Tag Archive for 'punditariat'

The ABC of Drumming up some online opinion analysis

Published
by
Mark
2 months ago
in Media and The Web
. 27 Comments

When the ABC’s Drum was launched, Margaret Simons cited a piece by Media Watch host Jonathan Holmes on internal discussions of ABC journos writing opinion pieces, which I referred to in this post:

Simons then looks at the cult(ure) of personality attached to high profile journos, and questions whether non-witty, non-pretty, non-Tweeting writers are perhaps missing out in a new age of “audience engagement”. She also worries about objectivity, which is another distinction which is hard to maintain.

I was thinking about this again yesterday, prompted partly by the renewed criticism of the right wing balancing act on the ABC, and partly by a snippet from a Crikey reader (more of that later). Annabel Crabb also popped up to discuss her practice as a ‘political sketch writer’ [deconstructed here by Andrew Elder]. Continue reading ‘The ABC of Drumming up some online opinion analysis’

Tony Abbott and the God question

Published
by
Mark
3 months, 1 week ago
in Culture, Media, Politics, Religion and Sociology
. 88 Comments

The first few days of Tony Abbott’s leadership have seen a concerted effort by the conservative commentariat to decry any criticism of his reactionary policies on women’s rights and social issues as ‘anti-Catholic’.

A number of points need making about this trope:

(a) Abbott is, of course, not the first federal leader of the Liberal party to be a Catholic. Sectarianism was definitely a factor in the largely Protestant and bourgeois parties of the centre right in the past, and there may be residual effects within the Liberal party itself. It’s worth remembering that Malcolm Turnbull is a Catholic, and this issue (as far as I can recall) was never highlighted during his leadership.

However, Tony Abbott is the first leader to be associated with a particular style of political Catholicism – one which, some decades ago, would have been much more closely associated with the DLP (and indeed still has influence within various ALP right factions and unions). Outside the circles around Cardinal George Pell this sort of neo-grouper politics has little influence in Australian Catholicism itself. Australian Catholics are less unified politically than in the days of sharper religious and political cleavages, and while social justice Catholicism is also a living tradition, my own view is that the post Vatican II Catholic Church is much less politicised with respect to the broader community. That holds less for those who are identified with Pope Benedict’s ‘reform of the reform’, but here, there is often a significant disjunction between Papal social teaching in some areas and an ensemble of conservative social and political positions held by the Pontiff’s Antipodean warriors.

In short, the interface of religion and politics has itself been affected by a secularisation within Australian culture, which is powerfully related to a dissolution of modernist political battle lines.

(b) This fracturing of a largely unitary theological and political constellation is reflected in, and in turn, influenced by a different way of seeing the imperatives of religion for acting within culture. Guy Rundle has summed it up thus: Continue reading ‘Tony Abbott and the God question’

“Ghosts go along with us to the end…”

Published
by
Mark
4 months, 4 weeks ago
in Howardia and Polls
. 41 Comments

So, what happens if the Opposition, and their media echo chambers, tried every Howardian trick in the book, and nothing worked?

Possum explains the significance of the latest polling numbers:

With the phone poll average in the sidebar now showing 109 seats going to Labor were the latest round of phone polls repeated at an election, there must be some pretty nervous Coalition marginal and not so marginal seat holders.

Look back at the tactics of the Opposition over the last few months where every card from the Howard era was played. Rising Interest Rates…. tick. Labor’s debt…. tick. Boat People….. tick.

It’s like that episode of the Simpsons where Lisa tests the difference in learning capability between a hamster and Bart. Sure the cupcake is electrified, sure every time he tries to grab it he gets shocked – after a few tries even a hamster would learn – but Bart keeps grabbing away time and time again, hoping that this time he won’t be zapped. Hoping this time it will be different.

When you change governments you change the country – as Keating said, but the national zeitgeist also changes with it and pulling these old cards out from the Oppo benches is a roadmap to failure.

Meanwhile, Essential Research finds 66% of respondents rating the Rudd government’s performance in handling the Global Financial Crisis as good or excellent. But over at The Australian, they’re banging on about the Liberal leadership, and declaiming:

…debt and deficit are now a concern of most Australians…

Oh. Really?

Elsewhere: Bernard Keane.

Political media FAIL

Published
by
Mark
5 months, 1 week ago
in Media and Politics
. 23 Comments

Richard Farmer:

No government this morning. For the first time since I have been preparing the breakfast media wrap for Crikey I could not find a story to list this morning that quoted a Federal Government Minister. The whole attention of the news media is now concentrated just where Kevin Rudd and his team want it to be — on the Opposition. The press gallery really does have itself in a feeding frenzy as it stirs the leadership challenge pot. The only observation I can add is that surely Joe Hockey is not so silly as to succumb to entreaties from his colleagues to take over. He has no more chance of unifying what is now a rabble than does Malcolm Turnbull.

… 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:

Consider climate change, which Rudd says is the greatest moral challenge of our time. I could count on one hand the number of journalists who are across the detail of the government’s Carbon Pollution Reduction Scheme. (I am not one of them.) This is not for want of trying on the government’s part; it needs the public aroused so it can intimidate the opposition into passing the scheme through the Senate.

But the media can’t hold this policy conversation long enough for the community to have any sense of how their lives would change and how the economy would function. I can’t think of a bigger reform that has generated so little public demand for scrutiny.

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.

Turnbull, Hockey or Abbott?

Published
by
Mark
5 months, 1 week ago
in Media and Politics
. 94 Comments

It looks rather like the Liberals are going with the Gadarene swine option. If Joe Hockey becomes leader, then no doubt it will be characterised as a “save the furniture” tactic. But how persuasive is a party that will have churned through three leaders in three years, and is now crumpling in the face of a campaign led by climate change denialists and newspaper pundits (who are pretty much the same people, when you think about it)?

I wonder if Kevin’s picked out an ambassadorship for Malcolm yet.

Peter Hartcher gets it right in the SMH:

THE Coalition has entered a cycle of despair over its leadership. The more a frustrated Malcolm Turnbull tries to assert his authority, the more Coalition MPs carp about him to reporters.

The more they carp about him, the more the media report on the Coalition’s problems.

And the more the media report on them, the harder it becomes for Turnbull to talk to the public about anything other than his leadership.

The worse the funk becomes, the worse the Coalition’s poll numbers become.

And there is nothing like poor polling to make MPs anxious and angry at their leader. The cycle begins anew.

It is a cycle many failing leaders have discovered, to their dismay. The leader cannot land a blow on the Government because, as one Liberal remarked this week: ”We’ve successfully made it all about us.”

… And the one point that the Liberals just don’t perceive:

A new Liberal leader would break the party out of its cycle of despair, but it would face the same problem. The problem has a name. Kevin.

I still think the Liberals don’t get it. The baseline assumption appears to be that their appalling poll numbers are all about them, and there’s some natural centre of gravity which will exert its pull, if only they get rid of their leader.

Who would want to lead this mob? Is it even possible?

Legacy wars

Published
by
Mark
6 months ago
in Books, Writers & Writing, Economics, History, Howardia, Industrial Relations, Media and Politics
. 30 Comments

It was the political debate of last week, and we missed it. But that’s ok – so did most of the rest of the population, I would imagine. The columns of The Australian were full of the ‘legacy wars’ – arising out of Kevin Rudd’s speech at the launch of Paul Kelly’s new book. Rudd argued that – contrary to Kelly’s thesis of a similarity between John Howard and Paul Keating as ‘patriots’ working to modernise Australia along a similar path – that the Howard government had left little in the way of a nation building legacy. This promptly prompted rantings about his hypocrisy (because he’d argued that the history wars were done with when launching Thomas Kenneally’s book), claims that conservative dissent was being repressed, and … well, Rudd appears to have learnt the trick of making the punditariat and the Liberal frontbench rant on cue. Useful politically, that one.

It also probably contributed to the demand – within the Liberal party – to ’stand for something’, which is apparently code for ‘defending the Howard legacy’. This theme inspired Turnbull to get ahead of the pack and raise the tattered banner of individual work contracts. Not so useful politically, that one.

Those interested in the merits of this debate, as opposed to the sound and fury, might find Mungo McCallum’s contribution interesting:

It’s all Kevin Rudd’s fault. Here we are, nearly two years out of the Howard years and happily consigning them to well-deserved oblivion.

And then Rudd has to mention the war; and of course John Howard and Peter Costello lurch out of the political cemetery to boast about the size and quality of their tombstones and pretend they are not really dead after all, and Malcolm Turnbull feels that he has to join in and defend the two people in the world he most wants to forget. Such is the level of discussion in contemporary Australia.

The Liberals’ two hour strategy

Published
by
Mark
6 months, 1 week ago
in Media and Politics
. 38 Comments

In discussing Joe Hockey’s latest musings on the need for tens of billions of dollars of spending cuts yesterday, I wondered whether the Libs had conceded the next election, and were trying to position themselves for the one after. I also speculated that it might just be random, and that to imagine that the opposition had a coherent political strategy might be to impose a bit too much form on chaos.

There’s an interesting piece by Alister Drysdale in Business Spectator this morning, which rips into the Liberals:

There is no sign whatsoever of alternative public policy – just oppose. For Rudd, Gillard and Wayne Swan the Opposition modus operandi – exemplified by Question Time idiocy – must give them not a moment’s lost sleep. They’ve been lashed by the proverbial wet tram ticket, and feel no pain. And for that, we all lose.

I don’t know Drysdale’s work, but it’s interesting to see this sort of critique in a publication targeted at a business/finance readership. The alienation between business and their natural political allies is one of the most interesting and least analysed stories of the Rudd incumbency.

It’s also ironic to see John Howard ’stirring from his sick bed’ to denounce Labor in opposition for, well, opposing. (Not that I think the great debate Dennis Shanahan and his mates claim is occurring on Kevin Rudd’s latest red rag to the bulls is pre-occupying public attention).

For all the claims from the Libs and their media mates that Rudd and co are pre-occupied by the media cycle, it’s clear that Labor has successfully laid down a narrative and shaped public opinion. Drysdale’s argument is that the Liberals are narcissistically obsessed with popping up on Sky News and tweeting to political tragics, and have eschewed all the things oppositions should do in favour of playing to the press gallery’s short attention span. He’s right.

No wonder the polls never perceptibly budge.

Rudd vs. The Australian

Published
by
Mark
7 months ago
in Media, Politics and Sociology
. 59 Comments

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.

Continue reading ‘Rudd vs. The Australian‘

Newspoll: Labor 54-46

Published
by
Mark
1 year, 1 month ago
in Economics, Media and Polls
. 15 Comments

Late last year, I observed that the final Newspoll of the year was “probably an outlier” (Labor’s 2PP lead was 59-41). I also observed that the pundits and the more excitable members of the political class would nevertheless take it seriously, and while we’ve been spared the leadership speculation (unless you count the Barnaby Joyce speculation), we’ve also been spared any real reflection on the continued electoral weakness of the Coalition. And that looks set to continue with the first Newspoll of 2009, as The Poll Bludger reports:

The first Newspoll survey after the end-of-year break shows the Coalition recovering to 54-46 after the shock 59-41 result of December 9. The Australian spruiks this as the Coalition clawing back support, but a more likely explanation is that the previous poll was a rogue. Kevin Rudd’s lead as preferred prime minister is down from 66-19 to 60-22.

Get ready, I guess, for more of the same old same old from the ever astute punditariat.

Of much more interest for the fortunes of political war, I’d suggest, are the findings from the Essential Research survey. Not the ones about the enduring love people supposedly have for Howard (and The Poll Bludger has some good points to make on this one too), but the findings about people’s confidence in the resilience of their financial position. I think it’s still moot as to whether we’re going to be in recession this year, but it’s worth remembering that not everyone does badly in a financial downturn. The government, at any rate, will be banking on that, and hoping that the optimism displayed in this survey is warranted.

Update: Possum, who also thinks the volatility in Newspoll compared to the relatively static trend in other polls suggests the last one was an outlier, makes a number of interesting observations. Aside from discussing the number of uncommitted and refused respondents, he trains his eye on Malcolm Turnbull’s numbers:

Looking at Truffle’s Net sAtisfaction ratings, since he gained the leadership the gap between his raw net satisfaction and his net satisfaction with undecideds removed has closed while simultanously having his raw net satisfaction ratings drop. This means that as people have made up their mind about Turnbull, more of them have been dissatisfied with his perfomance than were satisfied, on balance. It’s not a dramatic movement, but it’s there and it’s something he probably needs to keep an eye on – it’s certainly not as bad as Nelson’s ratings where the undecideds were actually holding up his raw net satisfaction ratings.

Update: Just caught up with this post from Possum giving a breakdown on the financial and job security numbers.

Newspoll: Labor 59-41

Published
by
Mark
1 year, 3 months ago
in Media and Polls
. 39 Comments

… and Malcolm Turnbull is approaching Brendan Nelson territory with the PPM at 66-19 in Kevin Rudd’s favour. Of course, political scientists know leadership isn’t that big a factor (and Turnbull’s inability to patch over the same divisions that plagued Brendan Nelson demonstrates that) and this poll may be a bit of an outlier anyway, but in the world of perception, this is the measure the press gallery have anointed. I imagine that it’ll allow them to play their favourite game of leadership speculation over summer. Last Christmas holidays, the Liberals were (supposedly) giving some attention to their long term structural problems. Maybe that was the shock of defeat, a defeat that as they regained their cockiness, they seem to have forgotten. Far too prematurely.

Live by the sword…

Published
by
Mark
1 year, 3 months ago
in Media and Politics
. 29 Comments

Julie Bishop’s been copping it from unnamed “senior Liberals” for her poor performance as shadow Treasurer, who’ve helpfully implied Malcolm Turnbull shares their worries, and suggested a few names to replace her (Dutton, Robb, Hockey) for good measure.

While Bishop has been massively unconvincing in the Treasury portfolio, it’s not only the Deputy Leader who should be concerned over this latest outburst of leaks to The Australian. Malcolm Turnbull and the rest of the Libs should also recall that Brendan Nelson was brought down as much by the constant dripfeed of negative stories to their mates in the press gallery, as by his own hapless efforts as Leader. What is now being done to Bishop (and the articles have been cleverly framed to keep the “narrative” alive for quite a while – by forcing her putative replacements to deny an interest, and thus further fuel the story) could be done to Turnbull tomorrow. As if to lay down a few markers, Peter Van Onselen published an otherwise bizarre op/ed on Saturday praising Peter Costello as the best available leader.

I’ve observed before that the opposition’s coziness with the press gallery does them no favours. It shouldn’t be too difficult to find a way of resolving problems internally rather than in newspaper columns.

Rudd one year on

Published
by
Mark
1 year, 3 months ago
in Government, Howardia, Policy and Politics
. 111 Comments

Well, having opened a thread that perhaps proves that Ute Man is still out there but not actually supporting Emo Man, it behoves me, I guess, to have a bit of a say about the tenure of the Rudd government to date. To some degree all these sorts of anniversaries are somewhat artificial, as you can easily see in the United States with the fetish of the “first hundred days”. Governments will eventually be judged by the electorate in due season, as Kevin Rudd would say, and as almost all politicians intone (particularly those who are dissatisfied with their contemporary popularity), in the end they will be judged by history – whose verdict is perhaps as mythical as the Judgement of Paris, but never mind that. However, as I was suggesting, if politics and public discussion is cruelled by the vagaries and obsessions of an ever shorter media cycle, a year really is a long time in government, and it is worth taking stock.

It can also be interesting to compare first term governments at this stage of the electoral cycle, and here the obvious contrast – despite all the media beatups – is the absence of major scandal and ministerial resignations compared to both the Hawke and Howard governments. That doesn’t, of course, imply that all the Labor ministers are fabulous, but it is worth observing.

One of the things that’s interested me in the discussion that had already began quite a while before we reached the actual milestone is that in both comments on this blog and in conversations with some friends I’ve seen the sentiment expressed that simply avoiding hearing a daily litany of horrors from the Howard crew is Rudd’s greatest achievement. It might, and no doubt will, be objected that – “lefties would say that, wouldn’t they?” But I think there are a couple of points here. First, there is no doubt that a government with a more humanitarian tinge and an appreciation of propriety and ethics is to be welcomed, and that sentiment – along with the promise keeping – will be a contributor to Labor’s continuing lead in the polls. Secondly, I think The Howard Years has been interestingly timed to stimulate some comparison and to reinforce the whole sense of relief that we don’t have that turgid mob to kick around any more.

But, again, one thing that wore out the Coalition’s welcome with the electorate was the constant “rabbits out of the hat” and the whole bag of divisive tricks, along with the internal ructions and the cockiness of ministers. I agree that the Liberals are still playing at the same game in many ways. John Howard was elected in 1996 as a safe pair of hands and the Libs were “the party of order”, if you like. By the end of their fourth term, they looked like the risky and unsafe proposition and Kevin Rudd’s calm demeanour undoubtedly contributed much to Labor’s victory. WorkChoices was also probably the biggest single mistake the Coalition made, and the related apprehension that worse would follow and more leadership instability also condemned the Howard government to defeat.

But what of policy, and that shibboleth beloved of the punditariat, “the narrative”? Continue reading ‘Rudd one year on’

He’s tanned, rested, and ready to lead!

Published
by
Kim
1 year, 4 months ago
in Media and Polls
. 27 Comments

Newspoll has Labor on 55% 2PP (up 1 point, within the MOE). Kevin Rudd is on 62% (up 3) on the PPM to Malcolm Turnbull’s 22% (down 3).

Brendan Nelson peaked at 16%.

The Opposition Organ says:

But it remains substantially higher than his predecessor Brendan Nelson.

How substantial is substantial, I wonder?

Continue reading ‘He’s tanned, rested, and ready to lead!’

US election: Yes we can!

Published
by
Mark
1 year, 4 months ago
in Activism, Blogging, Elections, Foreign Elections, Media, Polls, Sociology, Technology and USA
. 16 Comments

Image of spontaneous street celebrations in Harlem courtesy of matt semel at flickr – reproduced under a Creative Commons licence.

No doubt one of the big stories about the US election will be the influence of the blogosphere and the netroots. In many ways, the rise of the intertubes in politics was an unintended consequence of the Rove approach to politics, as Publius perceives:

The bigger story is that this same anger – this same frustration – has led liberals to organize in more numerous and consequential ways. In the last few years, we’ve seen new think tanks. We’ve seen blogs flower. We’ve seen the rise of media sites like TPM and Huffington with real journalistic chops. We’ve seen unprecedented efforts to register and canvass voters.

In short, we’ve seen a new energy driving liberals back to politics.

In an opinion piece at ABC Online, Barry Saunders sums up the changes that net based activism and citizen journalism have wrought:

The impact of social media on this election has been enormous. Whoever takes office will have to deal with widely available factchecking data, embarrassing videos, rabid wingnuts, opinionated bloggers and TV hosts, and a massive number of new voters and donors who feel they have invested in the American political process – as well as two wars and a collapsing economy. Here’s hoping they know what they’re doing.

Continue reading ‘US election: Yes we can!’

The future of journalism – or its vanishing present

Published
by
Mark
1 year, 5 months ago
in Media and Sociology
. 0 Comments

As a supplement to my post on the Walkley Foundation Future of Journalism event I recently spoke at in Brisbane, here’s a link to the thoughts of my colleague and co-panelist Axel Bruns.