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].

This is what an anonymous writer in Crikey‘s tips and rumours section had to say yesterday:

Notwithstanding the important role played by ex-Crikey editor Jonathan Green, the ABC’s new journos’ play pen The Drum is a lacklustre affair, which seems to be based on the assumption that anyone who can talk can write and vice versa, thus newspaper writers have become broadcasters and broadcasters are writing columns and opinion pieces. Is this the new journalism?

Annabel Crabb, who earned something of a reputation as a perky sketch writer for Fairfax, is now making regular appearances on ABC local radio shows to update listeners on “what’s going on in Canberra”. Clearly nobody thought to give her a few tips on how to be a broadcaster, so her Q&As with such luminaries as Steve Cannane and Richard Glover have been peppered with elongated “ums” and “ahs” and other irritating hesitations to the point where she sounds as dull as the ever-grey Michelle Grattan on Radio National Breakfast show.

It’s sad, but one wonders why those who dreamed up The Drum really thought that ABC online users would want to read the writings of “top” broadcasters such as Tony Eastley, Leigh Sales, Jonathan Holmes, Mark Colvin (probably one of the few who can write) et al. It’s a sort of media junkies’ dump bin that assumes we all want to read what these people have to say — and most of that is about “the future of journalism” — although it seems to be a generation of has-beens trying to prove they are with it.

Time for a generational change, but the ABC has not invested much in training young talent in the arts of writing or broadcasting, so the online venture will remain frumpish and dull. The only place where the real money is going is to is the cutesy Kids TV channel expensively promoted as a funky lolly show with sparky young teeny presenters doing that jump-and-grin thing that was all the go when the Dave Clark Five were trying to oust the Beatles.

There was a time when the ABC was ahead, but as each new CEO takes over, they behave as if talking up the future and associating the brand with “new technology” as if the ABC really understood it.

Whether or not you agree with this critique (and I just post, not endorse, unless noted otherwise), there are a couple of real issues here.

I was also thinking about Chris Uhlmann’s dire performance as the summer host of the 7 30 report. I tend to think of Uhlmann as a bit of a shill for the News Limited commentariat line du jour, and as one of those journos who believes that it’s appropriate to adopt a post of ‘above the fray’ irony and cynicism. His predecessor as the 7 30 Report’s political editor, Michael Brissenden, was much the same. But, whether you agree with that or not, I think it’s reasonably uncontroversial to say that as someone trained in the craft of a radio reporter, he doesn’t really do tv interviewing very well. So, while it’s highly fashionable at all levels in ABC news and current affairs to suggest that journos have to be able to cross various media, I don’t think it’s as easily said or done.

Secondly, we can circle back to the point about journalist as celebrity that Simons made. While various ABC types might have more followers on Twitter than the average Joelle or Joe, that doesn’t necessarily mean that they’re the most authoritative analysts around.

There are some real questions for the ABC to ponder, I’d suggest, which need a much deeper, well, analysis, than Mark Scott’s techno-cheersquad provides.

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:

There are three dominant ideas of God in Christianity at the moment. Leaving aside literal protestant fundamentalists, the division between the other two runs right through the middle of the Roman Catholic church. On the one side are those who believe that God may be a real entity, but cannot be expressed in human terms?—?and consequently the idea that God might have firm views on homosexuality, condoms, evolution, traditional aboriginal culture etc is a category error. On the other is the idea that God has a more knowable form with whom a dialogue of sorts is possible?—?if not exactly a Grandpa in the Sky, God can be thought of in terms sufficiently assimilable to humanity to make the pronoun “He” a meaningful one.

The division is not around the unique divinity of Jesus Christ, but around whether the creation of a specific moral and political order is a business of humans left to do it by themselves, or one in which God’s will and law can be interpreted and acted on.

Our society and politics is overwhelmingly of the first belief. It is a widespread belief that underlies the Australian polity as a humanist one. Tony Abbott is part of the second formation, and it is perfectly legitimate to pin him to the wall on it.

Writing as a Catholic committed to a left wing politics, I would want to complicate that a little – for instance, the question of the Divine and personhood is more complex – but it’s an accurate social diagnosis. I’d also observe in passing that the more universalist perspective on the Divine is also one that Joe Hockey made his own (in a recent speech which is better thought through than most of its detractors grant). However, I’d agree with Rundle’s conclusion – and add to it the point that targeting Abbott as if he were solely representative of Catholicism or God is both wrong and politically counter-productive. It’s, in fact, the mirror image of his own self-conception.

(c) Rundle also raises the spectre of right wing ressentiment and victimology in an interesting discussion of the populist politics of the right. Again, it’s worth remembering that Tony Abbott and the conservative commentariat are not the ‘representatives’ of Catholics in the pews (or the much greater number who kneel in pews only very occasionally, if at all); and that the much taunted Liberal ‘base’ is in one sense correct in assuming the rhetorical position of victimised minority – the minority bit.

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.

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.

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?

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.

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.

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.

The broader context to the feud, however, is that this is a Government which has learnt from and gone well beyond the example John Howard set in his media communication. Howard, who was burnt by the incessantly negative coverage he received from the Press Gallery in his first stint as Opposition Leader, refined the art of going over the heads of the Press Gallery and communicating directly with voters, primarily via AM radio.

Rudd has gone much further, embracing any medium that allows him an unfiltered opportunity to convey a tightly-constructed, and highly repetitive, message. FM radio, long essays and light entertainment programs, as well as regular appearances on AM radio programs like Neil Mitchell, are favoured by Rudd. Rudd and his team are focussed on ensuring they control the content of the handful of seconds’ attention most voters give to politics each day — and shape events when voters are fully tuned in.

There’s also the basic media reality that newspapers carry only a fraction of the significance of commercial television news. The Australian sells around 140,000 copies each weekday. The Seven, Nine and Ten network news bulletins, which all use the same Canberra-generated political content no matter where the licensee is located, can offer audiences many multiples of that each night; in Seven’s case, up to 1.4m people on a weeknight.

It was instructive that on the night of Monday 22 June, after the Grech email had been revealed as a fake, Rudd went live on Nine News, and then Today Tonight — another million-plus audience. It gave him a mass audience platform to get out an unfiltered message attacking Turnbull.

Newspapers are influential with other journalists and “inside the beltway” but are no longer a viable means of mass communication for politicians even if they were disposed to use them. They’re a wide-scale boutique media form, a relic from a more literate and less visually-oriented society.

One of the traditional roles of the media in political journalism — in some ways, the entire raison d’etre of the Press Gallery — is to act as intermediaries between politicians and voters. That role is being rendered irrelevant as this Government, even more than its predecessor, pursues a communication strategy in which the Press Gallery is only one of many communication tools and, having a mind of its own, generally not the preferred one.

In that mix, newspapers can offer specific benefits — they can run long-form essays, for example — but don’t even provide a mass audience anymore. Moreover, the audience they deliver, being better-educated and better-informed than most voters, are far less susceptible to spin and propagandising.

It may be that Rudd shares the view of Jeff Blodgett, the Obama campaign director who visited Australia to speak at the ALP National Conference at the end of July. I asked Blodgett about the impact of conservative media. His view was that they simply fulfil their business model, which is to serve a conservative base, and have minimal impact beyond that.

Blodgett had in mind Fox News, but the same reality check applies to The Australian, whose readership is smaller, older, richer, more white-collar and more male than even other newspapers. The Prime Minister may feel having an ongoing feud with a media outlet like that is never going to hurt him.

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.