journalism with cheap analysis and opinion built around in-house columnists.

This is why the front covers of our newspapers are now less about “what happened” and more about what someone says it all means.

News Ltd has taken this a step further by using its own Newspoll to advance its agenda. In this sense, the polling is not so much a reactive tool, but a proactive one. It drives the news cycle in such a way that journalists, once mere spectators, become actual players in the political game.

For a business organisation looking for a new business model in an online world, this makes a lot of sense. Instead of being hostage to externally-driven events that everyone can cover, you now “own” the news itself. The additional costs are very little. The polling is being done anyway. The “journalism” is just someone’s cheap opinion laid over the top.

Hence, we see The Australian dictating that the future of Rudd’s prime ministership hangs on its next Newspoll. Being so influential with such little investment is a sweet result for a margin-squeezed news organisation looking for a new reason to exist.

For an old journalist, it seems a logical extension of the holiday national road toll…..but with our own democracy as the road kill.

Editor Marni Cordell sums up the website’s achievements, and discusses its financial plight, in an editorial published this morning:

The online media environment we’re leaving is vastly different to the one in which we started. Since we launched, several mainstream opinion and analysis sites have joined us, including The Drum, Unleashed, The Punch and the National Times. Although we hope that the newspaper presses keep on clattering for decades to come, it’s clear that the role of online media outlets will only grow in the future — whatever business model they follow.

This is very sad news, as NM did indeed provide an excellent counter-point to the mainstream media, publishing stories based on genuine research and analysis and featuring a range of writers on a range of topics rarely seen in print.

Cordell writes:

The big media players are struggling to find a workable online business model that allows them to pay their writers and maintain high standards — and so are we.

We’ve noticed that too at LP. When we began taking advertising, it brought in revenue probably sufficient to support one person in frugal comfort. Now it’s pretty much running costs and beer money.

Phil Gomes, an LP blogger, has this to say at his eponymous blog:

But there can be renewal after death. What I’d like to see is all contributors to New Matilda who don’t already blog turn their energies to that form so that we can build a genuine independent new media ecosystem – one that unfortunately died before it had a chance to fully develop.

The tools are now even more refined to connect that ecosystem. Unfortunately everyone will have to get a real job, but you can’t have everything and dying for your art is a noble gesture.

I think he’s right. The NM model, though indeed run on the smell of an oily rag compared to big media, in some senses mimicked the business model of a magazine: a physical office, five or more paid staff. It’s always going to be difficult to sustain that sort of cost structure. The cost of running a blog, by contrast, is minimal – mainly consisting of the somewhat incalculable and largely unremunerated energy, passion and time of its contributors and writers.

We’ve been publishing since March 2005.

In that time, the portion of the Australian blogosphere devoted to public affairs has shrunk, with a lot of the independent blogs hoovered up by Crikey, and others leaving as their lives and priorities change. Feminist blogs remain extremely lively, but there are fewer independent voices writing about Australian electoral politics.

I’d like to see that change.

Some of us have been tossing around some ideas for some time about how we could expand the established readership of LP, and the scope of its contributors and content, in order to fill a gap I believe still exists in commentary and analysis of Australian public affairs, a gap which has just got bigger.

That’s not to diminish the value of many of the contributors and contributions to some of the sites mentioned in this post. But I do think there’s a need for independent commentary and analysis from a site which does not see itself as a media organisation, and whose energy and verve derives as much from its commenters and readers as its writers.

That wouldn’t come for free, as I think that marketing is necessary, and I also think that people’s commitment of time and knowledge has to be recognised financially. But I don’t think it necessitates replicating a model with full time paid staff and a physical space they work in.

Watch this space.

In the meantime, we’d be delighted to talk to any NM contributors who might be looking for a new outlet for their writing.

Elsewhere: Andrew Bartlett:

There has been an increase in online sources of commentary and news in recent years. As their announcement on NewMatilda.com notes, this has included sites such as The Drum (funded by the ABC), Punch (funded by News Ltd) and The National Times (funded by Fairfax media). Whilst these new sites have provided new vehicles for commentary, I believe it is still very important to have independent operators in the media and online environment.

Crikey is still rolling along as the main independent web-based source of news and views, and Online Opinion continues to provide a wide range of articles and comment each day. There is also still a number of reasonable quality blogs around which focus on social and political commentary. None the less, the pending disappearance of New Matilda will certainly leave a hole in the fabric of independent social and political commentary, which is already much too threadbare.

Elsewhere: [by Kim] Spike.

Elsewhere: [by Kim] Qed.