Some time ago, I made some observations on the significance of Kevin Rudd and Julia Gillard’s attacks on various News Limited papers, and on The Australian.
The thrust of that commentary was that – the immediate antecedents of the stoush aside – there had been a recognition in Government circles that the damage newspaper campaigns can do is much over-rated, and has significantly diminished with a change in the mediascape. This is often ascribed to the internet, but in fact – as with the misconception of the problems facing print media (which lie more with advertising income than declining sales) – its causes are both more profound and of much longer lineage. It’s more that a tipping point has finally – and belatedly – been reached where perception has caught up with reality.
Over the fold, I’ve excerpted some paragraphs (with permission) from Bernard Keane’s piece on this in today’s Crikey. It’s very much to the point, particularly the comparison with Fox News – rather than the “heart of the nation”, the News Limited flagship actually increasingly operates on a business model where a small minority of hardline partisans get their worldview catered for. Politics – in the sense of the partisan stoushing that dominates political coverage – is the concern of a very small minority of Australian voters. For all the claims about “spin”, Rudd’s message is resonating not because of some particular cleverness in its conceptualisation and execution (though that’s there) but because he’s speaking to a mass electorate using the only mass media available – radio and tv – and speaking to concerns that are real. That needs to be recognised.
Political media FAIL
Richard Farmer:
… and that’s the same press gallery which will pontificate, at the drop of a hat, about the noble role of the fourth estate in ensuring government accountability.
Let’s combine Farmer’s take with some other recent commentary.
George Megalogenis:
With the exception of the claim about “public demand for scrutiny”, which wrongly elides the expression of public opinion with what is refracted or created by the press (and that’s the big problem), Megalogenis is right (and he himself is often a notable and praiseworthy exception to the rule).
Greg Craven, ACU’s Vice-Chancellor, writing in the Fin Review the other day, observed that governments, at some time in the 1980s, decided to use all the resources at their command to destroy oppositions through the media. Whether or not there was some sort of golden age of political journalism in Australia prior to that, I’m too young to say (though I doubt it). But these sorts of diagnoses, while close to the mark, beg the question of the complicity of the media in all this – as do frenzied attacks on Rudd spin.
The foolishness of the federal opposition in destroying itself through the pages of The Australian (and surely Joe Hockey would be just next in line to be torn down by the punditariat, as a moderate) also points to the “inside the beltway” phenomenon – as does some of the weird jargon and the general outlook of Paul Kelly’s The March of Patriots, which entirely identifies his perspective with that of the “political class”. The public are walk on extras, represented only by proxy through that poll News Limited owns. Live by the media, die by the media.
Is it any wonder, as Bernard Keane remarked fairly wryly the other day, that no one much outside the self-same political class listens to this stuff anymore?
The big unanswered question is whether something else will come along to fill the gaping hole in serious discussion of public affairs. For all the best will in the world, various ’spheres’ and ‘verses’ (blogosphere, twitterverse, and so on) just aren’t resourced well enough to do it.