The Failed Estate

Excess Baggage

2012-02-16T22:17:00.010+11:00

Politics is a television medium. It has been for nearly 50 years. But TV has changed in that time. Artifice in the aid of the entertainment was formerly tolerated. Now, thanks to the 'reality' TV phenomenon, we seek out representations of 'authenticity'. Guess what happens to politics?

The driver of the reality television phenomenon is well known. Starved of funding and their business model broken, networks experimented with cheap and cheerful drama formats that needed neither writers nor actors - just an 'unscripted' competition franchise that pitted desperate amateurs against each other.

Of course, it didn't take too long for savvy participants in these shows - dating back to Survivor, Big Brother, The Weakest Link and Australian Idol - to crack the key to on-screen longevity: Appeal to the broadest possible audience without appearing to be trying; in other words achieve scripted 'authenticity'.

These days, we are all sophisticated viewers of reality TV. We know the scenarios are heavily formatted. The only really unpredictable element is the ability of participants to work within the artificial constructs while conveying in some sense - however desperate - an element of how 'real' they are.

Now cast your mind to Canberra - The Big House - and the 150 or so participants thrown together after each election to see who emerges as media winners in a competition that's all about doing politics without being seen to do politics. Who do you think is winning that race?

The story so far: In the red team, Julia Gillard "lied" about the carbon tax to gain power. And she backstabbed popular Kevin before that to stay in the show. In the blue team, Tony Abbot is just as duplicitous, but is somehow getting away with it. We know he can't wind back the carbon tax and restore the private health insurance rebate and subsidise brown coal producers and grant universal un-means-tested maternity leave - while providing a sizable surplus - without telling a few porkies. But we've collectively decided that blokey Tony is the authentic housemate while shifty, backstabber Julia's the fibber. So Julia is heading out of the house and Tony's staying on.

Mainstream media journalists - pofacedly locked into their modernist scripted role as 'independent' intermediaries - play along with this charade because they are part of the show themselves (often without realising it). And even if they are sufficiently self-aware to see how redundant it is to have 'observors' when everyone can see what's going on backstage in real-time, they can't really afford to give up the pretence because it keeps them employed and gives them access.

Colour writers like Annabel Crabb represent a belated rearguard stab at post-modernism by the ABC (always about six steps behind intellectual fashion) to get behind the curtain with the political actors and wink at the audience, but her self-consciously ironic schtick is just a little too cute and self-satisfied to fill the subversive role it is clearly designed to be.

That leaves the rest of us on Twitter, sparring with a mainstream media contingent, who tribally circle the wagons while loudly proclaiming pretending that they are the professionals and the insiders and the rest of us are hopeless amateurs unaware of how politics really works.

It should be clear to anyone with any instinct for these things that the media and political culture, as it has been played now for about 40 years, is exhausted, burnt out, past its use-by date. At the same time, the ideological season is turning - the accepted wisdom about 'free' markets always being right and politicians being inferior judges of risk and opportunity than those supposed 'captains of industry' (in reality salaried managers with little skin in the game either) has been ripped to shreds by the global financial crisis. Dead political paradigm. Dead economic one too.

While we wait for what comes next, we are all left watching the reality show called contemporary politics - two teams of alpha individuals playing up their minimal differences and trying to win us over as authentic, while the ~~Fourth~~ Failed Estate seeks desperately to convince us all that somehow it means something.

It's excess baggage. We just haven't woken up to it.

Groundhog Days and Shadow Plays

2012-02-06T21:53:00.010+11:00

Just back from the US, where alongside the endless Republican primary circus and The Madonna of the Superbowl Festival, the media was preoccupied by Groundhog Day, in which the likely length of winter is prognosticated by a rodent.

In a tradition introduced to the wider world by the 1993 Bill Murray movie, journalists crowd around a creature known as 'Punxsutawney Phil', whose ability to see his own shadow is seen as a sign of how long the winter will last. In this case, furry Phil did see his shadow on coming out of his hole, which was taken to mean spring is another six weeks away.

Returning to Australia and looking at the headlines here, it struck me how our own Fourth Estate plays a version of Groundhog Day, relentlessly calibrating the body language of frightened Labor backbenchers as they emerge from caucus meetings and prime ministerial barbecues to judge just how long the Gillard winter will last. Whispered off-the-record asides of disgruntlement and mutinous murmurings from marginal seat-holders become the basis for that classic mode of Canberra journalese - sentences with inanimate subjects: "Speculating is intensifying..."; "Pressure is growing..."; "A showdown is looming...".

You may well ask where is the news in that. In journalism school, they teach you that news is about what's new, what's novel, what's unusual, what's changed. But we have been hearing this story now for more than a year - Disenchantment with Gillard as PM is growing on Labor's backbench and if the poll numbers don't turn soon, a challenge is ON. So a few weeks of political and policy events are allowed to run, a fresh round of opinion poll fodder is generated, a fresh round of leaking ensues and the cycle begins again. Does anyone else feel the urge to tell the press gallery to just shut up and let us know when something really is happening? Or perhaps, editors just need to tell reporters they'll stop running the story unless the mutinous backbenchers go on the record? This is an olde journalistic tradition BTW. You quote people ON the record, because going off the record just allows them to manipulate events without taking any responsibility. (Yes, yes, but what about Watergate and whistleblowers, I hear you say. My answer is that leadership scuttlebutt is usually self-serving for all parties involved and doesn't tell the public very much at all).

Think I'm being unfair? The Courier Mail just over a year ago, without quoting anyone in particular, was telling us the flood levy (remember that?) was set to "define" Gillard's leadership. A couple of weeks later, Dennis Shanahan in The Australian reported that Newspoll had found voters actually backed the s flood levy, although support for both Labor and Gillard had gone backwards. Also just on a year ago, AAP dutifully reported Opposition health spokesman Peter Dutton as saying that Gillard's federal-state healthcare reforms could "make or break" her leadership (Well blow me down) . As it happened, the deal went through. But The Advertiser (Feb 15, 2011) subsequently reported that despite those reforms, "falling numbers may doom Gillard". In late February, 2011, The Herald Sun reported that Gillard was staking "her political future on the ultimate carbon mission". Lots of backbench murmurings again. None on the record. As we now know, the reform went through. And on and on it goes. Gillard proposes reform, is criticised as being foolish and reckless, gets reform through, poll numbers don't turn, media whips her with the chosen narrative, fuelled by loose lipped, unnamed MPs. In the meantime, the real business of government goes barely reported.

Another rule of political journalism is that if the news doesn't match the narrative, you choose the "news" that does fit. So Dennis Shanahan was telling us by July last year that poor polling was the symptom, not the cause of Labor's plight. The cause, he said, was lousy policy implementation. Really? In the past five years, Labor has, among other things, implemented a fiscal stimulus identified by the IMF as world's best practice, enacted groundbreaking healthcare reform, sought to lower the cost and improve the transparency of superannuation and financial advice, and instituted a carbon pricing program that had eluded governments for years. So on one view from the media, Gillard was doomed by poor polling despite good reform and on the other she was doomed because of lousy reform. Do you get a sense here they are making it up?

What the general public often doesn't appreciate about journalists is they can prove to be very reluctant to desert a preferred narrative or framing device for the news if it's one that proves successful and one that allows them to hunt efficiently as a pack. In fact, this interpretation of every event in terms of a single frame or meme is identified by veteran Guardian journalist Malcolm Dean, in his recent book "Democracy Under Attack: How the Media Distort Policy and Politics", as one of the seven deadly sins of modern journalism.

"A familiar scene takes place once a social policy departmental briefing has concluded," Dean says. "As the minister leaves, the journalists get together. Some times in one group, some times in at least two: tabloid and old broadsheet. They swap and check quotes with each other and then discuss “what’s the story?”. (This is) driven by two factors: the intense competition between papers along with the insecurity of journalists. They don’t want an 11 pm call from their night news desks asking why they are leading with story A when all the other papers have opted for story B."

This kind of fevered group think is easier when your time is short, your resources limited, your staff stretched and your editors impatient to feed the insatiable sausage machine. And keep in mind, also, that journalism has lost its specialists in recent years. Formerly, there were health reporters and science reporters and environment reporters. Now, with the loss of the old "rounds" people (who understood the nuances of policy and what was new) everything is about the politics and insider talk. And not the real politics mind you - the politics by interest groups behind the scenes - but politics at the very top of the tree between individual personalities. It's politics as an end in itself. Dean describes it thus:

"In the last decade as editorial budgets have been squeezed with the downturn in advertising and reduction in sales, there has been an accelerating trend of cutting specialist reporters. Policy is complicated. News desk editors don’t like too much complication. (So) political reporting through bi-focal lens can produce a more simplified story: who’s for and who’s against."

This is exactly what we are seeing in Australia now. Major reforms that affect all of us are going under-reported or poorly reported, while the press gallery focuses all of its considerable attention on a single groundhog. So much is going on below the surface of our politics; so much that is real and significant. Yet the only question our press pack wants to ask is whether Julia will last till winter. There may be a real story there. In fact, I'm sure there is a story there. But it is not the only story. And the media ill serves our democracy by pretending that it is and serving up speculation and groundhog watching as truth.

Also see: After the Fact: Adventures in New Journalism - Ben Eltham, The Drum
Also see: Politics without Policy: The Age of Unbelief - Jeff Sparrow, The Drum

The Frame Game

2012-01-27T17:08:00.002+11:00

Photo: Lucas Coch, AAP

Life as a TV news cameraman in Canberra is not one normally filled with adrenalin. Most of their days are spent trudging from doorstop to doorstop. Once in a blue-moon, there's a leadership spill and they get to walk backwards down a corridor as the new leadership team promenade for the press. But riots? In their dreams only.

Filming an Australia Day awards ceremony at a glass restaurant near parliament must have beckoned as another pedestrian assignment -shooting up the nostrils of leaders at lecterns, stowing away a couple of routine cutaways of, well, other cameramen. Might have been 20 seconds at best as part of a presenter-voiced montage at 6pm.

But then: "Extraordinary scenes in Canberra today as an angry and violent mob forced the emergency evacuation of the prime minister and opposition leader from an official function..." Hubba Hubba. "Running the gauntlet of baying protesters, federal police bundled a clearly terrified prime minister into a waiting car." Oh, journalistic joy: 'Anger, violence, gauntlets, terror' - don't get to use those words covering Senate Estimates. And for a Canberra cameraman - the novelty of spontaneous and unrehearsed speed, movement, colour and emotion was mana from heaven. Who can blame them for beating it up?

For a beat-up and an hysterical over-reaction this most clearly was. The game was given away at the end of the news report on Channel Nine when the reporter said there were no arrests. And for a discriminating viewer, a second or third viewing of the footage of the "frenzy" showed a dislocation between the script and the actual events. A "riot"; a "violent mob"? Well, yes, they were banging on the window, but where was the violence? This was a long way from Tripoli. And in the shot of the police bundling Gillard into the car, hardly a protester is to be seen. In fact, there are more police and media in shot than anyone else. If there is panic, it's panic on the part of the security people. And the media loved it.

Call me cynical, but for my money this was a classic case of how journalists' infatuation with "great pictures" can distort their own editorial judgement. Television newsrooms are rife with this. This is a medium, after all, that is all about visuals. And with 99 per cent of the political news out of Canberra consisting of talking heads and set-up shots, an actual spot news story involving both the PM and the Opposition Leader on an otherwise quiet public holiday was always going to get the, err, mixmaster treatment.

Newspapers do it too. And in this case, it was just too tempting for journalists to describe Julia Gillard as terrified. Well, perhaps she was. But was she frightened of the protesters or at being dragged along the ground by an over-zealous and clearly pumped up security guard? Pictures can be very malleable in the wrong hands.

My philosophy when I suspect a beat-up is to ignore the Australian media's version altogether and see how the global wires treat the story. Correspondents who work for the like of Reuters and AP know a riot when they see one and their seen-it-all-subs often have a perspective lacking locally. Their headline on the story: "Aussie PM Loses Shoe in Protest Fracas". Quite.

(See also: 'The Mob Violence that Wasn't' - Ben Eltham, New Matilda and 'Australia Day' - Mike Stutchbery)

The Play's the Thing

2012-01-22T21:37:00.004+11:00

What do you think the pokies story is about? According to the Australian press gallery, it's a story about individual politicians and party politics. The prime minister they have dubbed 'Jul-iar' Gillard, incapable of keeping promises, has done it again - ripped up a deal, walked away from an agreement and put pure politics ahead of principle. It's the story her opponent wants run. And , of course, the genuises of the press gallery dutifully report it ('The Blame Game Begins', says Seven News).

The story could have been about how a thuggish and self-interested clubs industry - trumpeting the interests of the 'ordinary bloke' - had f**ked over the wider population with a $20 million advertising campaign and threatened a few marginal seats. But in the narrow orbit of the press gallery, it was just too hard to report that. No, this was about "Ju-liar's" capacity to keep a promise. The pokies compromise provides just another excuse for 900 words of analysis on how long the minority government can struggle on - what does it mean for Gillard's leadership, what does it mean for the Gillard-Rudd shadowplay - yada yada yada.

You see, the Australian media - largely because it is part of the machine itself - wants you to believe that 'politics' is about what happens in Canberra. They shine the light almost exclusively on the confected battle between tweedle dee and tweedle dum - the figureheads at the top of decaying political parties that everyone outside the inbred Canberra vortex can see are just shells of organisations pretending to believe in something beyond power itself. The issues they fight about are just props for the pantomime that the media reports on as "politics". The real issues - the pokie industry that destroys families, the mining boom that's threatening every other industry outside resources, the climate change that's threatening the planet - these are just just kindling for the eternal bonfire that keeps the huddled hacks in the press gallery in the warmth of secure employment.

Real politics - how money and position and fear buys power - is actually much more interesting than that. That game is fought outside the political parties. Canberra is just the show at the end of the road. This is the politics the media doesn't report - because it's "too complicated to explain" or because no-one wants to get out of the cosy gallery life or because it involves leaving parliament and talking to people outside the infernal machine. To do journalism like that (and how it should be done) would be to show how the game is played; the complex webs of relationships and favours and the corruption of institutions. Instead, it's just easier and cheaper to replay over and over the "politics" of the Punch and Judy show of Tony and Julia - the sock puppetry hiding the underlying power relationships.

The press gallery doesn't want to tell you about the interest group politics; the narrow groups with deep pockets who fund the journos' bar tabs, both figuratively and literally. Unaware of their complicity in the game, the journos reduce it all to Team A vs Team B and 'what does it mean for Labor's primary vote?' The idea is to keep it simple and monochromatic for the news editors in Sydney who tell them "the punters" are too stupid to get it. So it's Julia vs Tony over and over and over again.
And they wonder why voters have switched off.

Put aside Labor vs Liberal for a moment. The fact is Australia is governed by a handful of extremely powerful interest groups: The miners, the bankers, the "gaming" industry, the media. Journalists employed by mainstream media companies can't tell you this, because they are part of the power structure themselves. They can't take a step back and analyse the institutions that foster the very apathy that allows narrow interests to pursue their advantage unmolested. They want you to believe that the vital contest is between Labor and Liberal when the real and interwoven power structures of money and influence are unexamined. (BTW, the threat the Greens pose to the cosy duopoly is closely correlated to the lies and hysteria the Murdoch press whips up against them).

As a former journalist, that to me is the most disconcerting thing - that journalists who pride themselves on their "independence" seem so naively unaware of how they are a tool in a game designed by someone else.

You Can't Handle the Truth!

2012-01-16T17:27:00.011+11:00

If the world of politics is now so dominated by spin and media management that 'reality' is whatever you choose it to be, what's the proper role of journalism?

It's to find the truth and report it, right? Journalists are employed to serve their readers and viewers by cutting through hype, digging out red herrings, challenging misleading statements and exposing what's really going on. You would think so, wouldn't you?

But it turns out it's a little more complicated than that. So complicated in fact that one of the world's most respected and established media outlets - The New York Times no less - has seen fit to ask its readers whether its journalists should be "truth vigilantes".

Arthur Brisbane, who's employed as the NYT's 'public editor' (a role created to represent the readers in the news gathering process), provoked a controversy when he wondered out loud whether journalists should call politicians out on outright falsehoods.

Brisbane used as an example recent statements by Republican presidential contender Mitt Romney that President Obama had made speeches "apologizing for America" when the record showed he had done no such thing. The NYT public editor wondered whether the paper should, in addition to its separate fact-checking, challenge Romney's claim within the copy.

The reaction to Brisbane's blog post boiled down to 'why the hell is the New York Times asking its readers whether they want the truth? Isn't that what you guys are there for?' Media guru Jay Rosen seized on the column as further proof of his hypothesis that the mainstream media is failing its readers by forsaking the pursuit of truth and employing fake objectivity and a kind of "view from nowhere".

This blog has been saying something similar now for some time. But unlike Rosen - who gets a little carried away blowing his own trumpet - I don't blame the journalists. There seems little doubt, that with honourable exceptions, most working journalists these days spend the vast majority of their time on the hamster wheel, and that reflects the lousy economics of the trade now - fewer people being asked to do more and more by an industry in terminal decline. Skills and institutional knowledge are being lost to journalism as people quit the craft, disillusioned with low pay, poor conditions, a lack of a career path and a realisation that the people who employ them don't care much about the truth anyway.

Newsrooms are now populated by desk journalists, cutting and pasting from press releases to meet constant deadlines and online obligations. Their harried news editors and sub-editors - like Sisyphus - are given the immensely thrilling job of rolling the boulder up the hill everyday, only to see it roll back down again and crush them. (Do I sound bitter? Sorry. Shell shock. Haven't taken my pills today.)

So, what we were talking about? The Truth? Yeah right. Young journalists on $60K a year and working 60-hour weeks are being asked to pump out 3-4 stories each day to fill the Great White Spaces between the ads, while providing updates for the web and occasionally a multi-media piece. For these kids, there is barely enough time to run the spell check, never mind challenging, say, Joe Hockey's lie that government debt is "exploding" and "putting upward pressure on interest rates". And unlike US newsrooms, there has never been any culture of fact-checking in Australian journalism. Subs are now consigned to cutting the story to fit and are actively discouraged from checking the copy beyond the most cursory grammatical/spell check.

So my take on the Truth deficit thing in media is to avoid blaming everyday working journalists (By the way, I'm not talking about highly paid columnists here, who are hired as professional trolls). The vanilla reporters are stuck in the Dark Satanic news mills, working in bad light under strict instructions and pumping out thinner and thinner yarn. If you want a culprit, you need to look past those drones to the media owners, who under intense economic pressure have decided that what they are selling is not so much the Truth, but a view of the world that confirms the received prejudices of their own readership/viewership (prejudices, BTW, that are formed by reading the tosh served up as news).

As to this notion of Truth, it's worth asking "whose truth?" In an academic paper released in 2008 (Gentzkow and Shapiro, 'Competition and Truth in the Market for News'), two researchers from the University of Chicago Booth School of Business put forward the proposition that consumers will tend to favour those news outlets whose in-built bias best reflects their own. Yes, there is a disincentive for media organisations to peddle outright falsehoods. But between the two extremes of damned lies and the virginal truth, there is an awfully great expanse of grey territory.

"Suppose that consumers consciously trade off accuracy of a news source against a preference for information that is likely to confirm their beliefs," Gentzkow and Shapiro write. "They want to learn the truth, but will choose a less accurate source or one that avoids reporting certain kinds of facts in order to avoid having their personal beliefs challenged. Adding competitors in this kind of world can sometimes exacerbate bias because it allows consumers to self-segregate more effectively and to avoid hearing information that might contradict their priors."

This the unspoken secret in journalism - the realisation that the public is not really that interested in the unvarnished truth. Commercial media owners have twigged to this and now are in the business of spinning "facts" (rather factoids) that use "the news" as a platform for presenting a world view in keeping with the one they have educated their readers to believe in. Hence The Daily Telegraph's continued commercial success in printing outright falsehoods (remember Wayne Swan's "congestion tax"?).

Traditional journalists (ones who saw their readers as their first responsibility and not their employer's bottom line) might have been expected to have challenged this practice. Alas, an entire generation of journos has now been schooled that their job is to serve up the view of the world that their readership wants and which suits the commercial imperatives of the organisations that employ them. And if they allow an outright lie from a public figure to be reported unchallenged, their defence can be "well, HE said it!"

You see it's no longer about Getting to The Truth. Like advertising, journalism now is mostly about constructing a version of the truth that suits a chosen market. It's about making an impact and attracting eyeballs and building a brand. And the greatest shame of it all is that a gullible public buys it. They can't handle the truth.

News Anonymous: The 12-Step Program

2012-01-04T17:48:00.006+11:00

One of the joys of the silly season in Australian media is that the focus switches from being bored to death by Duelling Press Releases in backwoods Canberra to the relative excitement of watching five-day cricket tests on television.

Like a blowfly loose in the kitchen, you only notice the enervating influence of the drone from the nation’s capital when the Raid starts working. The resulting quiet allows you the space to make New Year’s resolutions about your media consumption.

Most of the suggestions below broadly come under the heading of Turning Off the Noise. In our always-on, wireless and networked modern world, preserving one’s sanity is often best achieved by just un-hooking oneself for a while (or not allowing oneself to get hooked in the first place.)

So in the interest of sponsoring more calm reflection and less needless flying off the handle, here is my 12-step program for junk media junkies in 2012:

Don’t watch Q&A. Going to sleep is a challenge at the best of times. Achieving it after an hour of having one’s blood pressure raised by the likes of Sophie Mirabella and Jim Wallace is virtually impossible
If You Must Watch Q&A, Don’t Tweet It: This is like trying to meditate to 2GB. After 40 minutes, you want to strangle the Buddha.
No more Drum solos. While Jonathan Green does a marvellous and thankless job editing the ABC’s opinion site, there are only so many IPA rants about the Nanny State that one can accommodate without taking an axe to the Nursery.
Shun the Sun King. Rupert, enemy of “elites” everywhere, is omnipresent. He’s even on Twitter now. So don’t follow him. And don’t read his papers. If you want his empire to die, you have to stop talking about it, linking to it and giving it any oxygen whatsoever. If they want to reach you, they’ve got your number.
Keep the Insiders Outside. Spending a sunny Sunday morning watching jaded journos call the winners of the weekly horse race out of Canberra is like looking at your teenage kids squeezing their blackheads. Not one’s idea of a good time.
Polls are for Trolls. It should be evident by now to the sane among us that media companies use opinion polls purely as content generators. It’s manufactured news. Keep an eye on Possum. If a trend is emerging, he’ll tell you.
Wallow in your insignificance. Most of what we fret about in Australia barely rates anywhere else. Change your bookmarks from the SMH and The Oz to The New York Times, The Guardian & Germany's Spiegel Online. Be a citizen of the world (and of your local community).
Network in the Pub. Digital relationships are all very well, but we’d make a lot more sense to each other if we spent less time tweeting and more time tippling.
Delay consumption. If you must track news closely, read the papers a week after publication. You’ll be amazed how little of any lasting significance there is. Oh, and refrain from reading the 2012 forecasts till December.
Make amends to those you have wronged. Apologise to all the trolls on Twitter for swearing at them over their insistence that the science isn’t in on climate change. Then block them and report them for spam.
Facebook is for fun. Your Aunty Mary is not interested in the theoretical analysis of digitally mediated social movements. She just wants to see pictures of your new puppy.
Recognise a higher power. No, not Rupert. It’s your Lost Life calling.

Did I mention Andrew Bolt? I didn't? Good.

The Right Stuff - The FEIJOA Awards, 2011

2011-12-16T15:18:00.007+11:00

Good journalism these days tends to get done despite rather than because of the institutions that support it. As anyone who has had to put up with me and many others banging on in recent years, the slow death of the business model supporting journalism has decimated the craft in the past decade.

But amid all the press release churnalism and he-said-she-said stenography and feeding of a relentless 24/7 cycle and low-cost opinionating and manufactured culture wars and dial-up controversy, some great journalism still finds its way through the cracks of the crumbling edifice of the MSM.

Everyone has an opinion on what defines good journalism. The old school says it's all about "scoops" and "exclusives". However, in an age when anyone can publish instantaneously, armed with nothing more than a mobile phone, this seems like a dead end road to me. (Think back to the Rudd coup and the spectre of journos sitting on cable news shows reading tweets off their iPhones). What's so smart about being "first with the news" on a story that's going to break anyway?

My thinking is that the best journalism - particularly in an age when everyone has their amps up to 11 - is more of a quiet achiever. It sheds new light on public issues and encourages people to think about things in different ways. Good journalism is more about standing back from the noise, creating some perspective and "whispering" in the audience's ears.

Good journalism eschews just being another clearing house for the predictable talking points of the dug-in partisans of all sides. It makes no assumptions and takes nothing for granted. It asks the questions that need to be asked, but which never seem to be - because everyone else is so focused on generating "gotchas" and "gaffes" for the 24-hour cycle.

Finally, it might sound obvious - but the best journalism is about serving the reader or the listener. It's not about feeding the insatiable machine or beating the opposition by five minutes or pandering to the prurient or confecting cheap outrage or impressing other journalists.

Ultimately, good journalism is about increasing our understanding of an issue, a person, an event; it's about revealing - in the public interest - what is otherwise hidden or obscure. And it is about asking sometimes difficult questions in a way that yields answers. Increasingly, though, with so much information already out there, the best journalism is about explanation. It uses digital tools to bring together all the existing data to make sense of complex issues in a vivid, memorable way.

With the above criteria in mind, here are the inaugural annual Failed Estate International Journalism Awards (The FEIJOAs) for 2011:

The Lord Monckton Roadshow - Wendy Carlisle - Background Briefing, ABC Radio National:
So much Australian media coverage of the Monckton circus - by pretending there is a serious debate around man-made climate change - neglects to show that this indeed is a circus of the insane and that the odious 'Lord' Monckton is a paid puppet of the fossil fuel industry . The fearless Wendy Carlisle, in this report, goes behind the curtain to show the men manipulating the levers.

Politics and Plaster Ducks - AKA Kitsch as Kitsch Can - Guy Rundle, Crikey: For my money, no-one writes better about the exhaustion of conventional politics than Rundle. This piece - about the denial by media and politicians of a changing world and the retreat by the Julia Gillard-led Labor Party into banal paeans to "working families" - hit just the right note at the right time.

Labor Hopeless, Abbott a Hollow Man - Laura Tingle, AFR: Sometimes the best journalism just dispenses with the mealy-mouthed fake objectivity and comes right and says what we are all thinking. Laura Tingle is better than this at most, using this column to poke fun at the ridiculous rhetoric coming out of both sides of politics in Canberra. "Oh for goodness sake. Enough," she writes. "Pledges in blood. Policy run on the smell of intestinal fortitude alone. We are supposed to be talking about who becomes prime minister here, not an action man movie."

The Skype Scandal - Hugh Riminton, Ten Network: My pick for 'scoop' of the year. It involved the careful unmasking of systematic bastardy and misogyny in one of the nation's most prestigious institutions. In many hands - particularly in the blokey culture of commercial television - this could have turned into tabloid salaciousness (where the reporter wags his fingers and winks at the audience all at once). But with the classy Riminton on the case, that was never going to happen.

Sri Lanka's Killing Fields - Channel Four via ABC Four Corners: Not an Australian production, but bravely aired on our own Four Corners, this terrifying piece of current affairs television exposed the bloody final weeks of the quarter century war between the Sri Lankan government and the Tamir Tiger secessionists. The awful, uncensored images brought home more than anything I have ever seen the capacity for human beings to descend into barbarism. When we talk about journalism that pulls no punches, this is it.

Australian Exceptionalism - Possum Pollytics, Crikey: The biggest lie in Australian media is that the vast middle class are "doing it tough". It's almost become a mantra for News Ltd, which has become a propaganda service for people earning $150,000 a year - a community for whom hardship is defined as not being able to afford the movie channel on Foxtel. In this piece, Australia's most unheralded economic journalist Possum delivers a massive reality check, backed by hard evidence, to a population that seriously wants to believe that Australians are hard done by.

Go Back to Where You Came From - Cordell Jigsaw Productions/SBS: Campaigning documentary journalism masquerading as a reality TV show, this three-part series on SBS dealt with the seemingly intractable refugee issue in a way that showed up all all the talkback radio/tabloid newspaper bigotry and grandstanding for what it is. Every Australian who purports to have an opinion on the so-called "boat people" should watch this before inflicting their views on the rest of us.

There are plenty more potential nominees out there. Sally Sara of the ABC, David Crowe of the AFR, Stephen Long of the ABC and Peter Martin of the SMH/Age are some of my favourite writers. Outside the MSM, I would nominate Melissa Sweet at Crikey, Ben Pobjie of New Matilda, Mark Bahnsich of Lavratus Prodeo, Nick Gruen of Club Troppo and Tim Dunlop of The Drum/B Sides.

We're lucky to have these people either online or offline in dead trees media. It's not all bad. It's not all a failed estate. Some of it still succeeds. We should celebrate it.

Merry Christmas.

Blogalism

2011-12-09T15:06:00.006+11:00

A US court's $2.5 million ruling against a blogger for defaming a businessman has sparked a flurry of new attempts to define journalism in relation to blogging. My view on what constitutes journalism is similar to what someone once said about por**graphy - I know it when I see it.

While this won't help the judges, you can be certain that earnest attempts to define a journalist in legal terms will lead to nothing but confusion. The Americans, with their black letter law pedantry, just love debates of this kind because it keeps much of the legal profession in business.

Ask Google what a journalist is and you'll get something like this:

The collecting, writing, editing, and presenting of news or news articles in newspapers and magazines and in radio and television broadcasts.
Material written for publication in a newspaper or magazine or for broadcast.
The style of writing characteristic (my emphasis) of material in newspapers and magazines, consisting of direct presentation of facts or occurrences with little attempt at analysis or interpretation.

By the first definition, the work of the hordes of shockjocks and trollumnists and opinionistas - whom our mainstream media cost effectively employ to vomit their half-digested, fact-free views on the news of the day into our breakfast cereal - can all be described as "journalism".

Meanwhile, a painstakingly researched, brilliantly written, fact-filled offering like that of Scott Steel, in his Possum Comitatus persona, is a mere piece of blogging. Steel's article on the media-propagated myths about the Australian economy is as good as, indeed better than, 90 per cent of the content masquerading as economic journalism in the mainstream media. It sheds light on a complex issue, it supports its arguments with facts, it provides historical perspective and it is written in a lively and engaging style that most people can enjoy. I call that journalism.

To add a personal note, I was employed as a journalist in the mainstream media for 26 years - starting out in radio, then moving to the wire services, television, newspapers and online media. I moved out of the media into corporate communications five years ago, but still think like and, still consider myself, a journalist. I write about public issues with the hope of gaining an audience. I support my arguments with links, facts and background and sometimes bring to people's attention a perspective that might not previously have encountered or considered.

Granted, I am no longer paid as a journalist (and bashed out this piece in my lunch hour). And I don't (for the most part) do original reporting. But then neither do many of the popular columnists and commentators in our daily papers. The difference with this blog is that because I am not paid for what I do, I am under no pressure to be deliberately provocative or sensational for linkbait that attracts eyeballs to paid advertisements. And I'm not writing to suit a proprietor's worldview or agenda.

Another frequently heard argument against bloggers as journalists is that blogs, unlike MSM journalism, are not edited and do not undergo the rigorous system of fact-checking and quality control that sub-editors provide. For insiders, I can deal with that in one word: Pagemasters. For those outside the industry, that means sub-editing is a dying occupation and, like Qantas, newspapers are outsourcing quality control to low-cost labour. As a result, there are now almost as many typos, howlers and unfiltered rubbish on newspapers' print editions and websites as there is on the worst blog. And badly paid and overworked journalists find themselves under pressure to just pump out more verbiage irrespective of quality.

Yes, there are some pretty awful blogs out there, full of half-formed or bastardised ideas that represent little more than a dummy spit or a vanity project (just as there are quite a few newspaper columns with similar characteristics). But there are some pretty good blogs as well that feature reasoned and expert perspectives on current issues, that respect the intelligence of readers and that are not compromised by commercial objectives.

Ultimately, we are having this debate because the traditional distribution platforms for journalism - print and broadcast - are gradually being made redundant by new technology. The media has been disintermediated and experts can reach audiences independently of people formerly employed to filter those views through the industrial word factories that were 20th century newsrooms. The better blogs - like Possum or Club Troppo or Larvatus Prodeo - are achieving this with a similar level of quality of content, design and utility that you will get from any respected traditional media outlet.

My own view is that the market will sort this one out. As dead tree newspapers and old broadcast media slowly die, journalists are going to have to reinvent themselves as entrepreneurs and sole agents and collectives - just as musicians have had to do this last decade amid the slow death of the traditional recording business. As the old technology is cast aside, new opportunities will arise. Whether they will make much money is the big question. But that doesn't mean they won't have a social use. As The Economist magazine wrote recently, the internet is taking the news industry back to the coffee house culture of the 18th century. News has become a social medium, not a one-way publishing industry where large institutions sell content to a passive populace.

In the meantime, as the old media sinks or swims, the public will choose to do what they always have done. They will gravitate to those sources of information and commentary that they trust the most. If that content adds independent perspective on public issues and backs that up with facts, context and background in a compelling way, it will be journalism - regardless of the platform.

(See also: 'When Does a Blogger Become a Journalist?' - Fiona Martin, senior lecturer in convergent and online media, University of Sydney, and Tim Dwyer, senior lecturer in the department of media and communications, also University of Sydney, provide some detail around the legal status of bloggers in Australia).

A Fistful of Donuts

2011-12-05T21:34:00.005+11:00

Which party is best at cutting the red tape that stifles Aussie entrepreneurship, promotes small business initiative, checks lazy government waste and puts downward pressure on interest rates for working people? Me sir! Me sir! Just bend me over the desk for a moment and flash me your fiscal rectitude.

Isn't the state of economic journalism clear by now? After the earnest and profound economic policy debates of the 1980s, we seem have devolved into a pale imitation of that in our modern political discourse - one in which one side and then the other stage a predictable pantomime that bears little resemblance to our lived reality.

I spoke in the previous post about the now ritualised surplus fetish (which as Ross Gittins points out is itself a reflection of the media's free pass to the Coalition as 'super economic manager' and of business economists' gutless complicity in that myth). Now it's time to take down the Big One - the idea that the Daddy Party has defacto dibbs on the Prime Economic Levers.

Gittins made an entirely reasonable and overdue point: How does the mainstream economic commentariat, employed largely by the nation's banks and its major media publishers, manage to keep up without realistic challenge the charade that the clown's circus of Abbott, Hockey, Robb and Joyce somehow reflects a better solution for what ails us?

(Reality Interlude: What 'ails' us, according to most reasonable and educated people, is an economy feeling the full effects of a once-in-a-century externally generated boom in demand for its finite raw materials, which if we don't manage correctly, will leave us like a Qantas jet after a south-east Asian engineering pit-stop - flying on one engine and out of VB).

In the meantime, the yawning, gullible public (according to the opinion polls) adopts the default stance that the conservative parties are the better economic managers. On what reality this is based is not exactly clear, given the ALP made all the hard reforms in the 1980s and Howard/Costello merely introduced the GST, delivered a good first budget and then spent 11 years subsidising asset-rich retirees and calling them battlers.

But as we have grown accustomed to from Australian media circles (and in a trend that mirrors the irrationalist US Right and its media cheer squad) the truth is rarely a major concern for the nation's economic commentators' who prefer to hoe the already furrowed field that spares them the effort of dreaming up new narratives and threatening the Tories' inexhaustible get-of-jail-free card.

That's why much of the media shrugged its collective shoulders when the Coalition's then finance spokesman Barnaby Joyce threatened to break up the assets of Australia's banks (among the top-rated financial institutions in the world), or when Tony Abbott said a more responsible response to climate change was to subsidise polluters with taxpayers' money or when Joe Hockey suggested you can grant tax cuts, tighten fiscal policy and lower interest rates all in one Lindsayesque (as in Norman, not Penrith) magic pudding.

And now, they're doing it again. Peter Martin, one of the few real economic journalists out there, has revealed the dodgy, behind-the-bike-sheds arithmetic on which the Coalition costed its policy promises ahead of the federal election last year. Mind you, we knew this was the case. In fact, Laura Tingle, another rare, real journalist recently won a Walkley for speaking the truth on the issue. Nobody listened.

Unfortunately, few people read the AFR or The Age. They listen to talkback radio and take their cues from journalists (careerists?) at the Herald Sun and the Daily Telegraph and commercial television, who are excited by regime change and will not let the facts get in the way of their pursuit of their chosen narrative - of incompetent Labor government, botching policy over and over, waiting for its final execution at the hands of a brilliant and innovative Coalition front bench.

What is it going to take the Australian population to wake up to this con job? When are people going to realise that a plutocrat, US-based billionaire - playing his role as the common man railing against the 'elites' - is wilfuly distorting reality so as to eat their lunch and those of their children? Presumably it will take a recession, though if it happens on Labor's watch (even in a global recession) one can imagine the Tories dining out for years on how they cleaned up the ALP mess.

In the meantime, did you see Today Tonight's brave expose of the campaign by Aussie risk-taking entrepreneur Gerry Harvey to take on the online pirates? Don't you just love the gutsiness of the Australian media- standing up for the true-blue small business people against those socialists in Canberra?

Oi Oi Oi.

A Show About Nothing

2011-11-29T22:50:00.005+11:00

Where else but Australia would the media work itself into a thumb-sucking frenzy over a 'MYEFO'? Perhaps if you told the Brits it stood for My Youthful Exotic French Odyssey, they might bite. But Mid-Year Fiscal and Economic Outlook? Hold the front page.

In Australia, journos scribble millions of words every year, pulling out ersatz 'analysis' from their proverbials about data that has little or no bearing on the lives of most of us - like monthly forecasts of volatile unemployment data (a throw of the dice by the statistical gods) or, worst of all, whether the federal budget ends the financial year in a small surplus or a tiny deficit.

To be sure, this surplus fetish - the notion that we will be eternally damned in the fires of fiscal hell unless government revenues exceed spending by even a dollar - is partly of the current administration's own making. But why is it so hard for the media to admit to the public that it is all a cruel (accrual?) joke?

Unfortunately, it seems easier to pirrouette in time with the self-serving political spin that these minuscule numbers mean something. It is simply to beat up a completely understandable shortfall in revenue - due to a deteriorating global economic environment - as opening up the old "black hole" and (god help us) "putting upward pressure on interest rates". In reality, there is a good argument that the increasingly hostile international landscape justifies the government letting the budget's automatic stabilisers do their job and not make a bad situation worse (the budget in this sense is like airbags in a motor vehicle. Your car still gets smashed in a collision, but you survive).

Let's put this in perspective. Firstly, whether the government delivers its promised $1.5 billion surplus next year is neither here nor there. As a proportion of overall revenues of about $300 billion, that is around half of one per cent. Or to put it in numbers that most of us connect with, it's like a household on a $150,000 annual income earning $750 more than it spends over 12 months. Oh, jackpot. If that equation was around the other way, can you imagine your average aspirationals lashing themselves to the mast?

Secondly, let's tackle the Opposition canard - gleefully recycled by some media outlets - that somehow we are drowning in debt. It doesn't take much - like five minutes on the Internet - to show that total government liabilities at around around 22 per cent of GDP are the lowest in the OECD and compare extremely favourably to just about every other developed economy. Japan, for instance, an economy rated lower than Australia at 'AA', has liabilities of more than 200 per cent of the size of its economy. (Economics 101: It's not the size of the debt, it's whether market hordes think you can pay it back.)

Thirdly, look at the market pricing. It is one of life's great mysteries that the media credulously reports economics out of the mouths of politicians in cowtown Canberra without actually looking at what the global markets think of this supposed "out of control" fiscal mess.

Australian government 10-year bond yields last week hit record lows of around 3.8 per cent. Low yields mean high prices. Put another way, the famed 'international investors' - hungry for low risk assets - can't get enough Australian government paper. Compare the yield, or return, with an equivalent US government bond of less than 2 per cent and you can see the attraction. As to the fiscal situation putting "upward pressure on interest rates", it's actually the other way around. As mentioned, long-term yields are at record lows. At the short end, the RBA has already cut official interest rates once and the market is priced for more. So notions that the Australian government, like Oliver, is having to plead for more are just, err, made up.

Finally, look at the credit ratings. Australia is now - after the Fitch upgrade - one of only 11 countries globally whose government bonds are rated the top 'AAA' by all three ratings agencies. We are officially seen by the agencies as a better credit risk than the US, the world's biggest economy. OK, nobody believes the ratings agencies after the GFC. Fair enough. So look at the prices instead. They tell you that large fund managers in New York and London and Tokyo - the people actually putting dollars or euro or yen on the table - see Australia as a better bet than most. A highly desirable investment bolt-hole in a chaotic world, in fact.

So to sum up - our deficit is insignificant (and so will be the promised surplus), our debt is the lowest in the OECD, our credit rating is the highest possible and the demand for our bonds is unprecedented. Interest rate pressures are down, not up, and no-one in the financial markets - the people all this hairy chested rhetoric out of Canberra is aimed at - is losing a minute's sleep over Australia. Bigger things to worry about, like, oh, Europe and the United States.

So comparing the actual extent of the "problem" with the level of rhetoric out of our fevered provincial capital makes one wonder why the media makes such a fuss over this. Of course, the answer will be that the fuss is of the government's own making. Wayne Swan wants to look tough. And he's boxed himself into a corner by tying the government's economic credibility to whether the government's cookie jar has a few pennies left over in the middle of a European sovereign debt crisis that is potentially catastrophic. By the way, in those circumstances, if Swan didn't run a deficit, he really should be strung up.

But this doesn't absolve journalists from actually pointing out to their readers and viewers that the politics of the situation - interesting only to them - and the actual, real-world economics are miles apart. Unfortunately, doing that would involve admitting that the whole debate - like so much in modern party politics - is a confected charade that exists to keep the commentariat in business. In other words, it is a show about nothing.

(See also Stephen Koukoulas: Who's addicted to spending and taxing? )
(See also Tim Dunlop: Deficit Bad, Surplus Good in Political Narnia Narrative)

The Elephant Men

2011-11-24T22:38:00.008+11:00

"The world is a business, Mr. Beale; it has been since man crawled out of the slime. Our children will live, Mr. Beale, to see that perfect world in which there's no war or famine, oppression or brutality - one vast and ecumenical holding company, for whom all men will work to serve a common profit, in which all men will hold a share of stock - all necessities provided, all anxieties tranquilized, all boredom amused. And I have chosen you, Mr. Beale, to preach this evangel."

That pivotal scene from Paddy Chayefsky's prescient 1976 media satire Network sprung to mind when lowbrow radio clown Kyle Sandilands revved up the outrage machine again this week and was rewarded with buckets worth of free publicity for his troubles.

The speech above is delivered by network executive Arthur Jensen, who drags broadcasting demagogue Howard Beale into the company boardroom to remind him how capitalism works. Beale had "meddled with the primal forces of nature" by venting on air about a contested Saudi takeover of the network, Jensen said, and needed to remember that his primary role was to amuse people, or least distract them.

And distracted we are for a few days this week as the shockjock ritual is played out once more. The actors may change - whether it be Alan Jones or Andrew Bolt or Sandilands - but the narrative arc is the same: Media loudmouth sprays sexist and/or racist bile, sparks revulsion and calls for their silencing, retreats to martyr pose, protests about "free speech" and eats up acres of newsprint, air time and social media space for a few days. Mission accomplished.

There have always been media figures who courted controversy. But the venom was traditionally in the service of a particular end. Now the circus is an end in itself. The advertisers and station owners are not interested in the message, they just want a noise - any noise - so long as it pulls in sufficient eyes and ears to look at and listen to the ads.

Some might say it has backfired in Sandilands' case, with major sponsors pulling their support. But consider this: The man is ubiquitous right now - he even featured on the 7.30 Report, whose crusty audience is a million miles from the politically switched-off Today FM demographic that thrills to such fearless broadcasts as Kyle and Jackie "hanging with the Kardashians".

So one could reasonably wager that, if anything, Kyle's currency has gone up. The fact is audiences are so splintered and entertainment and information sources so diverse these days, that anyone who can command an audience, for any reason, will be courted - if even after a mandatory period in media Siberia.

If you want further evidence of the desperation of the mainstream media money mandarins for manufactured controversy, look at the Ten Network's recent hiring for $NZ1 million of "controversial" Kiwi breakfast broadcaster Paul Henry, whose claim to fame was being sacked by NZ network TV3 for wetting himself on air about the name of an Indian government minister.

"Paul is exactly what we've been after for Breakfast," said Ten's chief programming officer David Mott. "He's cheeky, mischievous and unapologetically forthright, just like Ten's viewers. While you can't ever be sure what Paul will do, when he's on air, you know he's going to tackle the elephant in the room."

Yes, elephants. Big and brave elephant hunters,not afraid to tackle the herds of threatening beasts whose presence most of us are afraid to confront: Elephant men like Paul Henry, who fearlessly snickers on air because someone has a funny sounding name. Elephant men like radio "personality" Sandilands, calling a female critic a "fat slag" and threatening to hunt her down. Or the biggest elephant hunter of them all, Alan Jones, Order of Australia, calling for our female prime minister to be stuffed into a sack and drowned at sea.

Network Boss:"All necessities provided, all anxieties tranquilized, all boredom amused. And I have chosen you, Mr. Beale, to preach this evangel."
Howard Beale: "Why me?"
Network Boss: "Because you are on television, dummy."

NETWORK, 1976

(PS: If this is all too depressing, Kyle and Kittens sums it up from a pictorial angle)

Market Farces

2011-11-14T22:35:00.002+11:00

As with everything in Australian politics these days, debate over the federal government's media inquiry has become just another coat-hanger on which ideologues of every stripe can drape their off-the-rack worldviews. It's why we're hearing market forces are the fix for dodgy journalism.

So, knock me over with a feather quill, here's Chris Berg of the Institute of Public Affairs (an organisation whose KPI is promoting corporate interest as the public interest) saying that rather than the government spending big bucks on public broadcasting, they could save the money and just let it rip, so to speak.

"The profit motive is one of the most powerful forces in our society precisely because it delivers consumers what they want," Berg wrote on, um, the ABC's website. "(So), the profit motive seems like a pretty good way to deliver journalism which people want to read, watch and listen to. But, otherwise, the government spends a billion dollars a year on the ABC - specifically to address an assumed failure by the market to provide quality media in the absence of a public broadcaster."

That's it! Sell the ABC and let the market decide! Why hasn't anyone else thought of that before? That's clearly what's skewed journalism in Australia - an army of fearsome basket-weaving, beard-stroking, lentil-munching public broadcasters are wrecking the opportunity for Rupert's brave rear-guard of freedom fighters and culture warriors to cement complete dominance of the Australian media landscape and run more fanzine-style stories about Shane Warne and Liz Hurley or manufacture dishonest beat-ups about carbon pricing.

Not Enough Market on this world view is just another synonym for Not Enough Murdoch. If the old biddies want to watch lawn bowls on Sunday afternoon or if the navel-gazing wankers in Balmain really are interested in the politics of Third World Aid, let them pay for it. The taxpayers' role is not to subsidise the idiosyncratic desires of obscure urban tribes, but to 'remove the impediments' to global media magnates making even more moolah. 'The People' are the ultimate arbiters of good journalism and it's the job of the media to satisfy their curiosities, not matter how base. So if one needs to hack into the phones of murdered teenagers or pass off photos of a half-naked model as that of a former politician, so be it. It's what the market wants.

As Mr Berg says, everyone knows that free market forces deliver the best solutions. Just look at the global banking system and the enormous growth of securitisation in the past decade and a half. Err, no, wait. Anyway, the thing is - as that hugely successful Fairfax publisher Fred Hilmer once said - journalists are really just content providers for advertising platforms. Their job consists of making the news widget thingies that occupy the white spaces between the clients' advertising collateral. As such, their mission is to generate sufficient click bait to get people looking at the ads. We want more of 'Gordon Ramsay's Dwarf Porn Double Dying in a Badger's Den' and less of why billionaire miners might be so keen to co-opt the public interest as their own in blocking attempts to secure a bigger share of a commodity windfall for public education and health.

But seriously, if you genuinely believe that 'unfettered market forces' will rescue journalism, you've been asleep for the last 30 years. The whole story of my lifetime in journalism is the gradual encroachment of bloodless managerialism and the liberal market worldview into a craft whose greatest practitioners have always lived outside the business world, not within it. Editors in recent years have been more focused on 'wages and pages' (the cost of people and the cost of print and distribution) than on the content, which is mostly an after-thought. We are living with the consequences of that trend.

No-one is saying journalists should not be aware of the need for their proprietors to make a profit. And more government regulation is not the answer either. But journalists' output should not be seen as a commodity to attract eyeballs to ads. And it is not profit-making that motivates good journalism. Instead, journalists excel when they keep a foot outside the market and see as their first priorities to safeguard the interests of readers, to retain commitment to the truth and to maintain a level of independence in the face of commercial pressures to cater to the lowest common denominator. If journalists spent less time fussing about the business model or the technology or the distribution platform or 'exploring the synergies from the multi-media interface' and concentrated on their craft, the profits might follow.

The Forecast Deficit

2011-11-07T14:58:00.003+11:00

A few years back an economic forecaster was asked to explain why his predictions of a 10 per cent return on the Australian equity market that year hadn't come to pass. (The market ended down nearly 40 per cent in 2008). "It's not my fault," he complained. "No-one predicted Lehman."

To which the response is well, isn't that the point? Forecasts are subject to considerable error, due to the tendency for events to screw around with one's cherished assumptions. A plane flies into a building, an investment bank goes belly up, a country defaults, a government changes etc;

So why does the media in Australia continue to give such prominence to economic forecasts that are at best an educated guess, at worst a shallow marketing opportunity? And why do journalists - who pride themselves on being primo bullshit detectors - never apply any scrutiny to the accuracy record of the forecasters whose every utterance they treat as if written on tablets of stone?

Access Economics is one such body whose regular prognostications, helpfully dropped into the media's lap on slow news day Sundays, ritually enjoy a free plug (see Crikey) in the nation's newspapers and broadcast outlets with no attention ever paid to how much it gets wrong. Dear Aunty ABC felt Access was such an unbiased source that it didn't feel it necessary to attribute its latest budget deficit claims to the agency in the opening paragraph of its news story: "Treasurer Wayne Swan is being told to abandon his plan for a budget surplus in the next financial year." There's that passive voice again, but that's another story.

Anyway, this would be the same Access Economics which made these wonderful forecasts, all lamely parroted by an Australian media in recent years:

FORECAST: "Australia risks falling into a recession as the Asian economic impact bites, forecaster Access Economics has warned." SMH 10/8/1998
WHAT HAPPENED: Australia sailed on through the Asian recession as the $A acted as a shock absorber.
FORECAST: Leading economic forecaster Access warns bird flu pandemic could crush Australian economy. 1/11/2005 West Australian
WHAT HAPPENED: Well, it COULD if there was one. There wasn't.
FORECAST: Access Economics predicts housing boom will end in tears. Daily Tele 19/9/2002
WHAT HAPPENED: The housing market pulled back slightly from late 2003 and then powered ahead again. Still waiting for the bust eight years later.
FORECAST: A housing slump will cancel the rebound from the drought, causing flat growth over the next two years, says Access. Daily Telegraph 20/1/2003
WHAT HAPPENED: In the subsequent two years, the economy grew at or above trend.
FORECAST: A sharp and lengthy slowdown is under way in consumer spending and will push up unemployment, Access warns. The Age 4/4/2005
WHAT HAPPENED: The unemployment rate continued to edge lower and within three years of the forecast had reached historic lows of 4.0 per cent.
FORECAST: The investment surge that has helped drive the WA economy could be about to turn, Access Economics has warned. West Australian 7/5/2007
WHAT HAPPENED: On the contrary, record prices for iron ore and coal continued to drive investment in mining, which the RBA now says will hit record levels of 7 per cent of GDP
FORECAST: Extremely tough Budget needed to avoid further rate rises this year, Access warns. Herald Sun 21/4/2008
WHAT HAPPENED: The global financial crisis came along, triggered four rate cuts by the end of 2008
FORECAST:Inflation time bomb ticking, warns Access 9/5/2008
WHAT HAPPENED: Within 18 months of that forecast, the RBA's underlying inflation measures sank from around 4% to the bottom of its 2-3% target ban and the cash rate fell from 7.25% to 3.0%.
FORECAST: 'Close to a million Australians face unemployment as the economy plunges into recession, Access warns.' Herald Sun 28/4/2009
WHAT HAPPENED: Australia was virtually alone in avoiding a recession through the GFC. Unemployment topped out at 5.9% (nearly half the level of the US) and then fell back again

Now bear in mind, Access is reflexively described as "leading economic forecaster" in news stories, which makes one wonders what the "lagging" ones are like. Any ideas anyone?

Back in my newspaper days, I recall an editorial meeting at which it was suggested that a shame file be compiled of economic forecasters and published once or twice a year. Great idea, you might say, but the argument went that if we started shaming bad forecasters no-one would ever talk to us again. So we went back to breathlessly reporting each and every new forecast as if all the previous and usually contrary ones hadn't existed.

Of course, making forecasts for a living is an impossible game. If you step outside of consensus and make a big call that turns out to be right, you're an instant legend. But if you make a big call and get it badly wrong, you're toast. This is why economists tend to loiter around consensus. The negative consequences of being bold and inaccurate exceed the positive consequences of being bold and accurate. And there are so many ways in which your forecast can go awry.

Yet the media continues to peddle the myth that there are people out there with a reliable crystal ball. And that somehow they can see the future better than anyone else. The truth is all you can really say is that economists work off assumptions. If this happens and that happens, then this may happen. But the more moving parts there are, the more they have to revisit their projections.

As to why the media relies so much on thumb-sucking forecasts for front page fodder, there are a couple of theories. Firstly, forecasts are easy. No phone calls or research are required. One just cuts....and pastes. And helpful people like Access or BIS supply all sorts of ready-to-publish tables and graphics that absolve hard-pressed, underpaid journalists from doing any actual work. Secondly, it's cheap and it causes an easy splash on a quiet news day. Finally, with yesterday's news already known by the time newspapers publish, we can't talk about the past anymore. So let's talk about the future. It fills a hole in the 24-hour news cycle and gives the punters something to chatter about until the next instant sensation comes along.

Head Bangers

2011-11-02T22:26:00.005+11:00

Old and experienced editors (are there are any left?) will tell you the best stories write themselves. Answer the who, what, where and when in the first paragraph. Tease out the why and how. Then add background and quotes to provide authority and colour.

But with so much competing noise out there, that template is rarely sufficient anymore. So journalists take every piece of news, however routine, and stick it through a Marshall stack turned up to 11, stomp on the adjectival overdrive and invite jaded readers to stick their heads inside the PA.

In this journalistic world of constant high volume, every story is Metallica. There are no dynamics. The entire media is shouting ALL the time because they're worried that if they pull back on their Tube Screamers their highly compressed copy won't be heard over all the other sources of distraction.

Amping up the story used to be the preserve of tabloid media, where every development was startling and dramatic, even if it just involved a point of order at a council meeting. But even old Aunty ABC is flashing the devil's symbol these days and cranking it up on every story to the point that you feel you're stuck in the front row at a Black Sabbath gig without a set of earplugs. Take this piece from the ABC online:

"The Qantas political brawl has escalated dramatically with an extraordinary suggestion that Opposition Leader Tony Abbott had prior knowledge that Qantas was to ground its aircraft."

If it were me subbing that piece, I'd ask the reporter 'who says it's dramatic?' Is it more dramatic than, say, the public killing of Gaddafi? Will we still be talking about this five years or even five days from now? What makes the suggestion 'extraordinary' compared with every other claim and counter-claim that ricochet around the press boxes in parliament house every day? And who says it's 'escalated'? When was the last time a reporter wrote that a public row had 'diminished'? They always 'escalate', don't they? Theres's no light and shade any more. It's all a journalistic three-chord thrash. And then in the second paragraph:

"Mr Abbott was forced to deny the claim in Parliament, saying he heard about the grounding only a few minutes before it came into force on Saturday."

Who forced him? Was he dragged kicking and screaming to the dispatch box? Did Julia Gillard - like Laurence Olivier in Marathon Man - strap him into a dentist's chair and threaten to yank out his molars with a pair of pliers?

Just in case we weren't yet awed by the volume, the reporter then chucks in another power chord, telling us that Transport Minister Anthony Albanese had "made the extraordinary suggestion that the Opposition may have colluded with Qantas to 'orchestrate' the lockout and grounding". Again, who says it's 'extraordinary'? An alien invasion is extraordinary. A cure for cancer is extraordinary. A suggestion by one political party about its opponent is not extraordinary. What is wrong with simply stating the facts, like this:

Transport Minister Anthony Albanese has questioned whether Opposition Leader Tony Abbott, despite his denials, was part of an orchestrated campaign with Qantas to lock out its workers and ground its planes.

It's a good story on its own. You don't need the effects pedals. So spare us the launching of stinging attacks; the firing of angry salvos, the delivery of broadsides, the dramatic upping of antes, the unleashing of bitter tirades and all the increasingly blunt tools of the journalistic arms race and just tell us what happened.

When you've covered a war or a famine, you can pull out the big, fat end-of-days adjectives. Until then, spare us the migraines and turn down the volume. Please kids.

Turning off the Noise

2011-10-27T12:17:00.006+11:00

It was the great English journalist Walter Bagehot who said that an inability to stay quiet was one of mankind's most conspicuous failings. The irony is that the only way of appreciating the wisdom of that observation is to turn off the noise for a while and see how it feels in contrast.

That's what this blogger has done in recent weeks, taking time off on the NSW north coast and in New Zealand for the Rugby World Cup, an event that brought a whole grieving country together in a way that kicked into touch the daily political noise and flotsam and jetsam of cheap opinion mongering.

So what a joy to return to Sydney and find that the man the SMH hires as a professional troll, Paul Sheehan, had struck a rich seam of eyeball-generating outrage by condemning the violence suggested by the "throat-slitting gestures" of the All Blacks' Kapa O Pango haka. (For the uninitiated, the Kapa O Pango is a relatively new haka - first performed in 2005 and an alternative to the traditional 'Ka Mate' haka. It was devised to recognise the wider Pacific Island influence in NZ rugby and it is used on special occasions when the ABs want to show the strongest respect for their adversaries. So it was used in this World Cup mainly in the finals stages).

Essentially, Sheehan's snide, mean-spirited, condescending and racist diatribe against the Kapa O Pango was a personal dummy spit because the All Blacks - with a precision display of the code at its very highest level - had blown the Wallabies off the field in the semi-final at Eden Park.

"If some of the All Blacks persist in ending this latest version of the haka with a throat-slitting motion, they will be using a very big stage to remind people the Maoris once engaged in unspeakable conduct, which we don't discuss any more," Sheehan wrote.

Reading that, one has to assume that the fragile Sheehan had slept through the last two decades of Australian cricket, in which numerous bowlers and wicket-keepers have sought to unsettle new batsmen with aspersions to their wives, racial characteristics and eating habits. Of course, one could draw conclusions about the Australian cricketers' perfection of the art of personal sledging as an echo of their crude convict origins, but that would really be going too far.

Anyway, Sheehan got what he wanted. About 600 posted on the website version of his haka column, many of them making full and frank assessments of his character and motivations. So, having hooked a big fish the first time, Sheehan threw the line out again a week later with a second go at the haka. But this time he widened the attack to the sort of people who bothered responding to his trollery:

"The overwhelming bulk of posted comments are anonymous, spontaneous and negative, with a heavy bias to vicious," Sheehan wrote. "So, you get a trifecta of ignorance. I'm not sure if this cheapening of the public discourse is what the media had in mind."

Really, Paul? You mean you didn't write that column knowing that you would get such a reaction? You never thought that you would generate a strong and bitter response by telling the Kiwis that 96% of the world doesn't care about their national sport - an expression of their culture every bit as important as cricket is to Australia - and describing the Kapa O Pango haka as a symbol of innate Maori savagery? I'm dumbstruck.

The truth is that Sheehan knew exactly what he was doing. Like all trollumnists, his key performance indicator at the SMH is to push people's buttons and get a reaction, the more spontaneous and outraged the better. And because the contributors to the opinion cycle are growing exponentially, colummnists like Sheehan have to work ever harder at getting heard above the rest of the noise so his employers' advertising clients get value for their money. That's how the business works after all.

Anyway, you only realise how cacophonous and mentally and spiritually draining this noise is when you turn it off and when you walk around with real people in the open air outside the world of blogs and twitter and newspaper trollumnists. That's what I've been doing the past few weeks and I recommend it to you all. Just turn it off for a while.

Meanwhile back to the rugby. I snapped these French and All Black fans together before the final last Sunday. Does this behaviour by young NZ fans look like "dog-in-the-manger, chip-on-the-shoulder, small-country-small-minded, defensive churlishness on an industrial scale"?

The Gag Reflex

2011-10-11T22:49:00.002+11:00

Journalists are a curious bunch. Priding themselves as professional sceptics and reflexively cynical about those who pursue grubby advantage under the borrowed banner of universal morality, they nevertheless are incurably romantic about their own craft.

Indeed, for those of us who have sat through the debate over the recent Bolt judgement, in which Australia's most popular and most powerful tabloid columnist was found to have breached the Racial Discrimination Act, it has been impossible to follow proceedings for all the people in the front rows suddenly standing on principle.

Even normally practical and respected media observers - like Media Watch's Jonathan Holmes - have gone all Thomas Jefferson on us, seeing in Justice Bromberg's eminently sensible and balanced ruling the portent of McCarthyism - as aggrieved sections of the community hide behind the courts to shut down healthy public debate on important issues and silence truth tellers.

Strangely, Holmes and other journalistic opponents of the Bolt ruling find themselves on the same side as the IPA crowd whose public urgings for the preservation of "freedom" usually bear a strong correlation to the pecuniary interests of their undeclared funders in the mining, tobacco and business lobbies.

It's not my intention here to contribute to the fine and high-minded debate about Enlightenment principles and legal precedents, but like Mark Bahnisch I find it interesting that many of those at the front of the queue loudly proclaiming the virtues of freedom of speech (which has never been absolute in any case) are nowhere to be seen when powerful figures routinely use the courts and their own deep pockets to stifle media scrutiny.

The irony is that some of the greatest suppressors of a free media are the press barons themselves. The late Kerry Packer was an enthusiastic litigant and once went after Jonathon Holmes' alma mater Four Corners over a 1997 investigation into casino licensing. And from my own professional experience, lawyers for Rupert Murdoch himself - the great champion of a free media - threatened his partly owned AAP in the early 1990s over a well-researched piece by its media writer about News Corp's near insolvency at that time.

I don't recall journalists getting on their high horses in those cases when the Big End rode into town. And I certainly don't recall those Fair Weather Friends of Freedom that signed the IPA petititon fighting on the barricades when such characters as Piers Akerman or Col Allan went after other media outlets seeking to scrutinise their activity. In many of these cases, litigation is entered into not to seek a judgement, but merely to gag the media in the courts until an issue dies down. (See Stephen Mayne's great wrap-up of several notable defamation suits involving powerful figures over recent years.)

Yes, freedom of speech and a free press are critical to democracy. But I find it hard to rally around the freedom flag when so many are silent in the face of journalism that uses spin and distortion and outright lies in aid of an agenda to smear the least advantaged and most voiceless in our community; of journalism that champions freedom without reference to relative power relationships.

The fact is that journalists' freedoms are there to underpin their first and most important responsibility - to the truth. It is the truth that they are defending. For that, they can earn the trust of their readers and develop a moral strength that acts as a bulwark against tyranny. But calls for freedom ring hollow when the truth comes second.

Waiting for the Feature

2011-09-27T15:39:00.010+10:00

It’s11pm at a Coffs Harbour sports club. The lone gambler is $400 down and still waiting for the feature.

This particular poker machine, The King of the Nile (pictured), is his favourite. When the coveted 15-free-games feature appears – all too infrequently – any winnings are trebled. Even better, this machine gives him a second chance if the original prize is a meager one.

Problem is he is so far down the gurgler by now that he would need a whopping payback to get anywhere near break-even. Every crisp $50 note he pumps into the slot carries with it an increasingly feverish hope of redemption. And when that has gone, he can replenish his supply of notes from the auto-teller at the door.

Reflecting between spins, he knows this session will end badly, as so many have. It is just a question of how badly....

Losing hard earned dollars is always a wrench. But losing the money on the first day of a holiday with his family waiting for him up north makes it even worse. There is no more cash after this. These are the dollars he would have spent on Movie World rollercoasters and ice creams and kayak hire. Now he has to think of excuses.

He leaves the club feeling stunned, flattened, numb. Rattling through his brain on an endless, relentless loop are desperate thoughts of how to get the money back and how he could have been so stupid and self-destructive….. again.

The gambler lies awake half the night beating himself up, mentally and physically – feeling like the lowest form of humanity, a father who spends his kids’ holiday money on pokies.

This is a true story of a compulsive gambler, one who asked to remain anonymous to spare his family But it will be familiar to anyone who has been stricken themselves or knows someone who is in the grip of what is a form of mental illness.

The gambler says his nightmare is an experience he would not wish on his worst enemy. And it’s an experience that all those rent-seekers trying to defeat a sensible and moderate attempt to slow the losses of problem gamblers need to understand.

The man above, at his most sane, might have chosen to spend no more than $50 on gambling that night. All that was needed was for someone to break the cycle and force him outside to gather his thoughts and break the breathless panic that all gamblers feel while a losing streak.

Gamblers will tell you that waiting for the feature is like waiting for the kick from heroin or cocaine. All the little wins and losses are what the gambler puts up with in the hope of the big reward – the flashing lights, the ringing bells, the happy music, the rolling numbers. When it comes, it comes in a rush. And then he wants more. And more.

The compulsion bears no relation to age or status or profession or level of intelligence of the individual. The gambler can understand perfectly well at an intellectual level that his or her chances of winning are extremely slight. But this activity is not about reason or even money. It is certainly not about having fun.

The will to self-destruction comes from self-doubt and self-hatred and depression. It is at once a form of escape from the negative feelings and a reinforcement of them. A big win brings merely relief and ammunition for the next gambling session. A big loss just confirms the emerging sense of loathing and worthlessness.

The Coffs Harbour scene, or something like it, is played out every day in the pubs and clubs of eastern Australia – a part of the world that has the highest concentration of poker machines on the planet and where it is possible to lose thousands of dollars an hour feeding the slots.

It might be a tradie blowing his pay packet in one sitting, having originally sat down with the intention of fluttering five bucks over a schooner after work. It might be a pensioner seeking escape from the loneliness of an empty flat. Or it might be a businessman sneaking out at lunchtime to try and win back the $1,000 he blew the day before.

Why do we let this continue? Because the power of the media, sports clubs, gaming companies and other vested interests are such that politicians are loathe to tackle what is a rampant social disease – one that devastates individuals, wrecks families, ruins businesses and destroys lives.

Reason tells you the sheer easy availability of high stakes, highly addictive poker machines comes at a cost too high for our society to bear. The skeptical - those who think this is really just about personal choice - should read the report from the Productivity Commission, a body known for its liberal market approach to economic issues:

About 130,000 Australians (about 1 per cent of the adult population) are estimated to have severe problems with their gambling. A further 160,000 adults are estimated to have moderate problems.
Problem gamblers comprise 15 per cent of regular (non-lottery) gamblers and account for about $3.5 billion in expenditure annually — about one-third of the gambling industries’ market.
They lose on average around $12 000 each per year, compared with just under$650 for other gamblers.
The prevalence of problem gambling is related to the degree of accessibility of gambling, particularly poker machines.
The costs include financial and emotional impacts on the gamblers and on others,with on average at least five other people affected to varying degrees.
One in 10 said they have contemplated suicide due to gambling.
Nearly half those in counselling reported losing time from work or study in thepast year due to gambling.

No-one is saying these problems will magically disappear with a pre-commitment system under which gamblers set a maximum loss before they hit the machines. But it is extremely hard to believe that such a system will not go some way to easing the pain of a problem that afflicts hundreds of thousands of people directly and hundreds of thousands more indirectly.

If we can’t address this, if we yet again bow to the rent-seekers and greed peddlers who disguise self-interest as the community interest, our political system will truly have failed. We may as well just lie down and let them do us over for eternity.

We can't afford to keep waiting for the feature.

The Secret Sauce

2011-09-21T17:05:00.003+10:00

What did the International Monetary Fund say about the Australian economy? We’re heading for a severe slowdown. No, wait! We’re better placed than anyone. Hold on, that’s not right! Julia Gillard is putting a brave face on a grim outlook.

In an age when the source material for most news events is freely available on the web, it is gob-smacking that cynical and desperate media organisations continue to spin multiple versions of agreed facts to suit their own ideological positions.

If the facts don’t fit the dominant fake narrative – in this case an incompetent government that has wrecked the economy – then the hacks toiling away in the galleys of the nation’s newsrooms will dutifully work over the facts until they do.

It’s how AAP and News Ltd – in full ‘neagh-naa-na-NAA-naa’ mode – managed to report generally glowing IMF report this way: “Prime Minister Julia Gillard says a global forecast that slashes Australia’s growth rate is a ‘ringing endorsement’ of the local economy.” You can virtually hear the sneer.

Ask yourself why they didn’t just tell us what the report actually said without filtering it through the local he-said-she-said noise machine? After all, we don’t need Julia Gillard to interpret the report for us. And we don’t need the media to tell us what Julia Gillard said about it. So why not just junk the increasingly ropey intermediaries (usually 22-year-olds cutting and pasting from a press release) and go straight to the source?

Here’s the IMF’s short and helpful summary of its twice-yearly Fiscal Monitor published today. And here’s the short and helpful summary of its World Economic Outlook, published at the same time. Here’s the video of the IMF’s economic counselor on the report. Here’s the press briefing on the fiscal report. Here’s the press briefing on the economic report. Here’s the transcript. And on and on it goes.

Not interested in all that and just want to know what they said about Australia? Click on the summary, download the PDF and search for the word ‘Australia’. It takes precisely one minute. And here’s what you find:

“Recent natural disasters slowed growth only temporarily in Australia, and despite recent earthquakes, New Zealand’s recovery has gained traction, supported by strong terms of trade and positive trade spillovers from the region. Growth is forecast to pick up from 1¾ percent in 2011 to 3¼ percent in 2012 for Australia and from 2 percent to 3¾ percent for New Zealand.”

Or you might find this graphic comparing general gross government debt across the major economies. All you need to know is that high red bars are bad, low red bars are good.

So at a time the IMF is warning of a new global recession, it’s predicting Australia is rolling along nicely, its fiscal and debt position is one of the best in the developed world and it has plenty of petrol in the tank to drive things along if the global economy stalls completely.

That’s good news isn’t it? I’m sorry, but I’m here to tell you that good news doesn’t sell. We know Australia is a beacon of light in a wrecked global economy. It’s partly why boatloads of destitute people are seeking solace here. But that’s another story.

What’s important to our parochial media is that the IMF report must be manipulated to fit into the carefully constructed narrative about a government that has lost control. It doesn’t matter whether this is true or not. What matters is that it’s the story they want to sell you.

And they want to sell it to you because they need lots of colour and movement to keep you looking at their clients’ advertisements. They lurve the eternal election campaign and the he said-she said parade of irrelevance. That’s why the local political climate is so shouty and tedious. They’re fighting about stuff they can’t control and they’re faking up conflict to put up the pretence that they make any difference.

If going to the original source is too much, why not ditch local media from your bookmarks and stick to international sources about Australia? You’ll find respected financial news provider Bloomberg, for instance, marveling at an Australian media pessimism that is wildly at odd with the facts. Or you’ll see The Economist magazine – the bible for free market liberals – aghast that a country with so much going for it could talk itself into a funk because it’s in the commercial and ideological interests of media companies and politicians to play Punch and Judy.

My advice is to ignore news out of Canberra completely. Most of it is noise. Most of it is self-serving tosh. And most of it bears little resemblance to what is actually going on in the world. So read more widely, go straight to the source and treat with a large handful of salt what you see and read in the local media. It’ll save you an awful lot of grief and it will give you the necessary perspective that good journalism is supposed to provide

The Untouchables

2011-09-14T22:24:00.008+10:00

They squibbed it. Given the chance to tackle News Ltd's stifling and anti-democratic dominance of the metropolitan newspaper market in Australia, the federal government has left ownership issues out of the remit of its independent inquiry into the media.

That was really the only reason for holding an inquiry in the first place. Instead, the inquiry - to be led by former Federal Court judge Ray Finkelstein - will focus on print media regulation, including online publications, and the operation of the Press Council - a body generally considered to be next to useless. This is akin is calling an inquiry into the liquor licensing board in Capone-era Chicago. Until you tackle the gangsters running the show, the Keystone cops appointed to police the precinct are going to prove plod-like in their pursuit of wrong-doing.

Competition lawyers would know better, but it seems to this blogger that News Ltd's cartel-like dominance of the media landscape could be dealt with through existing competition law and its provisions covering abuse of market power. Alternatively, as shareholder activist Stephen Mayne has suggested, there is ample evidence to attack the Murdoch empire on corporate governance grounds.

As it is, it is hard to imagine how the Press Council can be given any additional teeth when it is run by the newspaper industry, which in turn is dominated by Murdoch. In the meantime, this inquiry will just be more grist to the mill for the wind-up hysterical poobahs in the News Ltd papers and the skinny-suited, funky-spectacled, hair-gelled libertarian shills at the Institute of ~~Corporate~~ Public Affairs as an "attack on our freedoms." Yeah right.

It would be a lot easier to take seriously these blowhards' shrieking about attacks on the Fourth Estate if they followed a couple of the key principles of free market economics themselves - namely support for a multiplicity of voices and the encouragement of competition. Instead, they cast as the put upon victim the world's biggest and most powerful media company - a company that pays off police, uses its news pages to lie about public policy in support of its commercial interests and bullies politicians.

Agreed, there is no evidence of News' Australian operations behaving illegally like their UK counterparts, but the corporate culture here is the same - bullying, self-obsession, hyper-sensitivity to criticism and the hijacking of proper journalistic standards to fight manufactured culture wars, to serve tax-dodging agents of international capital and to pursue self-serving blood vendettas.

But don't take my word for it. Even some of News Corp's shareholders - aghast at nepotistic practices and lousy corporate governance - are taking legal action, claiming a failure by the company to "exercise proper oversight" and "gross mismanagement, waste and abuse of control".

As goes the corporate culture, so goes the editorial culture. News Corp is rotten - and until its empire is broken up and/or Murdoch himself dies - nothing will change.

(See also Tim Dunlop: An Inquiry that Ignores Ownership is Pointless)

Double Fault

2011-09-12T22:47:00.008+10:00

A consequence of our "media insider"-driven interpretation of politics is that journalists' conceit over their proximity to the major agents domestically can leave them blind to the global nature of the crisis in liberal democracies.

Journalists, like commentators sitting cosily in their freebie box seats at the tennis, are so busy praising Abbott's passing shots on asylum seekers or condemning Gillard's clumsy backhand on the Malaysian solution that they cannot see that global issues such as the unregulated mass movement of people across borders, man-made climate change and systemic issues in financial markets are at a level of complexity beyond the ability of mere individual states to resolve.

Meanwhile, remaining political tragics still desultorily watching the on-court action from the cheap seats are appalled at the lazy baseline play of the supposed contenders - each seemingly waiting for the other to make a mistake. It is political strategy as an end in itself - the strokeplay serving purely to give the media insiders something to fill the white spaces between their proprietors' ads and the rest of us to blog and tweet about.

The whole dismal spectacle seems to be perpetuated by lazy assumptions among the commentariat that "the people" are too stupid to understand they're being had when in fact the real problem is the narrow framing and the view of politics as contest of tacticians in the daily news cycle. New York journalism professor Jay Rosen, a recent visitor to our shores, nails the confected cynicism of the political press as 'the cult of savviness':

"In politics, our journalists believe, it is better to be savvy than it is to be honest or correct on the facts. It’s better to be savvy than it is to be just, good, fair, decent, strictly lawful, civilized, sincere, thoughtful or humane," Rosen said. "Savviness is what journalists admire in others. Savvy is what they themselves dearly wish to be. (And to be unsavvy is far worse than being wrong.) Savviness is that quality of being shrewd, practical, hyper-informed, perceptive, ironic, “with it,” and unsentimental in all things political. And what is the truest mark of savviness? Winning, of course! Or knowing who the winners are."

Journalists would argue, with some justification, that their savviness is like a suit of armour designed to protect them from the dispiriting circus they report on and allowing them to keep a sort of distance from their subjects. But perhaps the better approach is to remove themselves even further from the day-to-day noise so they can see the underlying signal. And to do that they need to read and observe a little more widely than the confines of a few hundred politicians, staffers and lobbyists in Canberra.

The fact is the disenchantment with mass party politics and the media noise machine that focuses on ephemera and political tactics at the expense of substance is a phenomenon in all the western liberal democracies. The problem is well documented in the US, where critics such as Rosen lambast fake 'neutrality' and he said-she said journalism that treats all claims on issues of public interest - no matter how divorced from reality - as equally valid. It is evident in the UK, where Guardian journalist Nick Davies has written about 'Flat Earth News', in which journalists are reduced to processors of second-hand material, much of it designed to promote the political and commercial interests of those who are paid to provide it.

This suggests the problem is the system itself, and not the people. Many of the suspected causes have been canvassed on this blog in the past year - the increasing speed of the news cycle, the death of the business model supporting quality journalism, the rising demand for content across multiple media as resources shrink and the growing power of the public relations and spin-doctoring industry. So the media is busted, the conventional political machinery doesn't work anymore and nobody is listening to the politicians.

Offering a fresh perspective is former UK diplomat Carne Ross, who in his book 'The Leaderless Revolution: How Ordinary People Can Take Power and Change Politics in the 21st Century' has proposed a networked non-violent "anarchism" to restore a sense of agency to voters in liberal democracies who have lost faith in national political leaders to resolve (and media to accurately report on) increasingly complex global problems. Ross, who quit the Foreign Office in disgust at the Iraq war, says established political institutions - and the media who report on them - have reached a cul-de-sac of powerlessness where they go through the motions, knowing the problems we face (climate change, terrorism, global financial collapse) are too complex and multi-faceted for any nation state to solve on its own - and where real power rests with markets, transnational corporations, cartels and criminal gangs.

"I actually have come to believe that the condition of leaderlessness is an essential condition of stability," Ross told the London School of Economics. "The heroic model of leadership that we have is part of the problem. We attribute to these people qualities that they do not have and that no human can have - the ability to interpret this extraordinarily complicated world and make rational, good decisions about it. No centralising authority is capable of it. The best people to understand it are those that are living it - and that means ourselves."

So for all the on-court histrionics, the game really has moved on. The domestic political debate is a shadow play that generates a torrent of commentary and a paucity of consequence. Our leaders are swinging their rackets at nothing in particular and with little purpose other than drawing the applause from a thinning crowd of "savvy" journalists and political tragics living under the illusion that what they do makes any difference whatsoever.

Anti-Social Media

2011-09-05T21:41:00.003+10:00

The Nine Network's recent staged live crosses to a helicopter "in flight" tell you all you need to know about the state of much of our mainstream media - cynical pretenders that see news as entertainment and their audiences as idiots.

Of course, faking live broadcasts is an age-old ruse in the infotainment business that commercial radio and television calls 'news'. The classic was Media Watch's 1996 expose of Today Tonight hack Dave 'Sluggo' Richardson, who, in the hunt for fugitive businessman Christopher Skase, used Barcelona as the set for an imagined showdown with police in Skase's Majorca hideaway.

Less blatantly, but no less dishonestly, Australian networks continue the tradition today by having reporters sitting cosily in a studio in London, New York or Los Angeles and reporting on events hundreds or thousands of kilometres away. The important point isn't the story. The point is that the network has someone "on the spot", even if that means turning around agency pictures and re-voicing wire copy, while spending half a year's budget on a fly-in-fly-out pieces to camera.

And newspapers do it too - ritually copying and pasting from Reuters or AP and sticking their own 'correspondent's' name on the top of the story when the only effort that individual typically makes is throwing a line or two of local context.

Over at the Limited News Deathstar, the trick is to force foreign affairs coverage through their Never Ending Culture Wars blender - which is why Greg Sheridan (the man who spotted Iraq's WMDs from the American club in Macquarie Street) can describe Tony Abbott as having "the right stuff to master the world" because he sucked up to some Israeli diplomats at a Sydney luncheon.

And, remember, these are the "professional" journalists - the ones who patronise respected names in social media as "unedited bloggers", and claim they themselves are the only ones with the skills and discretion to know news when they see it and provide useful and insightful analysis around it.

I prefer Jeff Jarvis' take on what journalism is in a social media age. It is no longer defined by who does it - he says - but what they do and how they do it. The community - through Twitter or other agencies - can share information among themselves, which means journalists are going to have to find new ways of adding value.

Sorry guys, but sitting in a stationary chopper and yelling over the rotor blades isn't going to cut it.

Branded News

2011-08-30T20:50:00.002+10:00

Is journalism about truth or marketing? If you picked the former, go back three spaces.

Journalism, as it is practised for the most part today, is about packaging, framing and distributing information to match the world views and ideological biases of distinct target markets. But don't take my word for it.

A highlight of the recent 'New News Conference' in Melbourne - held as part of writers' week - was a session involving the bosses of Fairfax, the ABC and Crikey. News Ltd predictably was unrepresented, which is why that fusty King of the Tory Nerds, Gerard Henderson, could safely describe it as as a lefty luvvies love-in.

The video above is a discussion between the ABC's Mark Scott, Fairfax's Greg Hywood, Crikey's Sophie Black, retired unionist Kevin Rennie and moderator Maxine McKew. Go to around the 38-minute mark and you'll hear Scott note that media consumers increasingly favour outlets that reflect and confirm their prejudices (the Alan Jones effect).

"If you want, you can read Andrew Bolt, you can listen to Alan Jones, you can watch Andrew Bolt on television. And so it's the emergence here in a sense of that Fox News model that says if you have a certain ideological world view, you can have all your media experiences within it. And it's important that others are providing a more pluralistic engagement."

So Scott's defence of the ABC's 'production of innocence' - a term which Jay Rosen uses to describe journalism that boasts about its 'neutrality'- - is that the ABC will line up all the wingnuts from right to left and let you make your own mind up about where the truth might ultimately lie. Well, thanks Mark, great service. I feel, so....informed by this array of choices. So in our world of journalism as marketing, the ABC emerges as a kind of Big W or Target - aisle upon aisle of cheap and trashy opinions for you to fill up your already overflowing shopping basket.

Meanwhile, down at the formerly chic and now shabby Country Road outlet - otherwise known as Fairfax Media - Greg Hywood is trying to satisfy the fickle tastes of multiple new niche markets without the former Gold Amex of classified advertising that funded quality journalism. Hywood's argument is that formerly there weren't that many choices for media consumers. But now there's too many. And that's making it hard for mainstream, traditional media organisations to satisfy everyone. So they target distinct audiences.

"I think people get upset because there is not a balanced coverage of everything," Hywood says. "And when you had a small choice, those media organisations had a relatively balanced approach because they were mass audience publications. But in this plethora of choice, the traditional media forms have to make a choice about who their audience is."

Call me naive, but I would argue that mainstream media organisations need to focus firstly on producing good, truthful journalism that serves the needs of the public. Where the media went wrong in the last 30 years was trading in its editorial integrity for the advice of marketing consultants and product positioners who thought the truth was just another brand choice.

The fact is news journalism isn't a brand that you sell to aggregate an audience for advertisers. Neither is it a smorgasbord of unrelated "facts" sold as a sort of bland neutrality. Journalism involves making judgements; it means representing the weak and voiceless against the strong and well connected, it means calling out vested interests selling self-serving propaganda as fact; it means asking tough questions of those whose displeasure could hurt your employer commercially.

News should not be a commodity that you sell to build a target audience around your "brand". It should not be a commercial process. But it has become so. And it explains why so much of the media tranquilizes us with "lifestyle" reports, crime beat-ups, bogus opinion polls, lazy template "yarns" and the political racecall. None of this would matter much if the consequences of selling news as a commodity were not so deleterious to our democracy - a point put passionately by the Guardian's Nick Davies (the fearless journalist who broke the News Corp hacking scandal) in his landmark book 'Flat Earth News':

"What we are looking at here is a global collapse of information gathering and truth telling," Davies writes. "And that leaves us in a kind of knowledge chaos, where the very subject of global debate is shifted from the essential to the arbitrary; where government policy, cultural values, widespread assumptions, declarations of war and attempts at peace all turn out to be poisoned by distortion; where ignorance is accepted as knowledge and falsehood is accepted as truth."

Real journalism should not be a commercial endeavour at all. It is about the truth. And its value lies in the trust that is engendered between the journalist and his or her audience. Go back to THOSE values and everything else will fall into place. Until then, it's just marketing.

(PS: See Tim Dunlop's latest piece for an example of how the news as branding exercise works. In this case, The Australian puts on a song and dance about a defamatory story it pulled, in an effort to satisfy a market that has bought its narrative about the minority government)

Mr Jones Goes to Canberra

2011-08-22T22:42:00.004+10:00

Photo: SMH

The media is a sucker for stories about plain-talkin', grass-roots folk confronting cynical politicians with homespun morality. Think 'Mr Smith Goes to Washington'.

Brought up on these sentimental tabloid templates and jaded with the daily theatre of covering politics, capital city journalists tend to revel in 'people's protests' as a welcome injection of 'authenticity' in a working environment where no-one ever says what they mean.

Aware of this tendency, Australia's savviest spinners and lobbyists have taken their cues from the world's best practice US media manipulators and their now widely employed strategy of 'astro-turfing' - a form of advocacy to advance a corporate or political agenda masquerading as a 'grass-roots' movement.

And don't some of our media friends in Canberra fall for it every time? Despite priding themselves on their cynicism, political reporters like the ABC's resident Tory Chris Uhlmann earnestly interpret the parade of shockjock-manufactured people's protests against the carbon tax, pokie reforms, gay marriage (and whatever else fires up an 18-wheeler driver in a lumberjack shirt) as some sort of expression of the real folk:

UHLMANN: "It's not as large a gathering as some of the organisers had hoped, but the crowd has certainly found a way to make itself heard. although there was an anti-carbon tax theme, the convoy had picked up many hitchhikers along the way."

PROTESTOR: " That's the international Christian flag. You see the cross up there. And I just brought this down today because God told me to bring it down."

UHLMANN: "But to dismiss them all as cranks of no consequence meant you didn't bother to talk to any of them or ask why they would travel so far."

Just when did our journalistic elite stop taking their bullshit detection medication? The mere presence of that self-promoting blow-hard carnival barker Alan Jones - a man whose opinions have been found to be correlated to how much he is being paid by corporate interests - should have alerted anyone with any news sense that this was an astro-turfed event. Sure there were a few truly aggrieved souls in the crowd, but the idea that this was some kind of natural expression of widespread community anger was just fanciful.

Yet there was Uhlmann running News Ltd's line that "the forgotten people" are not being heard in Canberra, despite 90 per cent of the media - including himself - doing little else in their reporting but manufacturing the circumstances of discontent with the government so that they can then run the line that the country is in uproar.

There are exceptions, of course. Getting full marks for real journalistic chutzpah, The Sydney Morning Herald's Jacqueline Maley sparked a characteristic spittle-projecting hissy fit by the vile Jones when she dared to ask him whether he had been paid a fee for venturing out of his $3 million Sydney harbourside mansion to mix it with the bush 'battlers' in chilly Canberra. For her troubles, she nearly found herself on the wrong end of a pitchfork.

But for the most part, it suits a lazy media - hooked on fake conflict and the eternal election campaign - to patronise their readership and viewership by presuming that a few dozen truckies in bush shirts and akubras standing outside parliament and calling for fresh elections somehow is the true 'voice of the people'.

We deserve more from journalists. We deserve a better media.

I've Seen That Movie Too

2011-08-17T23:29:00.006+10:00

As the ABC mulls the falling ratings for its flagship 730 current affairs show, it might want to consider whether the problem isn't so much the presenter or the physical set or the stories - but the conventional television narratives that have become so hackneyed that no-one can be bothered paying attention anymore.

A typical 730 pre-recorded package includes obligatory slow-mos (to differentiate straight news from current affairs), self-consciously portentous music (Ride of the Valkyries for smart-arse reporters smelling the Canberra napalm), ritual set-up shots (man works into a room, flicks through a report, picks up phone), recycled B-roll (story about trade - container ships; story about financial markets - men stare at Bloomberg terminals; story about consumption - waist-high shots of people in the mall carrying bags).

A typical 730 political interview involves Chris Ullman playing cat-and-mouse with an over-media-coached politician, trained to avoid saying anything mildly surprising or interesting - as long as he/she doesn't make the dreaded "gaffe". It's like Kabuki theatre, it is so formulaic.

The wonder is this creative bankruptcy continues at a time when visual/digital journalists have never had such exciting new tools at their disposal. On that score, the ABC's brilliant young team at Hungry Beast show how to tell stories visually without resorting to television cliche.
Against that vivid comparison, the cul-de-sac of traditional TV news and current affairs narratives look very tired indeed - a moving wallpaper of heavily ritualized forms, cut and pasted together by droning reporters seeking to appear arch and slightly detached for an audience that watches more out of habit than desire.

Guardian media critic Charlie Booker shows how the sausages are made here:

The Money Go Round

2011-08-10T14:15:00.002+10:00

Hi, I'm Ricky Retire-Safe and welcome to Your Money or Your Life - the program where we reveal what today's market movements mean for you, your children and your children's children. And if we scare the shit out of you in the process even better.

Coming up in today's show:

An utterly irrelevant round-up of overnight market ~~noise~~ action featuring loads of incomprehensible graphs that you will forget as soon as you've finished your weetbix...
A leading (OK, they're all 'leading') market economist issues a forecast on interest rates that is a 180 degree turnaround from what he said a week ago and 360 degrees from two weeks back...

And in today's interview, Shadow Treasurer Joe Hockey tells us that if interest rates rise/fall/stay where they are, it's because the government has lost control of the economy. First up, though, here's Kirsty Kram, with her thesaurus and the market wrap:

"Thanks Rick! Wall Street soared/sailed/shone overnight on promises of continued low interest rates , a day after swooning/sinking/slipping on fears of rising ones. Banks and miners led/drove/ the gains, a day after driving/leading the falls. Our dollar went along for the ride, accelerating/advancing/ascending after the previous day dropping/drooping/descending, while bond yields plummeted/parachuted/pirouetted lower after earlier perking/picking/piling up. The futures market suggests local shares today will strengthen/rebound/surge/flourish, but traders warn this will depend on the RBA cutting/slashing/trimming/lowering cash rates to stimulate/boost/buttress/promote activity. Also, say something here about the carbon tax destroying/decimating/damaging our future. Sorry, Rick, I can't read/decipher/translate my notes. I got the quote from a broker at a facility/establishment/the pub last night."

Thanks anyway Kirsty. And thanks Mr Roget. That carbon tax sure has a lot to answer for, which brings me to my second guest, Shadow Treasurer Joe Hockey. Joe, thanks for joining us. Has Australia become a sovereign risk?

"Well, let me put it this way, Rick, the All Ordinaries was 10 per cent above today's levels when the government unleashed the carbon tax on us. So it's gotta be hurting. And that's mums' and dads' super money."

But, Joe, every other market is down as well isn't it? And the carbon tax doesn't actually start till a year from now.

"Well, yes, and that just tells you the whole world is worried about this tax."

"Let's talk about inflation....I want to ask you...."

(Hockey pulls out piece of paper from suit pocket). "Yes, inflation. In economics, inflation is a rise in the general level of prices of goods and services in an economy over a period of time."

"We know that, Joe. But the market is saying the next move in rates will be down. Doesn't that suggest inflation is not a problem?"

"Not now. What it means ,Rick, is that this government is driving the economy into the ground with its carbon tax, which will force prices up."

"But you just said inflation isn't a problem. Growth is."

"No what I said was that people's lives and businesses are being thrown on the scrap heap because of the carbon tax."

"But the unemployment rate is at its lowest level on record."

"Yes, but that means wages will spiral out of control, inflation will surge, interest rates will soar/rocket/accelerate/take off (Kirsty, can you throw me the Roget......thanks) and the government will be in the dock for destroying our sacred Aussie way of life."

"Yes, but you said inflation isn't a problem."

"No, what I said, Rick, is that the whole world is watching Australia right now and not liking what it sees. Forget that the Euro is coming apart. Forget that the US has been downgraded. Forget that London is in flames. The whole world is watching us and thinking we have gone stark raving crazy over this tax on a weightless gas. I mean seriously...it would be funny if it wasn't so....so....serious."

"Yes, but we're one of the few AAA-rated countries left in the world. Central banks are buying our bonds by the bucketload and our currency is above parity. That doesn't sound like we're a sovereign risk to me..."

"But Australia will be a sovereign risk, Rick. Mark my words. Tony Abbott and I will do everything to ensure it is. We're off to New York next week to tell hedge funds that their money is no longer safe in our banks. And then we're gonna to leak to the Herald Sun and the Daily Telegraph that the government plans to tax the family home and then we're gonna block supply in the Senate and then...."

Thanks Joe. Unfortunately that's all we've got time for. We'll return in a moment with a forecast for today's markets that will be out of date by the time the next segment begins. And we'll have broker Rock Digger with his tips for three mining stocks to get you through till the next margin call. But first a word from our sponsor, Rio Tinto.....

Freedom Now!

2011-08-04T16:34:00.005+10:00

Our freedoms are under attack. And the assailants are wearing drawstring pants. As bad as the heinous actions of the Norwegian gunman were, nothing is as reprehensible as the dire assault by shrieking leftists on the quietly-spoken and moderate Marxist-turned-Libertarian Brendan O'Neill on Monday night's Q&A.

Fired up on mungbeans and soy machiattos, the Ultra-Leftist 10-stone enforcer Stephen Mayne took time out from shareholder meetings and dodging punches thrown by News Ltd freedom fighters to spew his bile at a man whose only interest is to preserve the legacy of our embattled publishing saint, Rupert Murdoch.

Yes, you heard me. Three words: Rupert. Murdoch. Saint. Like Anne Frank crouching in a ceiling space waiting for the Nazis to arrive, this is a persecuted man who loves his children (even the corrupt and forgetful ones), who has fought for press freedom everywhere (except China, where the size of the market is just too big to stand up for Freedom, but let that be for a moment) and who understands intimately his readers' concerns (which he achieves by tapping phones).

The Smug Left will never understand these achievements. Sitting around idly at cafes in Prahan and Paddington, thumbing through copies of The Monthly and mulling over colour schemes for their renovated nurseries, these shallow hipsters do not know what it is like to Fight for Freedom or die in wars championed by newspapers to eliminate non-existent weapons of mass destruction.

Meanwhile, the greatest Australian-American ever to walk this earth in Gucci slippers and a camel housecoat is holding governments to account around the world by publishing creative perspectives about climate science from self-proclaimed peers of the realm, by exposing the norks of nubile teenagers and by Generally Making Things Up. This is NOT easy. But someone has to do it to Preserve Our Liberties.

You see, there are two types of people in the world. Some are humble people, who love their families and their country. These people are plain-speaking realists who are not afraid to stand up in the face of mighty threats to denounce the Greens as f**cking loser d**kheads with sh*t for brains who want to Destroy our Very Way of Life in Australia. Let us call these brave souls The Right (as in They Are Right).

On the other side you have sneering elitists with degrees in post-modern literature and sociology, who hate their children, spit on the flag and cheer wildly at mass murders in Norway, knowing that they can use these events to pour constant scorn on gun club members and those who want to ban the burqa and swear at suspected Muslim terrorists shopping at Big W. Let us call them The Left (as in They Are Wrong).

Not content with fomenting extremism all around the world, these bleeding hearts now want to debate the power and concentration of the media. Debate! Let me put that another way. Debate is code for Close Down Scrutiny of the Government. These Totalitarians in Timberlands want to Silence Alan Jones. Brave Alan. ~~Gloria~~ Glorious Alan.

Ask yourself this: Is a media debate worth the loss of your right to call Alan's show after 16 beers and suggest Julia Gillard be stuck in a hessan sack and dumped in Sydney harbour? Do you want these 'liberals', with their pesky and long-winded questions and demands for 'diversity', to rob you of your right to get a skinful and scoot down to Cronulla on Alan's orders to take a crowbar to a few Lebs?

Now clearly, there are some reasonable people of The Left out there - the ones who take their dose of manufactured delusion each day from the Herald Sun and Daily Telegraph and just Shut the F*ck Up. But those people are not the ones making the trouble. Those people are not the ones driving our economy into the ground with their Special Pleading for schools and hospitals and other Entitlement Programs, or taxing our productive brown coal industries to death with their climate delusions.

The answer to this extremism is to embrace the default mainstream position of ordinary Australians - who jealously guard their rights to be fearful and suspicious within their own homes and who are distrustful of meddling liberals who insist on asking questions of your media ~~overlords~~ servants.

So Stand Up for Freedom! Actually, you sit down. We'll do the standing. Thanks.

(The author would like to thank Joe Hildebrand for the inspiration).

Fair is Foul and Foul is Fair

2011-07-31T18:26:00.006+10:00

As the US and European economies slowly sink into a quicksand of indebtedness, the world is watching with increasing incredulity the doom-laden discourse of lucky Australia . Here is an economy enjoying fundamentals that other developed nations would donate their first born for, yet our parochial media has decided to slavishly sing along with Tony Abbott's one-note death march of the saints.

How has it come to this? Our unemployment rate is half that of the US and much of Western Europe, our public debt is among the lowest in the world, our terms of trade are delivering a boost to national incomes unseen in at least 50 years, our banks are among the highest rated financial institutions anywhere and we were the only major developed economy to avoid recession during the global financial crisis.

Yet the witches chorus of Murdoch hacks, talkback quacks and business lobby flaks has convinced a blissfully ignorant and disengaged Australian population that the economy is descending into a fiery hell of the Gillard government's own making. Every initiative is quickly woven into a bogus, manufactured and hysterical narrative about policy incompetence that virtually everyone in the MSM (and the government itself much of the time) tacitly accepts as the truth.

For those who pay more than a modicum of attention to what is going on outside the echo chamber that constitutes the Murdoch press, commercial television and radio and parts of the ABC - and all you need to do that are Google alerts and a couple of RSS feeds - much of the developed world economy is in the crapper. Washington has run out of IOUs and the political experiment that was the single European currency is coming apart under the pressure of economic reality. Yet Australia is thriving. Insofar has we have problems - a suddenly savings conscious consumer and an overly strong currency - these are only so in comparison with the extraordinary period of leverage-driven consumption that went before.

So amid this endlessly echoing cacophony, hearing voices of reason from outside our own self-generated din provides refreshing reassurance that one is not insane. Among them in recent weeks was a bewildered sounding editorial in that pillar of the globalist neo-liberal establishment The Economist which asked how a country so magnificently endowed could conceivably blow it by descending into the sort of partisan-for-the-sake-of-it carping and negativity that has brought Washington to a standstill . This noise is amplified by a cynical media whose he-said-she said parroting of deceitful scaremongering - usually for the sake of ratings points and ad dollars - just reinforces the ignorance of their readership.

"Many Australians do not seem to appreciate that they live in an unusually successful country," The Economist said. "Accustomed to unbroken economic expansion—many are too young to remember recession—they are inclined to complain about house prices, 5% unemployment or the problems that a high exchange rate causes manufacturing and several other industries. Some Australians talk big but actually think small, and politicians may be the worst offenders. They are often reluctant to get out in front in policymaking—on climate change, for instance—preferring to follow what bigger countries do."

The Economist reserved special condemnation for Tony Abbott's importation of the Tea Party's tactics of wilful obstructionism and contrarianism. While Abbott's media cheerleaders say this has always been the role of the Opposition, his tactics aren't about providing an alternative viewpoint but mindless wrecking for the sake of making government impossible. And his results are impressive, with a public debate now at the point where detestable shockjocks ritually urge violence against our elected representatives. And no-one bats an eyelid. No-one, of course, apart from people watching from overseas and wondering how a country with such good fortune and so much potential could sink into such a stinking morass of its own making; people such as the influential Bloomberg business news columnist William Pesek:

"The politics of pessimism is a tried-and-true formula," Pesek writes. "Blame those in power for every conceivable ill, employing plenty of hyperbole and lots of volume. It's a sure way to dominate the news cycle. As 2011 unfolds, though, something feels different, more apocalyptic. Politicians, radio shock jocks, TV pundits and editorialists are tripping over themselves to call Julia Gillard the worst prime minister Australia has ever seen, today's economic climate the most dismal and tomorrow's outlook the most disheartening in history."

Pesek notes that Australia does have some challenges - like needing to invest more in infrastructure and education and working out what to do with the squillions from the mining boom. But, as he says, these are good problems to have at a time when much of Europe is heading for default and political paralysis in Washington is threatening a total shutdown of the government. While Australia has a rolled gold opportunity to use its prosperity to build a sustainable future, the country's politicians - living in fear of a media that does not look beyond the next deadline - are prisoners of a negative news cycle.

"Australia's obstacles are far less dire, though you wouldn't know it," Pesek writes. "The country needs an honest and transparent debate about harnessing the mining boom, but it's getting a petty brawl between Gillard and Abbott. Anything Gillard proposes, Abbott derides as economic suicide. (Meanwhile, having successfully killed the resource super profits tax), Australia's business community figures it can dump Gillard. Her sin is making an effort to lead. She is pushing something that's inevitable globally as temperatures and sea levels rise: a tax on carbon emissions. The knives are out and the punditocracy is telling Australians they will be homeless if Gillard gets her way. It would be silly if it weren't so pernicious."

Pesek has it right. The media and public discourse in this country has reached a point where people are not being trusted with the truth. Indeed, the media for the most part is not interested in pursuing the truth because manufactured conflict is proving a good business model.

Ultimately, journalism at its best is built on three pillars - trust, truth and objectivity. The latter attribute is the one that is least understood. It doesn't mean employing fake equivalence or 'balance' - as in ensuring every argument from every vested interest is given equal weight. It does mean providing context for readers, testing the veracity of politicians' claims (what are the chances of the coal industry shutting down overnight?) and providing points of comparison and contrast with what is happening elsewhere. It means supplying perspective.

And couldn't we do with some of that right now?

Agenda Benders

2011-07-24T17:49:00.003+10:00

What's the key difference between good and bad journalism? In the former, the facts always come first, assumptions are to be avoided and the simple questions 'who, what, where, when, how and why' are the tools of the trade. For the latter, the facts are just a convenient hook on which to hang a specific agenda. The tragic events in Norway provide a prime example of how this works.

The best journalists this blogger ever worked with were in the wire services. They were trained to work under the pressure of constant deadlines and they had the skills to deliver clear, concise, accurate and properly sourced copy in real-time on breaking news events. When the facts were incomplete or unclear, wire journos say so. It wasn't just pride in their craft that made them this way. It was good business. Agencies like Reuters or The Associated Press - who traditionally were wholesalers of news to retail media - know that the business they are in is fundamentally about trust. When you lose that, your product becomes worthless.

While social media and the ability for anyone to publish in real-time to a global audience have changed the dynamics of breaking news reporting, the major agencies are thriving in new ways by being trusted sources to an unmediated audience. Most newspapers, though, are struggling. Unable to compete on speed - primarily because they have never properly adapted to real-time news - some newspapers have decided their digital future is in instant punditry. In other words, their online business model consists of telling you what something means or what they think about it before the facts are known. And when the facts prove unhelpful, they often torture them to suit their pre-cooked agenda. Think of it as a gigantic trolling machine.

In Australia, the masters of this 'fit-the-world-into-a-pre-made-ideological-template' are, of course, the News Ltd tabloid attack columnists like Tim Blair and Andrew Bolt. So we saw these two fire up their blogs on Saturday morning as soon as the news came out of Norway - obviously seeing in those events a prime opportunity to push the instant hate buttons of their unhinged yet hopelessly devoted readerships. Imagine their disappointment, then, when the troublesome facts (lone gunman, white, right-wing and clearly delusional) did not fit the chosen template. Bolt's first line in his coverage of the story was:

"Once the identity of the attackers becomes known, the consequences for Norway’s immigration policies could be profound."

Yes, Bolt did update his blog to correct those initial impressions and provided accurate, real-time cut-and-paste updates from the wires. But he quickly lost interest in the story when it didn't fit the single narrative his readers constantly look to him to deliver - like small children wanting a parent to read them the same story over and over again. You see, people don't read Andrew Bolt for news. They go to him to have their prejudices confirmed. In other words, the agenda he pursues with almost religious fervour is more important than the facts, which are just there to be adjusted to his world view - one in which hard-working, white, conservative, Christian people are under attack from the brown, bludging, Muslim hordes and meddling bleeding heart "leftists". In fact, it's a world view eerily in sync with that of the gunman in Norway.

For a busted mainstream media, this get-your-prejudices-confirmed-here approach delivers page impressions, no doubt. It's successful, to be sure; if, of course, your idea of success is twisting and distorting real-world events to fit an agenda that panders to ignorance, bigotry and xenophobia. There's ALWAYS been a market for that. I'm not sure I would call it journalism, though. Not in my book.

If the Crap Fits...

2011-07-19T17:18:00.012+10:00

What recourse have the public when the nation's major media company wilfully misrepresents a public policy reform? What safeguards are there against blatantly dishonest journalism that presents opinion as fact and a partisan agenda as straight news?

Take a look at the two front covers above - from the nation's two biggest selling newspapers and ask yourself, as the ABC's Annabel Crabb has contended, whether this is merely "aggressive" reporting and that the government's response to it is paranoid and misguided.

How can the media be said to be doing its job when it scrutinises only one side of politics and, even then, uses distortion, manipulation and outright deceit to misinform readers in support of a corporate agenda? (See Jonathon Holmes' dissection on Media Watch of The Daily Telegraph's dishonest coverage of the carbon tax.) It is quite clear to anyone with eyes that Rupert Murdoch's News Ltd is intent on regime change in Australia. Yet it blandly maintains, as seen in the comments by CEO John Hartigan on 730 last week, that all it is doing is "taking the fight" up to the government:

LEIGH SALES: In the UK, some of the focus now is on the relationships between the media and politicians and whether or not the Murdoch press bully and intimidate them and abuse their power by running stories with an obvious agenda. Do your newspapers in Australia bully politicians or officials in that manner?

JOHN HARTIGAN: Look, I think we take them to their official capacity and responsibilities. I don't believe that we ever overstep. Yes, it's a love-hate relationship and sometimes it's loving and sometimes it's very hateful, but I don't think, generally speaking, that we exceed our authority.

A vigorous, questioning press is indeed an asset to a functioning democracy. But only if it employs that vigour against all sides in politics. News Limited does not do this on even the most charitable measure. Instead, it has run a nakedly partisan anti-government line on the NBN, the fiscal stimulus, asylum seekers and any number of issues with the clear intent of breaking down a minority government it has never accepted as legitimate and in which a major part is played by a party it has openly vowed to destroy. What's more, it has done this with little respect for the facts.

Now this would not matter so much if News did not control 70 per cent of the metropolitan print market and did not hold a monopoly in a number of cities around Australia. For many people, the News Limited coverage is the only coverage they get apart from what they hear on the ABC (which is increasingly an echo chamber of the Murdoch press in any case). But the answer to this misuse of monopoly power is not another inquiry, which would only tell us what we already know. Neither is it more regulation, which inevitably has unintended consequences. The answer is increased diversity. The question is how that can be achieved.

For a while now, we have been assuming massive technological change would lead to more diversity. In the middle of the last decade, the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission chairman Graeme Samuel spoke approvingly of an "exciting new era" in media as a younger generation embraced digital technology. Samuel, as many did at that time, spoke approvingly of Rupert Murdoch's own landmark speech to the American Society of Newspaper editors, in which he spoke of a "revolution in the way young people are accessing news". The hope was that new technology would lead to new players and new voices.

Six years later, there certainly has been a revolution. But the search for a working business model in the digital space goes on, most people still get their news from the mainstream outlets and those same outlets employ the vast bulk of journalists. Yet, we still hear from regulators about some wonderful imagined new media diversity that will change our lives. It's this utopian idea that's the subject of the government's current convergence review, which is looking into the appropriate regulatory framework for a world in which the old separations between print and radio and television are no longer relevant.

That's all very well. And it's true that convergence is happening. But this trend affect mainly affects the technology, distribution systems and user experience, not the ownership structure, which remains as concentrated as ever. The fact is whatever happens, the established players tend to get stronger. Foxtel, in which News Corp holds a 25 per cent share, is in the process of bidding for rival Austar, which would give it a monopoly in pay television. Irrespective of the stench around News Corp in the UK, there is a strong case on competition grounds that this bid should not be allowed to proceed. In the end, politicians will have to act to force greater diversity, but as Bernard Keane argues, they do not appear to have the nerve for it.

The case against more diversity, put by Alan Kohler, is that adding more players is no guarantee of higher quality. Kohler uses the lowest-common denominator muckracking of the UK tabloids as evidence that additional competition can actually end up lowering standards rather than raising them. In this view of the world, while Julia Gillard may plead with journalists not to write "crap", the sad fact is that crap sells and adding more players will just accelerate the race to the bottom. As for public disgust, the News of the World was the best selling newspaper in Britain because of the gutter journalism it employed. Readers were quite happy to look the other way until the methods driving that paper's sewer-standard newsgathering were exposed. Likewise, the bitter competition on commercial television here between Today Tonight on the Seven Network and A Current Affair on Nine has not netted any increase in quality; indeed quite the reverse.

There are a couple of responses to the 'crap sells and people love it' argument. The first - as we are hearing now from News Corp's legions of ventriloquising in-house defenders - is that this 'crap' is really just robust, honest, rough-and-tumble, democratic journalism loved by the masses of people and loathed by the effete elites. It's a pose that the billionaire Murdoch has been successfully striking for 50 years - even now (hilariously) characterising himself as the upstart outsider cocking his nose at a stuffy establishment with straight-talking, unpretentious truth telling.

Of course, this view would be easier to accept if News Corp did not consistently and conveniently find a common cause between the elite corporate and geopolitical interests it champions (mining conglomerates, tobacco companies, the gambling industry) and the humble battlers it purports to represent. Not to sound too cynical or anything, but commercial media organisations ritually beat their collective chests and claim to stand for truth and justice when their aims are in fact quite venal. And News Corp speaks out of both sides of its mouth better than anyone.

The second answer to the problem of "crap selling" is that strong, robust journalism and quality journalism are not incompatible concepts and there IS a market for it. One struggles to think of a better example of patient, meticulous, brave news-gathering than that they employed by The Guardian and reporter Nick Davies in pursuit of the phone hacking controversy in the UK. Murdoch journalists, of course, would say that their pursuit of the Rudd and Gillard governments fits in the same bucket, and, yes, it is quite legitimate for the press to ask tough questions of government. But the media also has a responsibility to get its facts straight and provide honest reporting of primary information before it starts opining on it. It should also separate out straight reporting from analysis and opinion. This is not the way of the Murdoch titles, which revel in openly partisan journalism. And while fearless scrutiny is wonderful, it needs to be applied to everyone - including Tony Abbott. "Accuracy, balance and fairness" were the three principles rammed down the throats of journalism students when I went into the trade and they still should be the bedrock upon which everything is built.

Finally, as I continue to argue on this blog, quality journalism has a social utility irrespective of its commercial viability. So we should pressure our democratic representatives to champion policies that encourage greater diversity and depth in media. That can be done by legislating limits on the control of the print media (Murdoch controls 70 per cent in Australia; compared to 40 per cent in Britain, the source of his troubles). It can also be achieved by ensuring an independent public broadcaster with a strong, non-partisan board and proper funding of news and current affairs services. Most of all, it requires a Press Council with actual teeth (not a puppet of the press barons as it is now) and an Australian Communications and Media Authority (the regulator of commercial broadcasting) that actually enforces its own existing standards. This is all achievable, but will need a much more vocal public pressure on politicians to show some backbone against a Murdoch press and talkback radio fraternity that is beyond the pale.

Further reading:
Daily Telegraph's GST Coverage from the '90s - Andrew Crook (Crikey)
Why we need media reform - Wendy Bacon (New Matilda)
News Ltd Journalism and Political Propaganda - Geoffrey Barker (Inside Story)
Carbon Tax Facts - a new website that strips away the misinformation and gives you the FACTS about the scheme to price carbon. Be sure to pass it onto your friends and relatives.

Strings Attached

2011-07-10T17:48:00.010+10:00

Business institutions so large and powerful that they distort the democratic process; frightened politicians in the pockets of large monopolistic companies; a corrupted and constricted public debate and an ever increasing separation between the actions of those large institutions and the generally agreed standards of public decency: The grim pathology of the global financial crisis comes to mind when watching the beginning of the end of Rupert Murdoch's malignant global media empire.

By common consent, Murdoch is the single most powerful media figure in the English-speaking world. From humble beginnings in Adelaide in 1952, he slowly has built a global vertically integrated media and entertainment conglomerate that ritually makes and breaks democratic governments and shapes our public space more than any other single entity.

Whether in America, donating $1 million to the Republicans, in the UK summoning would-be prime ministers across the world to his private court or in Australia vowing to destroy the Greens as a political entity, News Corp long ago crossed the line that separates news companies as observers of the political process from the direct players.

So any claim - and there inevitably will be in the weeks ahead - that action to curb Murdoch's power equates to a curb on the freedom of the press needs to be taken with a large grain of salt. Throughout the phone-tapping controversy in the UK, News Corp's management have sought to portray this behaviour as isolated and completely out of step with its professed ethics as a news organisation. But there is enough evidence from those who have worked inside the Murdoch empire that this sort of behaviour was a natural expression of the "whatever it takes" ethos that drives its journalism - not just in the UK but around the world.

The fact is News Corporation - like Merrill Lynch and Lehman Brothers in investment banking - is just too big and its tentacles are entangled too closely with our democratic institutions to believe that the public good is served by it continuing to exist in its present form. This is a company that professes a love for free markets, but which acts ruthlessly to stamp out would-be competitors. This is a company that uses its power primarily to further the commercial and ideological interests of its proprietor. And this is a company whose poisonous culture is a pox on journalism. It is the Failed Estate writ large.

The phone hacking case in the UK is the equivalent of the sub-prime mortgages blamed for the GFC - a symptom of the problem, not the underlying cause. In the case of the financial crisis, bankers gave up on their former humble yet honest roles as intermediaries to become players instead - using their balance sheets and an implied public guarantee to leverage up and take risks that would have made their soberly pinstriped ancestors spin in their graves. So big were the subsequent obligations and so potentially ruinous to the financial system, that governments had no choice but to bail out the banks. And taxpayers are now footing the bill. In this media crisis, News Corp has given up any pretence that it is a mere news company that acts in the public interest and now acts purely in its own interest. Like the Wall St banks, it has become so big and so influential that it virtually lives outside the law. And like the banks, if the laws don't suit, it gets them changed.

In Australia, the fact that one company owns 70 per cent of our metropolitan print media goes a long way to explaining the dire nature of our public discourse. News Corp now routinely uses its papers to pursue a policy agenda that suits its commercial and ideological interests - whether it be campaigning against the National Broadband Network, promoting industry-funded climate change denialism as mainstream "science" or fighting its silly culture wars.

In the UK, it has taken the public outrage over the discovery that agents of the tabloids were hacking into the phones of the relatives of a murdered teenage girl (and perhaps also relatives of British soldiers and terrorism victims) to prompt a rare show of defiance by politicians against a nasty, malignant corporate bully whose time must surely be up and whose publications are a blight on our democracy. Who will have the guts in Australia to take Murdoch on?

A series of inquiries into the financial crisis concluded that we must stop banks becoming so big and so interconnected with the financial markets that they are deemed 'too big to fail'. In the immortal words of Rolling Stone journalist Matt Taibbi, Goldman Sachs had become a "great vampire squid wrapped around the face of humanity, relentlessly jamming its blood funnel into anything that smells like money". Well, News Corp is the media equivalent. The sheer ferocity of its own blood lust is there now for us all to see. We have a chance now to rip this parasite from the face of our democracy before it sucks us completely dry.

FURTHER READING:

Live updates on the #NOTW phone hacking investigation on the Guardian's news blog here.
'Murdoch's Watergate?' by Carl Bernstein in Newsweek here.
'News would do well not to keep it in the family' by Michael Woolf in the Guardian here
'Scandal Reverberates Beyond Murdoch Empire' by David McKnight in The Conversation here.
'What to do about the power of the corporate media?' by George Monbiot here.

Parallel Lies

2011-07-10T10:24:00.000+10:00

Top of my hit parade:

Precooked: Carbon Tax Coverage

2011-07-05T20:50:00.004+10:00

The details of the carbon tax are announced this Sunday. All the media are planning special wraparounds and editions. But here's something we prepared earlier.

THE AUSTRALIAN: PAGE 1 SPLASH: Green Gamble - The Gillard government, in one last desperate throw of the dice to avoid electoral annihilation, is gambling its fortunes on a tax on carbon that attacks the very foundations of the resource boom and puts Australia in a lonely position ahead of the global pack.
The long-awaited announcement of the so-called multi-party agreement on the carbon tax was seized upon by the Opposition and industry groups as an ill-timed drag on the economy's last remaining engine and by community groups (get Pell/Jensen or another churchman on record) as a blow to working families.
A spot Newspoll, carried out on Sunday as the details were just emerging (just read it out to them over the phone), suggested the government was likely to be disappointed in its hopes for a poll bounce out of a tax which has sparked talk of capital strikes by global fund managers (Terry McCrann will give you a quote).

PAGE 1: Coal Comfort (Paul Kelly analysis) - Let there be no mistake. In a profound and irreversible shift in Australian politics whose reverberations will be felt for generations, a fringe group of radicals has seized the national political agenda and left the reforming spirit of the Hawke/Keating/Howard years in tatters.

PAGE 3: Warming? What Warming? (Monckton Op-Ed) - Adolf Hitler was a great believer in climate change and built bunkers below his Bavarian hideaway to deal with the inevitable melting of the ice-caps. And like today's climate charlatans, the Fuhrer knew scientists could be bought.

PAGE 3: The Forgotten People (Case Study) - For hard-working Matt and Nicky Spencer of Mt Druitt, the carbon tax is the final straw that will drive this hard-working couple from their home. Already struggling with their $600,000 mortgage and payments on their three investment properties, Matt and Nicky must now find the extra $1.20 they will pay in electricity bills a year ($1.15 of which will be rebated).

---------------------------------------------------------

THE HERALD SUN/DAILY TELEGRAPH: Editor's Note: Pictures and illustrations are going to sell this one. I don't want to see any boring tables or graphics and if you're going to run a temperatures chart, run it upside down this time.

PAGE 1: Cate's Rates - It's 6am at Blacktown station, bitterly cold and Murray Johnson is worrying how he'll pay the 500 per cent increase in train fares caused by a carbon tax pushed by Hollywood star Cate Blanchett sitting comfortably at home in her Hunter's Hill mansion. (Photo collage of Blanchett as Queen Liz the First chopping off a battler's head).

BACK PAGE: Footy in the Dark - Australia's great sporting stadiums may have to sacrifice flood-lit football (take the groundsman to the pub, he'll tell you) as the carbon tax sends power bills spiralling and deprives battlers of one of the last remaining pleasures of life.

BUSINESS: Green Grab - Insert Terry McCrann rant. (Just make sure his batteries are charged)

----------------------------------------------------------------------

TODAY TONIGHT: The Copenhagen Connection - Australia's carbon tax was sealed in this shady lane way in Copenhagen by Kevin Rudd during the aborted summit at the end of 2009 (We can film this in Fitzroy if we do it at the right time of day; get a couple of cops on bicycles to chase you).

A CURRENT AFFAIR: The Carbon Diet - Scientists have warned the federal government's new carbon tax threatens cutting edge research that suggests carbon-based diets could be the secret to sustained weight loss. (Shoot Tracey having burnt toast for breakfast).

ABC NEWS RADIO: Carbon Crash/Taxing Times/Temperatures Rising (We just need a cute two word headline, it doesn't really matter what; just make sure it starts with 'The Opposition has slammed...' and don't worry about running this before the policy is announced)

ABC 7.30: Analysis: Leigh Sales interviews Chris Uhlmann who interviews Peter Hartcher and Samantha Riley about what the carbon tax might mean for the next Neilsen and Newspoll.

60 MINUTES: Hot for Teacher: The world isn't the only thing that's warming. Feel the room getting h-o-t-t-e-r as Liz Hayes interviews Greg Combet about all that 'alternative' energy.

2GB: Alan Jones: (Just ensure the spittoon is on hand and keep Al's physician on standby.)

Not the Hoi Polloi

2011-06-28T21:17:00.000+10:00

OK, it's not Newspoll or AC Nielsen or Essential....it's not even a Morgan poll. But the Failed Estate is proud to unveil results of its first ever readers' survey. We polled your attitudes on party politics, economics, refugees, climate change and the media. Here are the (dubious) results.

On political leanings, five per cent of our respondents characterised themselves as former bleeding hearts turned grumpy conservatives. This is a category your host can identify with, except he is so old he has gone full circle from wet liberal to flinty conservative and back again - left, right, left.

A growing clique, seven per cent, identify as funky young neo-libertarians with cool glasses, skinny suits, lots of hair product and a distaste for the nanny state (at least until their cars are stolen or they have kids and the doctor's office doesn't bulk bill). A bigger group, 16 per cent view, themselves as angry anarchists (who scream at the neighbours' kids to get off their newly mown front laws). Another 11 per cent confess to being suburban Greens with air conditioning, SUVs and a peculiar love of Andre Rieu and pan pipes. But the vast majority, 59 per cent, feel politically conflicted. (You'll notice these numbers do not add up to 100%, but I told you it wasn't Newspoll).

In terms of the carbon price, two per cent of our readers see the proposed tax as an attempt by Godless Greens to set up One World Government (or OMG, it's OWG). Another three per cent favour the idea that a carbon price is a nefarious attempt by grant-seeking scientists to get money to upgrade their 1995 Camrys. Another five per cent think action on carbon is a plot by communists to destroy capitalism from within, by, err, bowing to market forces. Four per cent hark back vaguely to high school science lessons on photosynthesis and conclude carbon must be good. The rest, 83 per cent, think it's all just hopeless and the way the debate's going, the world won't be worth living in anyway. (Your host is with the latter group and suggests starting building the spaceship now.)

On asylum seekers, three per cent of sample (who clearly didn''t watch the SBS series) think boat people should be sent to some godforsaken hellhole (with the exclusion, of course, of Penrith). Twelve per cent favoured punishing with extreme prejudice the people smugglers (because that absolves them from having to think about what to do with the refugees). A relatively kindly group of 20 per cent liked the idea of billeting out the boat people in family homes (while stressing there's no room at their place because they're putting in a pool). Another 14 per cent thought the line in the national anthem about boundless plains to share was planted there by green elitists. But the biggest proportion, 50 per cent, think it's just too depressing and want to be on the first boat out. (Maybe this group could hitch a ride with the climate change believers on the spaceship?)

In terms of the economy, two per cent of respondents say interest rates will always be lower and ice cream will always taste nicer under the Liberals, which frankly just makes complete and utter sense. Another two per cent say the Nationals' devotion to free markets, 4WD subsidies, rural relief packages and cheap finance make them the best economic managers of all. For this group, the invisible hand is fine (as long as it's protected by a pair of milking gloves). The Greens are well represented, with 11 per cent saying Bob Brown's crew are the only ones who understand that economic management is best left to the rainbow serpent. Only seven per cent of our sample put their faith in Labor, citing its ability to ensure everyone sets the alarm for 4am to go and work in joyless factory jobs - representing the New Socialist Utopia (NSU). But a massive 73 per cent say the economy is the pimple on the arse of a flea on a cork floating on a seething ocean and it doesn't matter who's in power in Canberra because we're stuffed (presumably these are our Greek readers).

Finally, on my favourite subject, the media, just one per cent of readers identify with The Australian's audience - gouty, late-middle-aged Tories who feel their comfortable wood-panelled worlds are under attack from bicycle-riding, body-pierced, vegans. Nine per cent of you like the ABC, because it reports whatever The Australian says but with a plummier accent and without Janet Albrechtson. Ten per cent of the sample say their favoured media is the style guide for baristas, loft buyers and Brian Eno devotees - otherwise known as the SMAGE. Absolutely no-one admitted to being fans of the Hun-Tele working-man tabloids, presumably because our effete elite readership can't find a Herald Sun app on their Ipads. Predictably, most of you are digital natives - 77 per cent get your media from RSS readers, Google alerts and a bunch of blogs.

So my focus group are politically conflicted, highly networked, cosmopolitan globalists in favour of climate change action and embarrassed at our treatment of refugees. Damned elites in other words. This blog is never going to rate.

Not in it for the Money

2011-06-26T16:12:00.000+10:00

Why go into journalism? The industry that employs you is in decline, the on-the-job training is virtually non-existent, the business model is broken, the hours are long, the work involves endless and mindless churning of pregurgitated material, and the pay is lousy. Most of the population rate you just above used car salesmen and now the major media companies are farming off jobs to sweatshops.

Yet people are spending more time with news than ever as the technology that enables the creation, distribution and reception of news grows every more sophisticated. It's just that no-one can work out how to make money out of it.

A graphic demonstration of the grim plight of the mainstream media that employs journalists is the share price of Fairfax Media, which is one of the worst performing "blue chip" stocks on the Australian sharemarket in recent years, losing about 80 per cent of its value. By the way, News Corp has hardly been a good investment either in recent years, delivering a negative annualised return of 6.1 per cent in the decade till the end of May, 2011. (Source: Bloomberg)

Yet for all the gloom and doom surrounding the media industry, communications and journalism courses continue to turn people away in droves. So clearly the supply-demand equation for new journalistic talent is still tilted in favour of buyers. What's inspiring these young people to seek to qualify for a craft with apparently little future as a commercial enterprise?

Perhaps one way of thinking of this question is to ponder what would happen if private hospitals and schools stopped being commercial viable. Would we still need doctors and teachers? Of course we would. Just because the business model that underpins commercial media has been destroyed by the internet does not mean that journalism as a calling is any less viable than it might have been 30 to 40 years ago. Indeed, there is a good argument (as I have made elsewhere on this blog) that we need start thinking of civic-minded journalism as a public service.

But for journalists to be able to feed themselves and their families, we are going to need new sorts of entrepreneurs not wedded to traditional distribution models and programming formats. And by this, I don't just mean the internet. In its annual report on the State of the News Media in America, the Pew Research Center for Excellence in Journalism found the audiences for AM/FM radio have been the most stable of any traditional media in recent years. Given the total saturation of our commercial airwaves by right-wing shockjocks and shouters, it seems hard to believe there is no room for a progressive news-based network in this country. Perhaps Eric Beecher should buy the Fairfax network and fashion a radio version of Crikey?

Another option is to amalgamate many of the mature blogs into a radio/podcast network in which informed commentary on news and public issues can be heard. Modest subscriptions could be charged, alongside commercial sponsorship, to pay for a small team of journalists to run this venture. To this, I can hear former colleagues saying 'yes, but how are you going to break news with such limited resources'? The answer is that the vast bulk of the 'news' in mainstream media now is sourced from press releases and wire services. Most source material (ABS releases, ministerial statements, non-government reports, corporate releases) is available in real-time on the web. To that you add intelligent commentary and analysis. And once you start becoming an influencer, the news often comes to you.

There is no question that if you were starting up a news organisation today, a venture that requires you to print hundreds of thousands of words each day on dead trees and ship them around the country to newsagents, who deliver them to offices and homes, would be the last option on your list. The way we consume news is changing. It is a networked phenonemon. It is interactive and it redefines the professional journalist as someone who curates information, provides useful links and hosts conversations with citizen journalists.

Alongside these trends, our levels of literacy and curiosity about the world are increasing. The magnitude of challenges we face - in climate change, the economy, our political system and public life - demand a level of excellence in journalism that is worth aspiring to. It really is an exciting time if you look at it that way. And THAT may explain why so many young people want to become journalists. A word of advice though kids from the great Jimmy Smith and Dr John. If you're only it it for the money, don't bother.

The Media in Words

2011-06-22T12:00:00.011+10:00

What do we think of the political media in Australia? Obviously there are some great individuals out there working as journalists, but the overwhelming impression of political journalists and editors - as expressed by an admittedly narrow section of the Twitterverse in a very non-scientific poll - is interesting.

This deliberate stunt was inspired by a similar (though less consciously shallow) effort by our national broadcaster, which was so starved for web content it it that it asked its readers to sum up their opinions of Julia Gillard in three words to construct a word cloud. Despite the obvious tendency for these polls to be rigged, the resulting map was deemed front page 'news' on the ABC website, which sparked an understandable outcry over the media manufacturing news out of nothing.

True to form, the ABC sought to "balance" the books the next day by pulling the same stunt over Abbott, as if that made the whole silly exercise legitimate. So a public broadcaster continually complaining that it is under resourced might like consider what it is offering that is not available on the likes of Sky and NineMSN. This is tabloid, bone-headed, populist, cut and paste 'journalism' at its absolute worst and as bad as anything available on commercial networks and Murdoch wrappers.

You want some story ideas Mr ABC editor? Assign someone to find out who funds the IPA (whose legions of swatty young fogish libertarians you feature so regularly). Do a piece on what is likely to come out of the government's media convergence review. Investigate how much is our Afghan commitment costing us and ask where is the national interest here? Write a piece on the return on investment in the resource industry right now and compare with what's happening in manufacturing and tourism. Then compare the tax takes. How many alternative energy start-ups have upped stumps for California or Europe because of this country's dithering over climate change action? Get a CEO on the phone. What about getting you digital mapping people employed on an interactive graphic showing where the boat people are coming from and how insignificant their numbers are in proportion to the overall immigrant intake. Those are real stories that take effort and research skills and which don't fall into your lap. Journalists write stories like those. Typists do what you're doing - recycling Opposition press releases and making up doodles.

By the way, in no way does this blogger pretend that the above hastily constructed word map is an entirely accurate depiction of the attitudes of the wider community towards political journalism in this country (though I suspect it comes close). But then this blog doesn't pretend to be a news site.

The Empty Checkpoint

2011-06-20T21:37:00.001+10:00

What is news anyway? Young journalists are told it's what's new, noteworthy or unusual. It's something that prompts an "oh, really?" response. You usually know it when you see it. But to be deemed as news, events needed to pass a certain bar. These days, though, they must be setting the bar particularly low.

On the day AC Nielsen reported the Labor Party's primary vote had fallen to a 39-year low of 27 per cent, ABC News splashed with the headline "Abbott Blames Policies for Labor Slide." The lead ran: "Opposition Leader Tony Abbott says the Labor Party's unpopular policies are to blame for its dramatic slump in the polls." Now I realise that news can be scarce on a quiet Saturday, but this particular item would have to rank alongside "Catholicism Rocks, says Pope" in terms of newsworthiness.

In the days when editors used to actually spike stories, the rule was that if the copy prompted the question "well, he would say that, wouldn't he", then it wasn't news. It was publicity. And there's a lot of unpaid publicity around on the ABC these days. I'm not sure whether it's laziness, lack of news judgement, lack of staff, desperation for content or a pathetic attempt by an intimidated broadcaster to appear "balanced" to the paranoid culture warriors of the right - but this shameless recycling of press releases does not do much for the ABC's news brand.

And it's not just the national broadcaster. Many of the major problems facing Australia right now are extremely complex and multi-faceted in their origins and effects (climate change, a destabilising resources boom, a rising rate of inflation for food, housing and essential services, inadequate retirement savings, under-funded public education and a change in the global strategic power balance, to name just a few). As the government seeks to act on some of these issues, powerful and entrenched forces become increasingly adept at forestalling reform by running paid and unpaid publicity campaigns through the media to conflate the national interest with their own interests.

At times like these, an independent, sceptical and questioning media is vital. Journalists must not blithely accept the statistics and industry-commissioned "surveys" thrust at them in shiny packages by ever helpful PR spinners. Sometimes they have to drop a story if they can't verify it from independent sources or do their own research. Unfortunately, that's not happening. In fact, a lack of training, the loss of older, harder heads to the industry, tighter deadlines, fewer resources and the pressures to do more with less are making our media collectively gormless and easy meat for the spinners. Just because the Opposition says something does not make it news (the same rule applies to the government by the way, although with the proviso that the bar is slightly lower because governments are actually able to do stuff).

Respected SMH economics commentator Ross Gittins, in a column this week, points to this increasing tendency by a desperate media to waive everything through as legitimate news, without verification. And nowhere is this more evident than with the resource industry - which, having robbed Australian taxpayers of $60 billion last year by nobbling the super profits tax, is now trying to scare the public into opposing action on climate change on the basis it will destroy jobs in an economy already running at full employment.

"If you come up with a big-sounding figure for supposed job losses, you can be reasonably sure the media will trumpet the figure in shocked tones," Gittins writes. "You can also be sure few if any journalists will subject your claims to examination to see how credible they are. Why spoil a good story? I didn't say it, they did. If it's wrong, blame them, not me. All I'm doing is acting as a messenger, recording both sides of the debate. It's not my job to act as a censor."

That's the nub of the problem. Journalists appear to have lost their bullshit detectors - or least the media organisations that employ them have abdicated any sense that their mission goes beyond creating widgets to keep the ads apart, or in the case of the ABC, succumbed to the view that its mission is to blandly report the "he said-she said" parade of press releases and uncritically point cameras and microphones at PR set-ups without a moment's scrutiny.

In the absence of a strong media and with the government depending on a handful of independents to remain in power, powerful vested interests are succeeding in ensuring that 'news' is whatever they want it to be.

Hands Up: It's a Stitch Up

2011-06-15T21:13:00.006+10:00

Hands Up: Gillard Faces ~~Armageddon, Apocalypse~~ The Australian

Denis Shamandham

The Gillard government is under intense pressure tonight after (insert name of industry lobby group here' - ed) released a damning survey which highlights the cost to consumers ('unspecified, check tomorrow and multiply by four'- ed) of its contentious carbon tax.

The release of the survey from the high-profile something-or-other association comes amid a clash in Labor ranks between one-faction-and-another and is bound to fuel speculation ('can we drag a backbencher out of the pub for an off-record quote?- ed) of an imminent challenge to Gillard's shaky leadership.

"Our economy is on the ropes and this is the killer punch," said Dig-it-Out-of-the-Ground-and-Ship-to-China Industry Association president Chip Chunkworth. "Now the government is pushing us into our own graves ('mixed metaphor, but let it go, he's a miner' - ed) and that's got to be bad for working people."

The angry ('bitter?'; 'furious?'; 'seething?' - come on man, I'm asking for adjectives here - ed) industry response to the carbon tax inquiry is likely to cement ("cement!" ". Yes! send a note to the cartoonist to draw Gillard with cement shoes being dumped into the harbour by Rudd) recent unrelenting trend in opinion polls away from a government that is losing the faith of even its most rusted-on supporters ('rusted' - iron ore, God I'm good' -ed).

Earlier today, the respected Newspoll ('It better be bloody respected, do you know how much we pay these people to stitch things up for us?' - ed) showed increasing support for Opposition Leader Tony Abbott, whose straight talk is resonating with voters.

"Tony understands the needs of working people," said Jadyn, a 23-year-old welding contractor from Penrith ('Where's the second name?' - ed: - 'Lib Party guy says he will phone through tomorrow' - Denis). "Straight talk, no fuss and plugged into the mortgage belt." ('Stock photo of tradie with tool belt' -ed)

The Abbott ascendancy ('ascendancy' - I LIKE it! call The Weekend magazine and arrange a photo shoot of Abbot rock climbing' - ed) comes amid declining fortunes for a Labor Party which even its truest believers is starting to doubt ('insert photo of Faulkner with damning quote from headland speech' and call Latham for an op-ed' - ed).

(Ed: 'Put some stuff here from RBA speech along lines of'): The mortgage belt is losing faith in a Labor government whose reckless spending ('cut and paste BER, pink batts standard pars') has fuelled six consecutive increases in interest rates and looks set to spark a seventh after the next CPI figures in late July. ('Plot Aussie rates against US and Japan; yes, I know they're in recession, but f**k me, homes are cheap over there' - ed)

"The economy is strong and that means" that we have lost control of the economy, said ANZ chief economist Paul Eslakeland. ('Is that partial quote OK? He said something like 'that means we need to moderate domestic demand', but no-one understands that gobbledygook' - Denis. 'Do I look like I care? -ed).

The plight of the mortgage battlers provides a stark contrast to the relaxed demeanour of Prime Minister Gillard and her live-in, de-facto, fellow atheist partner Tim Mathieson ~~living in their godless relationship~~ ('Steady on, Dennis. We're getting Tony to do a homage to BA Santamaria this weekend anyway, so that should keep your rosary-fiddling mates happy' - ed)

The Prime Minister's clear desperation in courting 60 Minutes appears to presage her calling an election this weekend that polls suggest she would lose easily, providing greater certainty for business at a time of greater uncertainty ('where's the unprecedented?' -ed)

(Pick up wires from here. Link to Planet Janet on how secret 'madras' in Bankstown is telling kids that Mohammed was a surfie; link to whatever Kelly's writing about forks in the f**king road and tell Mega George he's fired! - ed)

Journos in Jarmies

2011-06-13T14:00:00.002+10:00

Over at Club Troppo, Don Arthur has run a post titled 'The Blogosphere's Delusions of Grandeur', regurgitating the now ritual meme that pits the apocryphal self-aggrandising blogger in pyjamas (usually venting about the meeja) against the hard-working professional investigative journalist risking everything for his readers.

Using as an example of the latter a Fairfax inquiry into Securency, the RBA subsidiary caught laundering bribe money through the Seychelles, Don argues for the value of old-fashioned hard-digging journalism and takes a swipe at those who (apparently) are saying that amateur blogging can replace this craftsmanship:

"There’s some great stuff on Australian blogs, but it’s hardly a replacement for the work of professional journalists. Writing in your pajamas after work might keep you out of reach of the truth-throttling tentacles of teh evil Rupert Murdoch, but it doesn’t leave much time to phone your sources, search public records or crunch numbers."

Well quite, Don. But just who is saying that blogging is intended to replace professional investigative journalism? And who says it is 'either/or'? Can't we have both? One would have thought we had got past this tired "pro" versus "am" debate and got to discussing what makes good journalism irrespective of how the writer is employed. The truth is journalism is changing for good and for THE good, regardless of what some diehards in the mainstream old media might hope.

The change does not pit the amateur against the professional. It pits those writers for whom "the audience" or online community is a source of collaboration in authorship versus those who prefer a passive, unseen and largely unheard audience at the end of a chain. But it clearly suits some elements in the mainstream media to turn this into an us-versus-them debate, as US journalism professor Jay Rosen picked up in an editorial from The Townsville Bulletin (part of the News Ltd empire, of course):

"The great thing about newspapers is that, love us or hate us, we're the voice of the people. We represent the community, their views, their aspirations and their hopes. We champion North Queensland's wins and we commiserate during our losses. Bloggers, on the other hand, represent nothing. They whinge, carp and whine about our role in society, and yet they contribute nothing to it, other than satisfying their juvenile egos."

This gets to the heart of the insecurity in mainstream media about the influence of bloggers - that these supposedly perpetually pyjama-clad obsessives are out to replace the media. I'm not aware of anyone who seriously thinks that's the case. In fact the reason blogs like this exist is to point to the often large gap between the principles of public-spirited journalism and how it is currently practised. Ultimately it is about supporting and championing good journalism and calling out bad journalism, regardless of where it appears or whether it is of the professional or amateur variety. The notion that it's either-or is a false dichotomy put out there by an often insecure mainstream media perceiving a threat to its existence, as Jay Rosen says:

"Blogging cannot replace the watchdog journalism that keeps a government accountable to its people. Journalists know that, but somehow the American (or Australian) people don’t. Replacement-by-bloggers talk is displaced anger toward a public that doesn’t appreciate what journalists do, a public that would somehow permit the press to wither away without asking what would be lost. "

In a second post on the subject at Club Troppo, Don reframes his question. Putting aside his original proposition that bloggers are presuming to replace investigative journalism (which no-one is actually saying as far as I am aware), he asks whose opinion writing is better - bloggers or journalists. I'm not sure that makes much sense or advances the cause much either. There are clearly good and bad in both. And like much discussion on this issue it gets unnecessarily hung up on delivery mechanisms and skirts around the more interesting and more fruitful questions - Like what IS the future of 'news' as a business? What is the role of journalists in a digital and interactive age where anyone can break news? Is there still a role for an intermediary whose role is to decide what's news and frame it according to their commercial imperatives? How can expert bloggers complement the more general news and analysis of MSM journalists? How might the future look if bloggers and professional journalists collaborated, both with each other and with their audiences? How might accelerated and universally available broadband change the landscape for journalists? If the MSM business model is broken and distribution is free, why tether yourself to a News Corp or Fairfax?

The reason we are having these debates is because, on the one hand, standards in the mainstream media are in rapid decline as struggling media companies, their business model broken, embark on a race to the bottom; while on the other, amateur bloggers - like Possum Pollytics or Matt Cowgill or Grog's Gamut - are doing serious and publicly useful journalism on their blogs that shame 90 per cent of the output of supposedly professional journalism in the mainstream media. These are pieces that provide context, that refuse to accept the pre-ordained narrative as gospel and which use facts as their premise, not lazy spin spoon-fed to them by former journalists turned media relations operatives. In any case, true investigative journalism in the mainstream media is noticeable mainly for its relative absence.

So instead of starting the discussion from the point of which is best - blogging or journalism - the question needs to be asked how can we deliver good journalism in whatever medium and how we might fund it.

Readers' Poll

2011-06-07T17:19:00.006+10:00

'The Failed Estate' has been going now for eight months. So we thought it was time we found out a bit more about our readership. Please help us by answering the five questions on the right-hand side of this post.

We are asking you about your native political affiliation and your views on a carbon price, boat people, economic management and your media habits. This is truly scientific polling, as you will see.

We plan to use your answers to these questions so we can give you the news that you truly want. That, of course, means omitting key facts, pursuing an ideological agenda, calling for free markets while standing up for rent seekers, seeking leftist conspiracies by bearded academics on government grants and pursuing unnamed 'elites' whose interests are strangely contrary to those of our advertisers. Other than that, it's pretty straight.

If our comprehensive questions on the right do not cover the gamut of your caffeine-fuelled media-driven shallow emotional life, please vent in the comments section below.

Fast and Fatuous

2011-06-05T22:42:00.004+10:00

The first the Australian public heard of the now infamous Say Yes television advertisement on climate change action was when The Sunday Telegraph told its readers that "Carbon Cate" Blanchett had "sparked outrage in the community" by fronting a campaign that no-one had actually seen at that point.

Acting under the instructions of Murdoch editors salivating at a Marie Antoinette-style story of "elite Hollywood star lectures Western Suburbs to take their tax medicine", the reporter tricked up some some outrage from rent-a-quote Barnaby Joyce and Plymouth Brethren reactionaries masquerading as the forgotten voices of middle Australia.

True to form, the ABC echo chamber dutifully ran with the story and we were off to the races before the ad had even aired on mainstream television.

Such is the speed of the news cycle now that media organisations ritually 'throw forward' a story before the actual events on which it is based become public. This allows them to frame the story according to their own ideological and commercial imperatives. It's also economically efficient as they can manufacture reaction and plot the course of the story over a five-day news cycle in anticipation of the reaction it will receive. Editors love predictability, particularly given earlier deadlines and tighter production budgets.

The other recent example of the media jumping the gun on a story, based on their own impatient presumptions, was the early mentions of Lindsay Tanner's book 'Sideshow'. As Media Watch noted, these stories, again appearing first in the Sunday Torygraph, had Tanner "unloading on the Rudd government" when the book said nothing of the sort and when the reporter herself admitted she hadn't even read it. The fact that their incorrect and superficial reaction only proved Tanner's point about the media's obsession with the political contest, as opposed to the underlying policy reality, was completely lost on many journalists.

This tendency to, in effect, manufacture news according to the inbuilt preferred templates of the news organisation is a product of the combined forces of increasing encroachment of partisanship in nominally 'straight' news coverage, the competitive pressures brought about by the slow death of the mainstream media business model and the pressures of the accelerating news cycle driven by new technology.

Think of how often you hear of the Opposition's reaction to a major Government policy announcement before you have heard the announcement itself. Governments respond to this by seeking to get two or three cracks at a policy initiative by leaking its intentions to favoured correspondents beforehand. But this merely serves to fast-track the Opposition reaction and alerts less favoured correspondents and outlets (usually the Murdoch ones) to arrange a stitch-up that undermines the announcement.

This phenomenon of second and third guessing 'virtual news' before it registers in the real world is prevalent around the world. In the US, it was noted by Pulitzer Prize-winning television critic Howard Rosenberg and former CNN correspondent Charles Feldman in their 2008 book 'No Time to Think: The Menace of Media Speed and the 24-Hour News Cycle..

"Contrary to Malcolm Gladwell's best-selling book 'Blink' treatise on the validity of first glances and snap judgements, instant response is not necessarily wise response," Rosenberg and Feldman write. "Plus the stakes become greater - quickness at times leading to quackery - in a higher and higher tech society that urges us to move faster. Not such a good idea."

The increase in speed puts pressures on journalists to offer "analysis" of events virtually as they occur, or, as we have seen, even before they occur. Due to the impossible deadlines and the sophistication of the spinners and fixers working for vested interests (almost always former journalists), the "analysis" usually amounts to a pre-positioning by those interests around a contentious policy area. The aim is to hotwire the narrative with the aim of forestalling action, usually on the pretext of "saving jobs". It works every time and encourages the view among a naive public that this is democracy in action.

But it should be evident by now that we are all being taken for a ride in this big, fast and fatuous media vehicle that manufactures news out of nothing and leaves democracy as the road kill.

Changing the Frame

2011-06-01T17:38:00.004+10:00

Meanwhile, in another media universe...

'Geo Gina': Iron Woman Robs Australians Blind

The Australian, June 2, 2011

Outrage is growing in the Australian community at the involvement of multi-billionaire Gina Rinehart in campaigns protesting against action on climate change and efforts for citizens to earn a fairer share from the sale of our natural resources.

Rinehart, the nation’s richest person with a fortune of more than $10 billion, has used her massive wealth to stymie reforms aimed at reducing Australia’s carbon footprint and ensuring an enduring national legacy from the commodities boom.

“Our regional infrastructure is falling apart,” said Opposition spokesman for regional development, Senator Farmably Choice. “Meanwhile, this spoiled heiress sits in her 50-room Peppermint Grove mansion, telling us she’ll be ruined if we take modest action on climate change and tax resource depletion more fairly.”

Family groups also expressed outrage at Rinehart’s self-indulgence and plan a rally for equity in the nation’s capitals this weekend.

“People can’t pay their electricity bills and it’s only going to get worse; we need to start investing in alternatives,” said Graham Straightlace of the Christian Family Association. “In the parable of the loaves and fishes, Jesus taught us the principle of community-mindedness. Ms Rinehart obviously does not read her Bible.”

The iron ore magnate has received a remarkable return on the modest $20 million outlay she and other miners spent to derail the government’s super profits resource tax. The subsequent compromise deprived taxpayers of $60 billion in revenues that could have been spent on schools, hospitals and badly need infrastructure.

“The bush is already bleeding and Rinehart is just opening the wound further,” Senator Choice told 2GB talkshow host Tim Dunlop.

Rinehart is known to have spent $70,000 on security measures around her compound in Perth’s salubrious western suburbs and recently hired tattooed pub rocker Angry Anderson as her personal bodyguard.

The pearls she wore in a protest in Perth last year against the super profits tax are reportedly worth $20 million on their own - enough to feed, house and clothe 200 families comfortably for one year.

Not content with carving up the resource tax and jettison the carbon tax, Rinehart is now buying up swathes of the Australian media to press her selfish cause even further. Stakes in the Ten Network and Fairfax Media are seen as her bulwark against policy measures that might otherwise protect the interests of tradies, small business people, teachers and nurses against the ruinously high interest rates brought about by an unsustainable commodities boom.

“We’re used to be a nation that looked after the little bloke and blokette,” Senator Choice mused. “Not any more. It’s a nation for billionaires and fly-by-nighters, robbing us blind and taking the cash.”

Next in our ‘Billionaires’ series:

‘After Murdoch: Warring Children Tear the News Empire Apart’

See also:
How Media and Mining Distort Australia's Climate Debate: The Guardian
Role Reversal as Liberals Belt Labor with Class War Rhetoric: David McKnight, SMH

Journalism as a Public Good

2011-05-28T17:07:00.002+10:00

The Australian media is one of the least diverse in the world. At what point does the dominance of a single player become so great that our democracy is at risk? How, at a time of accelerating convergence in media and the slow death of traditional business models, can we encourage a multiplicity of voices while preserving and encouraging press freedom? And why is no-one asking these questions in the mainstream media space?

When the global financial crisis exposed excessive risk-taking by deposit taking institutions operating under an implicit (and now explicit) government guarantee, respected economist John Quiggin said that if this public subsidy was to continue, banks should return to being basic public utilities. Why, after all, should these institutions indulge in dangerous speculation, privatising the profits and socialising the losses, while creating massive exogenous effects in the real economy from their casino-like behaviour?

While not having recourse to taxpayers' money in a crisis the way the banks do, the mainstream media nevertheless operates under a kind of public subsidy through a regulatory system that works against the entry of new players and encourages monopolistic behaviour that circumvents reasoned debate.

The dominance of the Murdoch press (it controls 70 per cent of the metropolitan newspaper market and its only major competitor Fairfax is struggling for survival) is such that Australia languishes at 41st position in the world in terms of media diversity. The dominance of one company - and one individual - in our media landscape has real costs for our democracy as we are now seeing, with The Australian and the Murdoch tabloids in Sydney and Melbourne regularly using their dominance to press the commercial and ideological imperatives of their owner.

In the meantime, with the national broadband network set to accelerate the development of new media platforms and opportunities for content creation, Murdoch and other established players are pushing for a monopoly in pay television through Foxtel's $1.9 billion takeover of Austar.

All this is happening at a time of increasing disillusionment with our media and our politics, resulting in what former Labor Minister Lindsay Tanner has described as a dumbing down of democracy - the mindless reporting of predictable political utterances, the obsession with conflict over substance (the fight itself rather than the issues), the twisting and distortion of public interest issues to fit a pre-determined narrative and outright lies and manipulation of public opinion.

No less than that bible of conservatism, The Economist magazine, has this past week laid part of the blame for the banality of Australian political discourse on a media obsessed with short-term biff, opinion polls treated like TV ratings and the 'Punch and Judy show' of the daily story cycle that is largely a media creation. While some of The Economist's prescription is questionable (it still ritually adheres to the Washington consensus), it rightly slams Australian politicians for dragging their feet on climate change and failing to use the opportunity of prosperity to widen the discourse behind xenophobic hysteria over refugees. Perhaps this debate is so circular because a concentrated media would rather keep pushing those buttons than talk about bigger possibilities.

The next great hope for increased diversity is the federal government's public review of media policy, now underway. The intention of this inquiry is to look at how regulation needs to change to accommodate the rapid convergence of media and communication technology to ensure the public goods of an open and diverse media are protected. But anyone who has witnessed the evolution of Australian media ownership laws and regulation will not be holding their breath for any significant change out of this review. It is a brave politician, after all, who stands in the way of a Murdoch, Packer or Stokes. And attempts at tighter regulation usually backfire.

In the mainstream media space, one can only hope that an enlightened entrepreneur (Eric Beecher perhaps?) makes a bid for the Fairfax radio stations, now up for sale. In a market saturated by right-wing shockjocks and newspapers that ritually co-opt the public interest as that of narrow corporate interests, it seems hard to believe there is no commercial place for a progressive media outlet.

But if there really is no possibility of a media that is both commercial and responsible, perhaps we should be looking at not-for-profit ventures like US investigative journalism venture ProPublica that serves the public good by employing the traditional journalistic values of accuracy, balance, context, fairness and publicly spirited inquiry. That, after all, is what a properly functioning democracy demands from the media.

Irrespective of the commercial ambitions of media proprietors, the journalism they fund plays a vital function in a democracy. And for that reason, it should be a public good in itself, like banks. People need and want reliable information from trusted intermediaries. If the government insists on regulating media ownership, it should ensure that licensees and owners meet certain public interest tests. The question is how do you enforce those without threatening press freedom. Alternatively, the government could get out of the way completely and let market forces prevail. But we saw what happened when banks were allowed to run amok.

If this is all too hard, if we cannot imagine what journalism could be beyond the partisan Murdochracy we are now imprisoned within, then the Fourth Estate really will be a Failed Estate.

Journalistic Principle$

2011-05-22T13:54:00.045+10:00

When Greens leader Bob Brown recently broke up the ritual of a Canberra doorstop to bravely take a direct swipe at elements in a thin-skinned media that demand intense scrutiny of everyone but themselves one could guess what was coming next.

Sure enough, journalists reflexively jumped onto their pulpits to say that Brown was wilting under the merciless pressure of a Fourth Estate merely doing its job in holding him to account. Leaving aside the fact that Brown showed no sign of 'spitting the dummy' over the deliberate misrepresentation of his party, he nevertheless found himself in the classic lose-lose situation of those treated shabbily by the media. You can either sit back and allow them to bag you and distort everything you say to suit their own agenda, or you can call them on it and then have them double their efforts to stitch you up.

This time, Brown called them on it. And didn't they (with the notable exception of Michelle Grattan) take it badly? One Fairfax radio reporter, clinging to the inch-deep attack line of his shockjock overlords, became so indignant at the media being publicly questioned that he sounded like he might break down and cry.

"You just come out here every day and you just bag out the Murdoch press or any media you don't like and you call them the hate press," the reporter whined. With remarkable restraint and equanimity, Brown simply replied: "The Murdoch press comes out every day and bags out the Greens -- why one rule for you and not one for the others?"

Indeed. It is hard to see how the Greens might ever expect to receive fair treatment from a media organisation which has declared it wants them destroyed; that they are "ruining Australia" and that the government they are helping to keep in power is illegitimate. As an indication as to why Bob Brown is peeved, take a look at this handful of recent headlines from Murdoch papers:

Squirming Brown Cornered and Relentlessly Grilled Over Coal - Daily Telegraph, May 19, 2011
Beware as Green Turns to Red - The Australian, April 19, 2011
Voters See True Colour of Greens - Daily Telegraph, April 14
If Gillard Means What She Says, She'll Divorce the Greens - The Australian, April 12
Greens Pulling the Treasury Strings - Daily Telegraph, April 8

Of course, newspapers are entitled to take an editorial line....on their editorial pages. But they are not entitled (unless they want to give up the fiction that they are 'news' organisations) to start using their news pages to run a political agenda of their own. (Lest this be seen as some kind of "leftist" view, even journalists who work for The Australian will tell you privately that they cringe at the partisanship and distortion of the news agenda at that paper to serve the Murdoch agenda.)

News organisations often talk piously about "holding politicians to account". And it is true, that that is one important role of journalists in democracy. But accountability cannot be selective. You cannot put one political party under the grill and wave through to the keeper another's lies, deceptions, half-truths and dodgy arithmetic. Indeed, anyone who has grown old in journalism knows that this high minded language about accountability increasingly is used to justify confrontational behaviour that is purely about drawing attention to itself. Journalists and media figures too often now see their role purely in terms of the level of "hits" or manufactured outrage their work creates. Think back to the Tony Abbott staredown with Mark Riley or the extremely ill-mannered reception "Ju-liar" Gillard received from Alan Jones (who while not a journalist receives all the privileges of one).

The fact is most journalistic output is entertainment dressed up as 'news'. Long gone are the old Chinese walls that separated the editorial and the commercial agendas of the media organisations which employ journalists. For their part, many journalists deal with this disconnect by sticking their fingers in their ears, screwing up their eyes and screeching every more loudly about the "public's right to know" or their own "sacred trust" as guardians, when the real motivation is the grubby commercial and ideological imperatives of their employers and the advertisers who pay their salaries, a point Lindsay Tanner makes in his book 'Sideshow':

"Much of the media's campaigning on matters of journalistic principle is, in fact, thinly disguised self-interest- the energetic pursuit of more marketable content - dressed up as the public interest."

While nominally non-commercial, even the ABC in recent years has become more commercially-oriented in its approach to news and current affairs, particularly on television. The intention appears to be to create a more low-to-middle brow Nine Network-lookalike that focuses on car crashes and crime and, in terms of politics, old fashioned adversarialism for its own sake. Look at the rebadged '7.30', which this year cast aside the crumpled but substantial Kerry O'Brien for the rather more marketable Leigh Sales and her sidekick, political correspondent Chris Uhlmann.

It was the latter who this past week trumpeted his 'interview' with Bob Brown, full of warmed over Murdoch talking points, as an accountability exercise. The whole interview (in which Uhlmann hardly let his subject answer a question) was based on a misrepresentation - that Brown wants the coal industry shut down overnight. Responding to criticism by viewers that he had not let Brown get a word in edgeways amid his hysterical interjections, Uhlmann's response was that the Greens leader needed to "harden up" (a phrase that would have sounded appropriate coming out of the mouth of Tony Abbott, a politician much closer to real power and one whom he incidentally had given an armchair ride to in an interview the week before).

The sad truth is the louder journalists thunder from their bully pulpits about accountability and the public's 'right to know', the less savoury are their real motivations. Scratch a little below the surface and you will find the grandstanding is really about a need to generate hits and ratings or attract eyeballs in an increasingly competitive marketplace. It's about branding themselves as players in the political game. It's about impressing their bosses or their fellow journalists. It almost always has nothing to do with the wider public good. And the most telling evidence of this self-interested pantomime is that journalists themselves cannot bear the slightest scrutiny of their own behaviour without squealing like stuck pigs.

See also:
Tim Dunlop, 'On Journalism and Fish Milkshakes' - The Drum
Ben Eltham, 'Bob Brown Versus the Press' - New Matilda

The Dark Side Inside

2011-05-15T20:55:00.009+10:00

Do people want the truth, or a dressed up and airbrushed version of the same? The difference in the dollar price between the two is the margin between journalism and public relations. While it shouldn't surprise anyone that PR costs more than journalism, the hard part these days is distinguishing between the two.

Journalists talk about moving to the 'dark side' when they make the inevitable transition - usually by middle age - between journalism and PR. The dark side pays more - much more - but as one would expect, there is a price in this Faustian bargain.

Traditionally for the journalist who makes the leap there is a nagging sense that one has given away something valuable. 'Selling your soul' is the easy descriptor, but it is more a feeling of leaving the tribe, of joining a grubbier world (like a priest who swaps the dog collar for a shirt and tie) and the loss of more than a shred of pride. After all, one is swapping a role that involves revealing the truth to one that is dedicated to hiding the truth, or at least to constructing publicity and selling it as the truth.

For the journalists who stay behind inside the crumbling citadel of the Fourth Estate, there traditionally are mixed feelings as well - usually a combination of envy that their colleague has found a way out, but also a grim determination to go down fighting alongside the remaining scarred members of the priestly tribe against the dark, soiled corporate PR forces camped outside.

I say 'traditionally' because the 'dark corporate PR forces' are no longer camped outside. They broke through the editorial walls long ago. The copy written by publicity agents, corporate communication flaks, advertisers and political minders now makes up the bulk of what is sold to the public as 'journalism'. (A university study undertaken and published last year by a team led by respected former journalist, lawyer and academic Wendy Bacon showed just that). This really isn't surprising, given the white spaces that keep the ads apart have increased as the number of journalists has dwindled. Something had to give.

But now the PR agents are so far within the gates that they are dictating the transformation of the industry itself. Look at the work that spin doctor Sue Cato has done for Fairfax Media in massaging its message over the axing of more than 80 sub-editing jobs as an "investment in quality journalism". So embarrassing has this makeover of the message been that it has been commented on New York's Columbia Journalism Review.

One sympathises with Fairfax's commercial position - this economy after all has been a long time coming - but it's not clear that the Australian people yet understand the price for journalism and democracy of these cuts at our second biggest news organisation. For one, it outsources editorial judgement and discretion to a much less able organisation - in the form of Pagemasters. For another, it destroys the unique voice of the Fairfax broadsheets - the last quality for-profit media company standing between Rupert Murdoch and a monopoly over the Australian print media.

And onto Mr Murdoch. It is a rhetorical point and obviously does not apply to every individual, but a case can be made that when a journalist leaves News Ltd for PR, they are really just swapping one publicity role for another. In their new job they will be representing a dozen or so corporate clients. In the old, they were representing the interests of one - the world view of Rupert Murdoch, as constructed by the harried editors he appoints to sell that world view in the public realm in countries around the globe. And, as we repeatedly see, when the facts clash with the Murdocrachy's agenda, the facts must be amended to fit.

Examples of this Orwellian world can be seen in Murdoch's papers every day, but a classic recent case was The Australian front page splash that had Westpac CEO Gail Kelly "joining the carbon tax revolt" by business leaders against the government. As Kelly herself said, and as ABC's Media Watch showed, the truth was quite the opposite. But that version simply did not fit the Murdoch agenda to wreck the minority Labor government and engineer the election of a friendlier one, so the story was appropriately altered.

Or look at the biggest "news" story out of the recent Federal Budget. News Ltd papers - which represent 70 per cent of our metropolitan print media - decided that the angle was the government's alleged assault on the "new Aussie battlers on $150,000 a year". Leaving aside the fact that News Ltd itself just two years before had led calls for an attack on middle class welfare, the story was a beat-up anyway. The budget had merely extended a freeze on indexation of family benefits to those on more than $150,000 that was first applied in the 2008 budget. But News Ltd wanted the budget to serve its purpose of building a sense of outrage over the government's alleged incompetence so great that it forces another election.

So what happens next? Well, of course, the Murdoch papers run a Newspoll which discovers that Labor is experiencing the worst reaction to a federal budget in 20 years. The poll finds 41 per cent of people feel they will be worse off as a result of the budget; 11 per cent better off. Now ask yourself how people came to this view; based on what information and whose version of the truth? Meanwhile, the prime minister in waiting gets a free pass after delivering a address in reply to the budget which was essentially another attempt to to shout Labor out of office as one would punters at closing time

None of this is to deny the Gillard government is damaging itself (as Peter Hartcher and others have argued) by jumping at shadows of Tony Abbott's making and by limply buying into the agenda framed by the Opposition and its media agents. But Gillard and Swan have been aided in their communications ineptitude by a Murdoch empire that clearly decided last year that the government is illegitimate (insofar as its proprietor's business and ideological interests are concerned). Now his serfs are doing everything in their power to foment an atmosphere where an election comes to be called.

That the Australian people - waiting for another government handout to meet the payments on their flat screen TVs, mortgages and margin loans - apparently haven't woken up to this conspiracy by a US citizen and his paid employees to decide our government highlights the difference between journalism and PR.

The dark side is now inside.

(See also Bernard Keane in Crikey: Media Bias Vs Political Substance in the Budget - subscriber)

Done Like a Dynasty

2011-05-11T22:27:00.001+10:00

Don't talk about alleged "middle class welfare" to Prudence Hetherington-Alswyth. This is a woman who already felt she had sacrificed enough. And now with Wayne Swan's heartless 2011/12 budget, her struggling family feels it has reached rock bottom. This is their story.

True blue Australian battlers, the Hetherington-Alswyths did not land here off a boat. (Well, not quite, Prudence's great-great-great grandfather Horace did arrive in Adelaide on a clipper in the 1870s to buy a 50,000 hectare pastoral property in the South Australian hinterland).

"Christmas Island? I'd like some of that," says Prudence with a snort. "We haven't had a decent Christmas at Whistler in at least three seasons. Lawrence is looking at skiing in Innsbruck this year. And the Aussie-Euro cross rate means we are going to have to do it on a budget."

Lawrence, an investment banker, has seen his bonus halved in the past three years since the financial crisis, lost his paid parking space and now faces the prospect of giving away his company Lexus because of the budget crackdown on fringe benefits tax.

"I find it hard to believe that this is a Labor government," Lawrence says, his pride obviously at a low ebb. "I mean look at the wine cellar. We're buying cleanskins for goodness sake! Have these people got no idea about the dignity of the Aussie family?"

Lawrence's son Vincent is a lawyer for a resource company and knows first hand the hardship that the mining sector has encountered since the government started trying to secure a bigger share of the wealth generated by the so-called commodity boom.

"They say it's a boom, but this is a dirty, dirty business," Vincent says. "I have to dryclean my Zegna suits every single week after a trip to the Pilbara. Have you got any idea what that red dirt does to microfibre?"

Vincent's wife Anastasia, just back from tennis, is equally scathing of Swan's budget.

"I've just heard three women tell me they're taking their girls out of Sceggs and putting them into St Catherine's. I mean really," Anastasia says. "When you cut the legs out from under working families this way - honest people just trying to make their way in the world -you really have to wonder."

But nothing compares to the hardship endured by the family's patriarch - Myles Herthington-Alswyth III. An Australian Air Force commodore in the Vietnam war, Myles survives on a veterans' pension, 10,000 BHP Billiton shares, a $5 million self-managed super fund and the rent from 10 investment properties.

"I have voted Labor all my life," says Myles. "But I can tell you now I am seriously thinking about casting my lot with those socialists Tony Abbott and the Coalition at the next election. They're the only ones who understand the sacrifices people like us make."

Those sacrifices will now extend to dispensing with the services of their gardener, Mohammed Achmed, a refugee from Pakistan.

"He'll be fine. He'll get the magic carpet ride from the government," says Myles, trying to hide his bitterness. "They always look after their privileged mates. And I'm sure he'll end up with a small business loan and a place in a TAFE training scheme or something."

Admittedly, the Hethrington-Alswyths are an extreme example. Other families are making more modest (though still humiliating) sacrifices, such as downgrading their coffee from Lavazza to International Roast or swapping Noosa for Byron for weekends away. But the pain is equally felt.

It seems Labor has misjudged the electorate yet again.

Locked Up

2011-05-08T17:43:00.007+10:00

The Federal Budget is 'The Big Day Out' for the political and financial media in Australia. Busloads of hacks (only the lucky ones go by plane these days) make the long journey to late autumn Canberra to join their full-time press gallery brethren in what is a media and political ritual - a six-hour lock-up, a frenzy of writing and then off to The Holy Grail (these days the Kennedy Room, I'm told) to get stonkered till 3am.

It's a ritual because the moves are rehearsed and wholly predictable. And it's an empty ritual because the budget these days is a political event, not an economic one. The AFR journos will run a comb over Treasury forecasts on GDP and inflation (which usually differ only slight from the RBA's own forecasts) and hope that there's some announcement on depreciation that they can splash for all their accountant readers. The Daily Tele and Herald Sun crowd will be flung some morsel about tax support for low income earners to justify the expense of putting them up in a flash hotel for the night. And the press gallery political heavyweights will supply the "over-arching analysis" - usually something about the government being caught in a pincer movement between the need to cement its fiscal credentials while winning back the heartland support.

The photographers will be tearing their hair out trying to come with visual images other than shots taken up the Treasurer's nose, as he stands in a little prayer circle with a bunch of journos inside the lock-up - surveying the sacred text of Budget statement number 2 while chewing on their pencils. The AFR, once again, will knock-up some waxwork figurines - this year most likely showing Swan as the Grim Reaper and Gillard holding a whip and an alarm clock. His Holiness Paul Kelly at The Australian will no doubt fulminate and ruminate and cogitate and all the other "....ates" about the budget marking a "profound change" in Australian politics as the party of the centre left takes the axe to the welfare bludgers.

The chosen ones will get a drop or two ahead of budget day to keep them onside and spread the news out over two or three days than just the one. And on the day itself, going into the lock-up, hundreds of journos will queue to surrender their mobile phones and sign affidavits to swear they will not release the thrilling information before 7.30pm when the treasurer gets to his feet.

This entire security charade - which goes back to the 80s when Australia opened to global capital markets under Keating - is built upon the anachronistic assumption that the markets care deeply about what the budget contains. But the fact is the Australian public sector's call on capital markets is so insignificant in the scheme of things that budgets come and go these days without causing so much as a blip in trading of Australian government bonds or the Australian dollar.

To put our budget in perspective, Australian public sector debt represents about 22 per cent of GDP, compared with Japan's 225 per cent (10 times as much in proportional terms), the UK's 76 per cent and the USA's 59 per cent. Out of 132 countries ranked by the CIA in terms of cumulative public debt (with number 1 being the most indebted), Australia ranks 108th. Our actual deficit (the difference between revenue and spending over one year) is about $50 billion or 4 per cent of GDP. In the US, the Budget Office forecasts a deficit of $US1.4 TRILLION this fiscal year. So the popular notion that Australia is sinking in a rising tide of debt and deficits is just nonsense.

The irony is that global asset managers - starved of safe assets to invest in - are actually hanging out for 'AAA'-rated borrowers like Australia to issue more debt. The fact is the growing indebtedness of countries like the US and Japan (and much of southern Europe) is making Australia even more attractive to foreign borrowers, who can invest money here in a safe environment for yields of 5-7 per cent - the highest in the industrialised world. It's a phenomenon The Economist magazine noted recently.

The government, of course, could go back on its (quite frankly stupid) promise to return the budget to surplus within three years as some business commentators are urging it to do. Funnily enough, none other than those guardians of fiscal rectitude Moody's, in a recent statement affirming Australia's top-ranked position, advised the Gillard government essentially not to sweat it over reaching the self-imposed budget target.

"Whether it reaches a balanced position in 2012-13 -- as targeted by the government -- or somewhat later is not important as long as the improving trend is in place. Because of its low debt levels, the government has some leeway in this regard."

But, of course, this is not the point. Having tied itself to the mast, the government has issued a challenge to the press gallery (forever looking for the "gotcha" moment) to find it going back on its word. So any suggestion from Swan or Wong that there is nothing sacrosanct about reaching budget balance in a particular year would unleash howls of horror and the tearing of garments in the media, who have swallowed whole the Opposition line that the government has somehow wrecked Australia's public finances, throwing money onto a bonfire of pink batts and school halls. That's the narrative. And facts can't be allowed to stand in the way of it.

So the emerging story around this budget is whether the government is good for its word (watch out for Budget Backflip) and will take the axe to its spending. If Swan can do that while putting the boot into single mums, the disabled and the long-term unemployed (the favoured targets of the drooling fascists of talkback radio), he will have achieved the quinella. Of course, no mention will be made of the $60 billion in revenue foregone by making the mining tax acceptable to the multi-national resource giants. The trick is to be seen to being tough - as long as he's 'tough' with those who can't fight back.

And the media will go on implicitly believing in the perverse morality of the budget charade; that somehow subsidising bankers with funding and deposit guarantees and charging cheap rents to multi-national mining companies is about advancing capitalism; while paying decent benefits to the least privileged in our community is something we can't afford. What a circus.

The Forgotten 'Poeple'

2011-05-06T13:04:00.014+10:00

The Americans call them copy editors; the English and Antipodeans call them sub-editors. Whatever you call them, they are traditionally the most under-valued and under-appreciated people in journalism. And with Fairfax's latest bout of self-mutilation, they take one step closer to extinction.

"We get all of the blame when things go wrong and none of the credit when good things happen." That frequently heard occupational grievance - heard so often in pub conversations between co-workers - could have been invented for sub-editors. These journalists - and let there be no mistake: sub-editors ARE journalists - are the real crafts people of newspapers and wire services.

Subs are the perennially eagle-eyed people who spot the monumental f**k-ups in the making - misattributed quotes, the absence of a little word (like 'not' - as in 'The Prime Minister said the ALP was ~~not~~ on the ropes), the mistaking of one person for another ('Former RBA governor Ian Macfarlane blasts the government's budget'....don't you mean the OTHER Ian Macfarlane?), potentially defamatory claims ('Dr Hawkins, a known associate of underworld figure Clams Maloney..' - err, maybe he really is only his doctor) and all the silly little mistakes that appear in reporters' copy; mistakes that - if not corrected - gradually erode the trustworthiness of a media outlet's brand. And it is trust, more than anything, that makes a media brand valuable.

But aside from correcting copy and saving a newspaper from embarrassment and multi-million dollar lawsuits, the best subs can also make the copy shine or least make it readable. Inelegant and clumsy grammar, jarring segues, cheesy leads, buried context, inappropriate or heavy-handed use of metaphor - all can be, and regularly are, purged from the raw material and honed into something that is a joy to read. Well, that's what sub-editors traditionally did (aside from eating bad food at their desks at ungodly hours). On top of all that, they wrote headlines that said 'read me' and captions that provided the missing information. When mistakes were made, the subs always got the blame. And when it all went right, who do you think received the kudos?

When you watch a movie, you don't see the script-writers and editors and story-boarders. You see the stars. And reporters in the last decade or so have become the stars of journalism. Their job is to dig up the information and get the interviews and write it all up in time for deadline. Well, that's the theory. The reality is that 90 per cent of the time these days, reporters are assigned to "event news". These are staged and pre-fabricated set-pieces - usually put together by a PR firm or paid flak - with ready-to-wear quotes and an appropriate visual. Of course, you could go and find your own news - something to distinguish you from the competition - 'but here's something we've prepared earlier'. Too easy.

This leaves reporters with the onerous task of cutting and pasting from an electronic media release, folding in a bit of wire copy to pad out the missing detail and context and sticking their names on the top. Always the names on the top - the most important part, after all, even for a six-par story. Talk to a harried sub-editor and they'll tell you that many reporters can't even get that right. So the subs - at least the good ones - go online themselves and check the facts and search the archives for the context and start to realise that the entire news "event" is not news at all, but a publicity stunt. Too late, though. The hole must be filled to keep the ads apart.

But this is where the failing economics of the media comes into the story, because for the last decade or so newspapers have gradually been lowering the bar for sub-editors. At Fairfax, generations of the old grizzled, seen-it-all subs have gone - to be replaced by casuals and contractors who are told to do the minimum and shovel the copy through. These temps have no affiliation to the newspaper, are paid a pittance and know that the consequence of tampering with the star reporters' copy (and their egos) is not worth the aggravation. So the word goes out to keep your head down and just cut the story to length, put a headline on the top and run the spell check. Do your seven and a half hours and go home. More and more, newsrooms became like Blake's Dark Satanic Mills, with drones pushing out widgets at the lowest possible cost and bugger the quality.

This is why Fairfax now has decided that it may as well just contract out the sub-editing to an even more lowly paid workforce at Pagemasters. It's probably inevitable given the dire circumstances of the mainstream media. But to say that this equates to investing in "quality journalism" is just a crock. The best journalism often results when a hungry, never-say-never and ultra quizzical reporter is matched with a wordsmith of a sub-editor. You very rarely get all the skills in one person. Like a movie, it's a team effort - a news editor with great instincts, a section editor with great contacts, a reporter with enormous energy and chutzpah and a sub-editor who adds the gloss and the flair. Throw in the visual elements - graphics and photography and design - and that's how newspapers are made.

To be more correct, that's how newspapers WERE made. It's not economical to make them that way any more. And that's fine if the public wants to live with the consequences of that. (I'll give you a hint: Without proper sub-editors - particularly for the marque reporters who can't actually write - newspapers' output will resemble "Stars Without Makeup". You'll see all the bad lines).

My own view is the newspapers should have seen this coming more than a decade ago. Back in the late 1990s they were all setting up online versions of the print edition and furnishing tiny work spaces in the corners of their newsrooms where the emerging digital natives lived. But it never progressed beyond there. With ink in their fingernails, the old hands could not (or would not) imagine a digital-only future.

Some of us warned them. We said it would make more sense to go completely digital - after all the biggest costs are printing and distribution. That way the money could be invested in multi-media teams that developed digital apps built around specific sections of the old one-size-fits-all newspaper.

We've known this for years. But now, it's too late. And so, as the sun sets on newspapers, we say goodbye to our old friends, the ~~sbu-etdors~~, the ~~stu-botieds~~, the sub-editors.

(PS: If you don't want to take my word for it, read the experiences of another old sub, former Melbourne Age night Jonathon Green, writingon The Drum - Subless Fairfax is a Fast-Sinking Ship.
Also see Who Cares About Sub-Editors by Mel Campbell on New Matilda)

Hole the Front Page

2011-05-03T21:58:00.001+10:00

Will this new documentary, 'Page One', do for journalism what Al Gore's 'An Inconvenient Truth' did for the global movement on climate change? The two films are from the same production company. Both suggest time is running short for their respective subjects - mainstream media journalism and planet earth. Both carry the seed of hope. Both suggest time may run out before those hopes can be realised.

'Page One' focuses on one year in the fortunes of the world's most prestigious English language newspaper, The New York Times. But the issues it explores relate just as much to Australian broadsheets, which are struggling to survive amid the combined onslaught of declining readership, the explosion of social media, the migration of advertising to other platforms and the disaggregation of disintermediation of news.

Certainly, the news that hundreds of sub-editing jobs at Australia's last two quality broadsheets - Fairfax's The Age and The Sydney Morning Herald - are being culled in the name of developing "quality journalism" suggests that commercial media organisations, if they are to survive, will be much leaner. But the question must be at what point, in the pursuit of keeping shareholders happy,do these last remaining brands in quality journalism destroy what little substance they have left.

My own view is that it is too late. If Fairfax really wanted to save money and invest in quality journalism, it would not be cutting the jobs of senior sub-editors and switching those positions to its half-owned AAP offshoot, the sweatshop Pagemasters - where the subs receive much worse pay and conditions. It would be stopping print production and distribution (thereby saving significantly more money), going completely digital and spending their savings on journalists.

In the meantime, get ready for lots more typos on page one and page two and page three and....

The Hall of Media Mirrors

2011-04-30T23:00:00.007+10:00

Former Finance Minister Lindsay Tanner has sparked a bitter storm within the Labor Party after publishing a tell-all book that exposes the inner manoeuvrings of the final days of the Rudd government.
Prime Minister Julia Gillard has attempted to laugh off revelations by former Finance Minister Lindsay Tanner of her role in the Rudd government dumping its Carbon Pollution Reduction Scheme.
Federal Opposition Leader Tony Abbott has seized upon revelations of extreme disunity with the former Rudd Labor government from former Finance Minister Lindsey Tanner in a tell-all book.
The minority Labor government is hanging by a thread after frank admissions by former Finance Minister Lindsay Tanner in his new book revealed still festering divisions in the ALP.

You don't have to be a genius to work out how the news headlines might have gone if Lindsay Tanner had used his book 'Sideshow' and the surrounding media interviews to do a 'Latham' and round on the party that had kept him in politics for two decades.

But quite wisely, realising from bitter experience how the media would revel in a Labor Party catfight, Tanner has chosen instead to focus on the wider theme of how our politics got to become so busted. And he has aimed the bulk of his criticism at a media that in recent years has been like a child with ADHD, running around in a raspberry cordial-fuelled frenzy seeking outrage and excitement at every turn and unable to focus on any one thing for more than a few moments.

Given Tanner's silence since retiring at the last election, it wasn't surprising or indeed illegitimate that in interviews about his book, television journalists like Leigh Sales on the ABC or David Speers on Sky should seek to focus on the former minister's senior role in the last government and the circumstances that led to Rudd's controversial dumping.

But once it quickly became clear that it was not his intention to rake over those coals, the media's response turned rather indignant. Tanner was “missing the point” or burying the lead or, more accurately, simply not telling the story that the media wanted to hear. And when respected bloggers like Grog’s Gamut pointed out that journalists were rather proving Tanner’s very point about treating politics as a sideshow, some mainstream media commentators became characteristically defensive. An exception, once again, was the always perceptive Laura Tingle in the AFR, who noted in Saturday's paper (subscriber) that initial reports of Tanner's interviews almost universally misreported him.

As a former journalist, I can understand that had Tanner tipped a bucket on Gillard, it would have been a story. But he didn’t and it was very clear that he wouldn’t because the point his book was making was that the media thrives most in a climate in which the focus is all on the game of politics, not the substance. Without having a fully formed idea about it, reporters implicity understand their job is about entrapping politicians – even when they are no longer politicians - into rare outbursts of frankness, only to accuse them then of making “gaffes”. Equally, they know that the game works best when they demand that politicians “rule in or rule out” certain causes of action. And when the hapless policymaker succumbs to the inevitable and changes course, they accuse them of a “backflip” or “lying to the Australian people”.

Some in the media are saying it has always been that way, but I strongly disagree. The focus on the fight itself or behind-doors politics has become ever more dominant in recent years. That can be explained partly by the growing sophistication of the spin doctors (usually former journalists who supply talking points to their charges and tell them to stay on message), partly by the worsening economics of the media (fewer journos, deteriorating standards of training) and partly by a gradual blurring of the distinction between journalism and entertainment (the job is now almost entirely about putting bums on seats, eyes on ads and ratings). So it's cheap vaudeville or Punch and Judy. Here comes the man with the black hat. Boooo!!

Highlighting that his agenda in Sideshow is not a partisan one or a lame defence of politicians, Tanner, in an interview with former Age editor Andrew Jaspan, expressed sympathy with the position that his arch political opponent Tony Abbott was put in ahead of the last election over Work Choices:

Yes you can, at one level, blame individual politicians and say you shouldn’t have done this or you should have been more brave, or you should have said this, but for example when you see the thrashing around that Tony Abbott had to go through on industrial relations at the commencement of the campaign in order to ensure that he wasn’t under siege about Work Choices from the media for the whole campaign, and that he had to go to the absurd lengths of promising absolutely not one tiny bit of change to industrial relations law for any reason full stop, then you see where the silliness is coming from.

So, it is most clearly a game. The only wonder is that the press gallery journalists themselves cannot see their agency in it. And they cannot see that the much bigger story here is the one that Tanner is alluding to – the increasingly short-termist and trivial nature of reporting on politics, the focus on entertainment and fluff and the absence of any real hard analysis (the type the modern reporter literally does not have time for) of the underlying policy and the difficult choices involved. Ultimately, it is highly ironic - or tragic - that the scrutiny the media rightly seeks to apply to every other institution it seems unable or unwilling to apply to itself.

Is it any wonder, then, that politicians are reluctant to tell people the truth – the truth, for instance, that electricity prices are going to up regardless, that our tax system rewards property speculation, that a budget surplus is not an end in itself, that we are in Afghanistan purely because our alliance with the US requires us to be and that we cannot afford the middle class welfare that has built up under successive governments.

To quote that Jack Nicholson movie, the entire politico-media edifice has decided that the public can’t handle the truth. And we are all the worse off as a result.

It's a great story. But who is going to tell it?

(Further reading: Journalism academic Jason Wilson finds Tanner's treatise disappointing)

That's Entertainment Revisited

2011-04-28T08:00:00.002+10:00

At what point does journalists' dedication to 'neutrality' obscure their obligation to reveal the truth? My post about a public form about 'false balance' in reporting on climate science, run late last year, has sparked feedback from one of the quoted forum participants - the Sydney Morning Herald's environment's editor Ben Cubby. Ben's complaint, and I quote him in full below, is that I had taken him out of context.

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When the bug-eyed publicity hound and climate change denialist 'Lord' Monckton paraded through Australia early last year with his travelling circus act, the media (and a typically guileless ABC in particular) laid down and let him have his way with them.

The Australian media's undiscriminating reporting of the hard core skeptic movement - based partly on the he-said-she said ersatz 'neutrality' model that conveniently allows journalists to claim they are 'objective' - was the subject of a fascinating forum broadcast on the ABC's Big Ideas program.

The forum, held at the University of Technology in Sydney, was sponsored by the Australian Centre for Independent Journalism and was held in conjunction with the annual George Munster award for journalism. The panel featured three academics - one climate scientist and two journalism professors - plus two practising journalists - Sarah Clarke of the ABC and Ben Cubby of the Sydney Morning Herald.

While starting amicably enough, the conversation soon became noticeably tense. Leading the attack on the media was Monash journalism professor Philip Chubb, who pointed to the distortions created by journalists giving credence to a hard core of either mad or fossil fuel-funded climate change denialists when 97 percent of published peer-reviewed scientists support the concept of anthropogenic climate change.

Cubby's response to this was to say essentially (though he argues I have taken him out of context, see below) that the media does not just have a responsibility to inform people, but to entertain them as well. And with the likes of the Mad Monckton providing such good copy, it was just too hard for journalists to resist giving him blanket coverage.

"One thing about journalism that is different from say a scientific journal is that it is also about story telling and it is to some extent about entertainment, as well as informing people," Cubby said. "You've got to sell newspapers, you've got to make people watch your TV show. Now that can lead to an unacceptable level of distortion. But the opposite is that every story in the paper could be dull, but worthy."

Cubby went onto say that it just wouldn't do to run front page stories every day saying 'Earth Still Warming; Extinction Approaches', because that wasn't news. Journalists had to find new angles to the story constantly and if someone was going to come along with a potty theory about socialist world government conspiracies, well all very good because the copy has to keep on coming.

So there you have it, folks. Out of the horse's mouth. Journalism is half entertainment-half information and sometimes the story - however important - is just too dull to bore one's readers with.

At the risk of breaking Godwin's law, one imagines if this is the case, we can expect invitations onto the Fran Kelly show for Holocaust denier David Irving should he ever be allowed into Australia - because we've heard those stories about the genocide of six million Jews over and over and the listeners are just bored with that.

Call me old-fashioned, but at what point did entertainment become a priority of journalists, particularly when it is at the expense of giving people an accurate view of the world and particularly when it concerns news about the survival of the planet?

Write colourfully, certainly. Seek out fresh angles and tell stories in compelling ways that resonate with people, of course. But this must ALL be in the service of revealing the TRUTH of things. It is not the job of journalists to do a little bit of truth telling and a little bit of entertaining to spice up the mix when they think the lead is going stale.

Climate change is but one area where this novelty-for-novelty's sake happens. Financial journalism is full of it. Every financial journalist knows in their heart of hearts that you can't "beat" the market and that a whole industry is supported by this ridiculous notion.

But because the media can't risk boring its readers with the truth (building wealth is about taking only those risks that come with an expected return, diversifying across asset classes, paying attention to costs and taxes and keeping a reserve of cash), they have to seek fresh angles to keep the punters looking at their clients' ads - for hedge funds and contracts-for-difference and high-yield bonds and fancy derivatives.

And we know how all that bad advice and exploiting the need for endless novelty by pushing fabled "high return-low risk" investments turned out, don't we? The global financial system nearly collapsed, millions of people were thrown out of work and governments in the US and Europe put themselves into a level of hock from which it will take them decades to recover, if at all.

So the media to some extent has blood on its hands over the GFC by playing up speculation as investment and by treating as gurus the spivs and charlatans that got us into this mess. And now, for the sake of entertainment, novelty and "story-telling" - even if those splendid yarns misinform the public - it is prepared to put the planet at risk. This is why the Fourth Estate has become the Failed Estate.

-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Ben Cubby responds:

Hi Bob,
Entertaining an audience is an intrinsic part of any reportage for any topic and any media, commercial or otherwise, and has been for a long time. But you should never jeopardise truth or accuracy to make a piece more colourful.
Yet you have paraphrased me as saying that if a story is too boring then the truth has to be sacrificed in order to spice it up, and that it's reasonable to give lots of news coverage to climate sceptics on this basis. This is an inaccurate rendering of what I said at this particular forum and what I believe in general.
You didn't record the relevant fact that a substantial part of that discussion forum was devoted to why our paper is NOT interested in covering or giving any credence to Monckton or his theories in its news pages.
So, your post is arguing that reporters should tell a full and comprehensive story, even if it’s dull. But to argue this case you are relying on a few out-of-context quotes and ignoring other evidence in order to make it seem like the facts fit your theory - pretty ironic.
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Mr Denmore adds:

I accept that Ben's intention was to say that truth should never be compromised by the need to entertain and that the SMH for the most part treated the Monckton visit as a backpage sideshow (unlike the ABC).

Unforunately, that is not the way it came across in the recording of the forum and I have listened to it three times. The quote I included is accurate. He did say that a level of distortion can result from newspapers seeking to "tell stories" in the service of entertainment, which is what the other panelists were accusing the media of doing in the climate change debate.

Ben is clearly a thoughtful journalist and in the context of the forum may have been playing devil's advocate to spark a livelier discussion. But I maintain that the media as a whole has not served the public well in the climate change debate, too often treating the views of charlatans as equivalent with those of credentialled scientists.

Killing Boredom as Your KPI

2011-04-25T12:19:00.001+10:00

With television increasingly dominated by the Outrage Business and shamelessly exploitative and cheap 'reality' shows, the 1976 Sidney Lumet-directed Oscar-winning movie 'Network' looks increasingly prescient. In this bitter satire of the effect that intense commercial competition has on broadcast standards, Australian Peter Finch plays Howard Beale, a TV demagogue so appalled by the profit-driven amorality of the network that employs him that he urges his viewers to turn their sets off.

Network's scriptwriter Paddy Chayevsky understood the nature of television as a sideshow, its primary aim to put bums on seats and eyes on advertisers' products. In the end, it doesn't really matter what Howard Beale or Andrew Bolt or any talkback ranter or tabloid preacher says. If he's successful, half the audience will hate him, half will love him and no-one will be indifferent. The important point for the broadcaster - and the number one KPI for the talent - is that they build an audience. And in the end, as the fictional Beale proclaims in the movie's pivotal scene, that's all that matters to the network.

"Television is not the truth," Beale says. "Television is a goddamned amusement park. Television is a circus, a carnival, a travelling troupe of acrobats, storytellers, actors, singers, jugglers, sideshow freaks, lion tamers and football players. Folks, we are in the boredom killing business. You won't get any truth from us."

When 'Network' first came out 35 years ago, it was seen as a satire, a deliberately over-the-top send-up, in which cynical network owners allowed clearly extreme and deliberately inflammatory commentators on air to deliver ratings points. Beale, for instance, dies in a hail of bullets fired by an extremist urban terrorist group hired by the producers to breathe new life into the show.
For some reason, it now doesn't seem so far-fetched.

The Truth Test

2011-04-10T20:20:00.007+10:00

What responsibility do journalists have to tell the truth? If the commercial or ideological interests of their
employers require them to misrepresent an issue or incite conflict or exploit partisanship, what protections are there for the public against that deceit? And if journalists are the professionals they insist they are, what sanctions do they face for breaching the ethics of their trade?

These seem more interesting questions than the reflexive liberalism we saw in recent weeks in response to the racial discrimination case against right-wing Herald Sun columnist Andrew Bolt. Incurably romantic about their chosen profession, journalists love any opportunity to quote Voltaire and argue that even the most odious commentator has a right to speak their mind. After all, rallying around the freedom flag proves how committed they are to the role of the Fourth Estate as an institution that asks tough questions and squares up to authority.

But perhaps the more courageous questions for journalists to pose in this climate of extreme partisanship and increasingly desperate attempts by media owners to create a sustainable business model in a disintermediated world relate to their own roles in the power structure and their own accountability to the public.

Yes, there is a journalists' code of ethics, which lists 12 major principles that journalists must follow - well at least those journalists who are paid-up members of the union - the Media, Entertainment and Arts Alliance.

These include a commitment to report honestly, striving for accuracy, fairness and disclosure of all essential facts. Journalists are required not to suppress relevant facts or to give "distorting emphasis". Other principles include not placing unnecessary emphasis on personal characteristics such as race and religion, and not allowing one's personal beliefs or commercial pressures to undermine accuracy or independence.

But what sanctions are in place should journalists not follow this code in practice? More importantly, who polices and prosecutes breaches of the code? Can journalists be disbarred or disqualified from the pursuit of journalism as can doctors and lawyers and even financial advisers? The short answer to these questions is an unequivocal negative. The Australian media is largely self-regulated - newspapers by the Australian Press Council (an irrelevant and totally toothless organisation run by the papers themselves) and commercial broadcasters by the Australian Communications and Media Authority. The ABC is held separately accountable by a government-nominated board administering a charter and a code of practice, as is SBS. A full list of regulatory arrangements is available here.

Ask yourself when was the last time you can recall a journalist in Australia sanctioned by an industry regulator over breaches of professional standards. Perhaps the most high profile case was the 'cash for comment' scandal, in which the ABC's Media Watch revealed that shockjocks Alan Jones and John Laws had been paid to give favourable on-air comments about major corporations such as Telstra, Qantas and the big banks. Laws was found by the then Australian Broadcasting Authority to have breached a disclosure standard. But Jones was cleared amid controversy over the ABA's inquiry, which the Communications Law Centre of the University of Technology described as "overly timid".

But calling Alan Jones and John Laws 'journalists' is a stretch even on the most charitable definition of the word. Paid entertainers certainly. But journalists? Surely not. But the fact is, as far as the listening public is concerned, there is very little difference between the young, idealistic and very badly paid reporters scurrying around town from press conference to press conference and the millionaire talkback hosts pontificating on the issues of the day with minimal respect for accuracy or independence or fair comment or the need to report all "relevant facts".

It might shock non-media people, but what is happening now is that nothing, beyond the conscience of the individual journalist, stands in front of the media's increasingly unethical pursuit of profit and the truth. A journalist can become and remain a good journalist in Australia ('good' as in upholding that code of ethics) only despite the organisations they work for, not because of them. And with only three or four substantial employers of journalists outside the ABC, it is a very brave reporter who stands on principle when they see the pursuit of the truth getting in the way of commercial imperatives.

In that context, then, what prevents Andrew Bolt using his new program on the Ten Network to propagate manifest untruths about climate science in support of an ideological agenda? And what is to stop the shockjocks on commercial radio using selective reporting to incite racial hatred and exploit prejudice and ignorance? Are the limits of our sanctions a slap on the wrist from Media Watch on a Monday night? How do you improve accountability in journalism and the media without sacrificing the rights of a free press?

At an academic level, this debate is now well underway in the United States, a country whose constitution's protection of a free press under its first amendment has been flagrantly abused by Rupert Murdoch's Fox News, which has given up any pretence of fairness and independence to pursue partisanship in a way that makes no distinction between news and comment. In a paper published last month in the University of Michigan's Journal of Law Reform, Andrew Selbst noted that while newsmakers always have been driven to an extent by profit, sensationalism and partisanship, this is now at a level that compromises the functioning of democracy. While the media trumpets its rights, journalists failed to reveal the truth in two of the biggest stories of recent years - the invasion of Iraq and the events leading to the global financial crisis. In the US, media companies such as Fox now actively promote untruths, such as the idea that President Obama was born in Kenya or that his health reforms would involve compulsory euthanasia.

The problem as Selbst sees it - and it applies equally in Australia - is that the media has become much less diverse since the mid-20th century "golden age" of journalism. Murdoch is dominant among a handful of media corporations that use their First Amendment protections to pursue their own commercial and ideological agendas. Media regulation is piecemeal, hostage to industry interests and largely toothless. Individual journalists might proclaim their commitment to a professional code of ethics, but these decisions seem unlikely to have a demonstrable effect on standards in an industry in which the pursuit of profit and audiences overshadows every other imperative.

In his paper, Selbst advocates the establishment of a Journalism Ratings Board, that administers a ratings system employing a list of eight principles expressed by New York journalism professor Jay Rosen - namely veracity, accuracy, transparency, intellectual honesty, inquiry (doggedness in pursuit of the truth), polyphonicity (plurality of voices), currency (staying up to date) and utility (the usefulness of the information).

Of course, this proposal will almost certainly provoke shrieks of indignation from most journalists, who view any oversight of their trade as an assault on the freedom of the press. For their part, public choice theorists argue the regulators inevitably will be captured by the industry they oversee (as we saw in the GFC). But just because there are potential conflicts, does not mean we should ignore the challenge.

Selbst argues the Journalism Ratings Board could work like the electoral commission or the securities commission (our ASIC), using a market-based approach that requires news programs to to provide "news consumer guidelines" that work similar to the parental ratings already employed. The details are up for discussion, but I suspect no working journalist, in their heart of hearts, thinks the public is currently properly protected against an industry that routinely hides behind high-minded appeals to freedom to push an agenda that aims to draw as many eyeballs as possible to the ads that underpin their profits.

What do you think?

PS: For a "people-driven" ratings system on journalism, it's hard to go past the idea of UK satirist Tom Scott, who has advocated sticking warning labels on newspapers. The warnings include:

"Statistics, survey results and/or equations in this article were sponsored by a PR company"
"This article is basically just a press release copied and pasted"
"Medical claims in this article have not been confirmed by peer-reviewed research"
"Journalist does not understand the subject they are writing about."

Here's a template if you want to make your own.

The Outrage Business

2011-04-03T20:22:00.008+10:00

As in drama, conflict drives the news business. The more black and white the conflict is portrayed as, the greater the passion the issue raises, the greater its confected 'news' value. Once a savvy media organisation works out what gets people worked up, it's a fair bet it will go out of its way to construct narratives around those very issues.

Welcome to the idea of the mainstream media as a gigantic trolling device. The business model, in the absence of anything else in these days of news of a commodity, is to post deliberately inflammatory commentary and to feature as much as possible those commentators who elicit a strong reaction from audiences. Good or bad; it doesn't matter. It's the culture war as a business model.

This explains why the ABC, for instance, is so ready to provide multiple platforms for professional provocateur Andrew Bolt and his News Ltd stablemates to recycle memes aimed at outraging the intellectual and cultural left that patronises the national broadcaster's programming in the absence of any other media outlet that provides a serious analysis of public affairs.

While the ABC isn't a commercial organisation, it does face substantial pressures; in its case to demonstrate to its political overseers - particularly on the Right - that it delivers sufficient "value for money" to as broad as possible an audience and to show its programming is not a form of upper middle class welfare. It is fair to say that these overseers, who have flourished since Howard's day and who strangely continued to assert great influence even under Rudd, will not be content until such time as the ABC is a facsimile of commercial talkback radio.

In practical terms, the outcome of all this appeasement of a prickly and paranoid Right is a pandering to views that already saturate the rest of the media - particularly tabloid newspapers and commercial talkback radio. If those views also receive the endorsement of the ALP, even better, which explains why the ABC is so ready to promulgate the myth that The Greens are anti-Semitic (despite 12 per cent of the electorate giving them their first preference votes in the last federal election).

In the commercial media, the culture wars are used as a business strategy to drive page impressions and breathe life into a dying industry desperate for an audience, any audience. This is why News Ltd, for instance, spends so much money on so many columnists whose job description is to elicit condemnation from tertiary educated , liberally minded people who find their views objectionable.

How all this informs people isn't exactly clear. But then it's not really supposed to. It is part of what Kevin Rudd's former press secretary Lachlan Harris describes as The Opinion Cycle. It's about generating an ongoing wave of outrage to pull in eyeballs, put bums on seats and manufacture a reaction for commercial advantage. That reaction then becomes part of the story, so that the narrative becomes self-generating.

Believe it or not, that's the way a dying mainstream media makes its bucks these days. And it's why our political debate is so narrow and exhausted and self-serving. It's why the media desperately wants to keep alive the idea that there is serious scientific disagreement about man-made climate change. It's why the media wants you to believe that the world will come to an end if the budget doesn't return to surplus and why it is no rush to tell you that Australia's refugee "problem" pales into insignificance compared with the issue in Europe.

Ultimately, it's about maintaining a permanent rolling outrage to obscure more prosaic truths that do not lend themselves to the favoured red team-versus-blue team template. It's successful, for sure. Like the circus, it draws in big audiences to look at the ads. It is guaranteed to cheer one side and outrage the other. But it sure as hell isn't journalism.

See also: Grog's Gamut: Decline and Fall
See also: Lachlan Harris: It's a Fact: Opinion is Rising
See also: Beck's Toxic Legacy

Mining the Truth

2011-03-29T16:45:00.002+11:00

The standards of journalism in Australia have come in for severe scrutiny on this blog and elsewhere recently, to the point where practitioners of the trade could be excused for feeling under siege.

Among the long list of shortcomings that 'The Failed Estate'; has documented:

Fake 'balance' that involves reporting polarised opinion and overlooking complexity and nuance
He said-she said journalism or the bland and unreflective reporting of opposing positions
A lack of context in reporting and the institutionalised mistaking of noise for signal
A lack of respect for the truth, particularly in ratings-chasing talkback radio
The manufacturing of outrage, again in talkback radio and commercial current affairs television
The pursuit of trivia and entertainment 'news' at the expense of serious reporting
An increasing focus on speed at the expense of perspective
An ever growing emphasis on the fight itself rather than on the underlying issues
The perversion of news judgement by the need to generate online hits
Endemic parochialism in which reporters fail to frame global issues in a global context
The growth of opinion and 'attitude' journalism at the expense of old fashioning digging

It's a depressing list, which is why it is so heartening to come across a rare example of how Australian journalism should be: Taking an issue of current public importance (in this case, the carbon tax) and putting it in a longer term and global context; adding useful background; using multiple sources; explaining difficult concepts in clear and simple terms and having a point of view (while representing all sides of the story).

We often hear about what journalism should NOT be, but we don't often ask ourselves what it SHOULD be. There are plenty of versions of an ideal manifesto for the trade out on the web, but few have summed it up better for me than a list that emerged from a US research project by the Pew Research Center for Excellence in Journalism. The Principles of Journalism sets out nine core principles for working journalists - starting with the idea that a journalist's first obligations are always to the truth and to citizens - not to editors or shareholders to advertisers or other journalists at the pub. Other key principles include the discipline of verification and the independent monitoring of power.

With that in mind, I'd urge all followers of this blog to listen to a recent documentary on Radio National's Background Briefing on the ABC. The reporter, Stan Correy, puts the current controversy over a carbon tax in the context of last year's row over the resources profits tax and the wider efforts around the world to extract for the citizens of mineral-rich nations a fairer share of the natural resources they own.

What's particularly welcome about Coorey's report is that he highlights the role of the media in reporting the RSPT, more specifically its failure to communicate to readers and viewers what the tax was about. An interview with AFR political editor Laura Tingle, one of Australia's best journalists, is particularly illuminating. Tingle tells how reporting of the RSPT became a classic case of he said-she said, with the focus quickly turning to the political fight itself rather than the issues when the media clearly decided these were too complex to bore people with. No-one was representing the public interest.

The result of all this, of course, is that the nation has diddled itself out of $60 billion in revenue by allowing itself to be bullied by multi-national miners who threatened capital strikes and spooked a government into ultimately dumping a prime minister.

It is a compelling story of great public interest and it is impossible to imagine this being told by News Ltd (an organisation that seeks to represent the interests of tax minimising multi-nationals as that of the Australian public) or Fairfax Media (a permanently cash-strapped enterprise focused on cafe journalism for real estate obsessed inner city yuppies). Only the ABC, in our current media climate, could tell this story. And plaudits to them for doing so in the way they have.

You can listen to 'Taxing Mines' by Stan Correy on Radio National's Background Briefing here.

Rupert's Top Ten

2011-03-27T22:23:00.006+11:00

Message to The Australian subs' desk: Have the week off guys and plug these into the paper over the coming few days. The production instructions are in brackets next to the headlines. Pick up wires from there:

1. Labor Loses the Mothership (SPLASH)
A humiliated Labor Party was left surveying the wreckage at the weekend as the party's birthplace in New South Wales was claimed by a resurgent Liberal-National coalition riding a national wave of anger at the proposed carbon tax.

2. Gillard Goes to Ground (SIDEBAR)
Prime Minister Julia Gillard has gone to ground to disassociate herself from an angry backlash from Labor votes in the nation's biggest state and to prepare for an almighty assault in federal parliament against her contentious carbon tax.

3. Heartland Attack (ANALYSIS)
Tony Abbott's Liberal-National Coalition, plugging into the real concerns of working people, took back Labor's industrial heartland at the weekend and threw down the gauntlet to a shamed federal minority Labor government ruing its decision to propose a carbon tax.

4. Voice of the People (COLOUR STORY)
Australia's blue-collar birthplace defied its political heritage at the weekend, turfing out a Labor state government and signalling to Julia Gillard's teetering federal regime that the patience of the battlers will not countenance a carbon tax. Joe O'Reilly is a heavily tattooed building contractor in Penrith....

5. Opinion: Paul Kelly (SPELL CHECK ONLY)
Let there be no mistake. This is a profound seachange in Australian politics. Freed from the shackles of the old class wars, Tony Abbott has made his own imprimatur on a Liberal Party that has reinvented itself as a classless and populist expression of the national soul.

6. Opinion: Miranda Devine (USE THE SMIRK PICTURE)
So much for the bicycling premier. Most NSW voters don't have the luxury of cycling to work to make them feel good about making a carbon impression that is meaningless in the scheme of things. So at last, we can drive our cars and chop down our neighbours' trees with impunity once more. And doesn't it feel good!!

7. Opinion: Janet Albrechtson (LOOKING OVER HER GLASSES)
In relative terms, the NSW Labor Party will say it won the election. Well, at least that is what their agents in the NSW Teachers' Union will be telling your children this week. You see, there are no 'losers' in our schools any more. So there can be no losers in politics either.

8. Opinion: Andrew Bolt (NEXT TO SPORTS)
The defeat of the Keneally government is a mortal blow to those who would claim that immigrants to this country make a positive contribution. Would they have only have stopped the boats when that woman crawled into port 15 years ago.

9. Business: Terry McCrann (HIT UP RIO FOR AD)
Now business can breathe easier again. Tax and spend interventionist government has been given a red card by a community more interested in pursuing profit than killing initiative. The NSW election ends further attempts to tax mining and extract unfair rents from a bleeding fossil fuel industry.

10. Media: Caroline Overington (ADD 'WALKLEY-WINNING')
The power of the fourth estate, led by the probing efforts of News Ltd, has given new power to Australia's proud democracy by exposing the short-comings of a Labor Party on its last legs and undermining the case for standalone action on alleged climate change.

(THE REAL EDITOR'S NOTE: Yes, NSW Labor was rotten and deserved to be tossed out. I didn't vote for them either. But don't underestimate the power of the News Ltd machine to turn this into something else).

Nowhere Man

2011-03-25T21:33:00.002+11:00

Chris Uhlmann wants you to know he's a non-partisan, straight down the middle journalist. One of the stars of the reinvented post-Kerry O'Brien current affairs show "7.30" (apparently 'Report' is superfluous now), Uhlmann represents the new, bland, board-approved face of the public broadcaster's current affairs coverage - as in whatever you do, don't upset the Tories because they might be back in government one day and cut our funding.

Covering a public rally, clumsily organised as a marketing tool by right-wing talkback radio shockjocks seeking to import the US Tea Party 'movement' to Australia, Mr Uhlmann decided bizarrely that the news angle was the unfair branding of the protesters as extremists, nutters and easily manipulated illiterates.

Wandering among the crowd, Uhlmann sought to render as morally equivalent this artificially orchestrated protest against the Gillard government's chosen means of dealing with a problem that threatens life on earth with a hundreds of thousands-strong demonstration eight years ago against the then Howard government for joining Australia to an illegal war fought on a false premise in defiance of the United Nations.

But Chris is more sophisticated than that. He covers his tracks by saying how hard it is to tread a sane, sensible middle path between the liberal, tertiary educated, middle class and, oh, the League of Rights and One Nation and the National Civic Council (who were all represented at the Canberra protest).

"According to them I, and the rest of my colleagues, are captured by the Left and don't even attempt to understand the grievances of that kind of crowd," Uhlmann wrote. "They believe that we dismiss them as aging nutters, unworthy of our attention, except when we want to sketch a caricature. They believed that we would not report the event, or that we would ridicule it."

But of course, Chris was not there to ridicule the protesters. He represents the new John Howard-reinvented ABC, which seeks to legitimise the most fringe right-wing elements of the country as somehow representing the real, salt-of-the-earth "forgotten" Australians who are overlooked in a media crowded by bleeding hearts and cafe-lurking urban sophisticates who know nothing of the concerns of "ordinary people".

So we see lots of verbal gymnastics from Uhlmann in which he notes that the "vast weight" of scientific opinion is against the protesters, before giving a kind of lawyer's credence to their incoherent views by saying some in the crowd made "better arguments" by saying the science was "chock full of uncertainties". Llike the theory of evolution and its disputation by creationists? Or like the tobacco industry's long campaign to discredit evidence of a link between smoking and lung cancer any conservative attempt to forestall change by insisting on a fake certainty principle?

In Mr Uhlmann's world, all arguments are valid and his job as a reporter is to provide an apolitical assessment of it all in a way that in the end merely plays into the hands of the most conservative and reactionary elements of society. It is just another back-and-forth, like a tennis match, and his job is to blandly call the score.

Was there ever a more blatant example in Australia of what New York journalism academic Jay Rosen describes as "the view from nowhere" - the idea of the journalist not as someone who informs people, but as a tightrope walker who seeks to walk a middle way between polar extremes, tiptoeing above politics in a way that tells us nothing except the fact of conflict:

"Journalists position themselves as being above the conflict as the neutral arbiter between the poles," Rosen says. " If you want to be in the news, you play the poles. The 'Real' is opposed often to the 'Fake'. So in the case of climate change, the fake is still given legitimacy. So this view of the world as being all about conflict, much of it illegitimate, and all about the extremes on either side of the conflict informs our political process. So our media and our politics tend toward entropy and ritualized conflict."

So well done Chris. You've got all the bases covered. Tony Abbott is happy. And you've been invited up to Maurice Newman's office on Monday for tea and biscuits. How courageous of you.

The Last Commons

2011-03-20T19:24:00.002+11:00

Five hundred years ago, English capitalist farmers began a process known as "enclosure of the commons", the forced and wholesale appropriation of public land - formerly used by villagers for arable farming. Now corporate forces, led by Rupert Murdoch, and agents of the political Right are attempting a similar manoeuvre on public broadcasting - the broadcast commons. The ultimate price is our democracy.

There are few remaining really globally trusted brands in journalism - Reuters, The New York Times and the BBC spring to mind. Here in Australia, there really is only one news brand left that the nation turns to in a crisis - the Australian Broadcasting Corporation. But as we shall see in a moment, even dear old auntie is on a slippery slope as - like a reluctant middle-aged stripper - she desperately seeks the approval of a vengeful Right that hates the very fact of her existence.

The attack on public broadcasting is not just an Australian phenomenon. In the US in the past week, House Republicans, citing left-wing bias, voted to cut federal funding to National Public Radio, all $5 million of it - a number that Washington Post columnist Dana Milbank noted represented one ten thousands of one per cent of the federal budget. The Republicans' ammunition, such as it was, included a recent orchestrated sting of an NPR fund-raising executive who was secretly filmed bagging the Tea Party.

The attempt to silence the last non-corporate, independent media voice in America comes despite an extraordinary increase in listenership for public radio. According to the recently released annual Pew Centre Project for Excellence in Journalism, NPR's listening audience increased 3 percent in 2010, to 27.2 million members weekly, up 58 percent overall since 2000. The fact is public radio is one of the last, if not THE last, bastions of serious, sober, accurate and trusted news - a field vacated by a commercial media increasingly obsessed with gadgets, vapid celebrity and the vein-popping screeching of polarised talkshow politics.

In the UK, meanwhile, Murdoch - who appears set to get his way yet again in moving to full ownership of satellite broadcasting behemoth BSkyB - has been seeking - through anointed heir James - to cut the legs out from under the BBC, which he believes operates unfairly with a public subsidy. A poll shows 60 per cent of Britons believe that Murdoch is already far too powerful. But politicians, wary of the reach of his platforms, are reluctant to curtail the spread of his ownership.

In a recent address to the London School of Economics, available on podcast, Michael Lyons - the outgoing chairman of the BBC's governing body - mused that the perfect environment for an attack on public broadcasting by commercial media was one of recession and declining advertising revenues - exactly what the UK has been experiencing for the past two years. Murdoch resents the public subsidy that the BBC operates under, particularly now that it competes with his newspapers for eyeballs in the online space.

Here in Australia, where the market is even more dominated by Murdoch, it now seems clear that the state broadcaster is seeking to appease the forces of the corporate and cultural Right by allowing their already very visible agents free access to air time to spread their gospel even further. The Andrew Bolts and Janet Albrechtsons and Piers Akermans regularly appear on ABC political talkshows like Insiders and QandA to tell us that climate change is a con, that the Greens are fascists and that a powerful, non-elected, leftist cultural elite is forcing its views on the rest of the population.

Now, no-one is saying that a range of voices should not be heard on a publicly funded broadcaster. But it seems fair to ask why Andrew Bolt, a journalist who already has a platform to expound his views in the biggest selling newspaper in Australia, need any further publicity. What gives him special status? Why is his opinion so keenly sought? In short, why is the ABC - a public broadcaster with a charter to air a wide range of voices - so seemingly desperate to court the approval of paid columnists of a magnate who already controls 70 per cent of the metropolitan print media in Australia?

There was an interesting discussion of these questions recently on the Pure Poison blog run by Jeremy Seer and Dave Gaukroger. The discussion focused on the fact that while conservatives hate (and always have hated) the ABC as a nest of basket-weaving lefties, even progressives now are despairing of the broadcaster's attempts to win favour with the Right by routinely running Murdoch paper talking points, routinely featuring his columnists and generally trying very, very hard to be seen to be batting for one side. Poster 'Castidhe' summed it up:

The Right hate the ABC for existing and denigrate it in the hope of getting it to the point where they can sell it to Murdoch and not have to worry about it any more. The Left are learning to hate it because it’s started pandering obsequiously to the Right in the desperate (and futile) hope of avoiding the fate of (1) thereby.

What seems very clear to independent observers is that public broadcasting is under a sustained attack by forces that would deny its right to exist and who insist that in the meantime it be yet another platform for the conservative viewpoints already crowding the editorial pages of the rest of the commercial media. Seeking the quiet life, the ABC has clearly decided that there is an asymmetry to the political pressures it might be under. Labor governments, now routinely afraid of fighting the culture wars from the left, will leave the state broadcaster alone, while Liberal governments will religiously run the stop-watch on its programming to enforce an accountant's conception of 'balance'.

In a world now perilously short of publicly minded media, what's needed more than ever is a rigorously independent public broadcaster which does not seek to pander to anyone, which asks hard questions of all sides of politics and which devotes its precious resources not to cheap and populist "opinionating" but to straight journalism, the type that exposes who is pulling the strings of power in a world in which wealth is ever more concentrated and independent voices ever more straining to be heard.

See also: "The ABC fears the conservatives": Roger Wegener

Noise Vs Signal

2011-03-14T21:34:00.004+11:00

First it was the nightly weather, then the finance report and now it's politics. There is a creeping conspiracy in television news of people standing in front of charts, taking the daily temperature - of meteorology, of markets and of members of parliament - and trying to persuade us that it all means something.

So an unseasonably cool early autumn day is enough to disprove the existence of man-made climate change, or a two per cent shift in an index presages a new bull/bear market or every five-point downward shift in an political leader's poll rating means a caucus challenge is inevitable. The media are inherently impatient, chronically innumerate and because of ever tightening deadlines and ever diminishing resources, dangerously ready to extrapolate a one-day or one-month wonder into a long-term trend.

Indeed, the great untold con of the news business is that it largely consists of passing off the transitory for the terminal, the ephemeral for the everlasting and the faddish for the forever. This mentality, of course, is quite understandable among journalists themselves for whom anything more than 24 hours ahead is the long-term. (Actually, in radio, wires and online media, anything beyond the next half hour is the distant future.)

It's something the public needs to keep in mind when sitting down to watch the television news at night (assuming of course people still do that in this age). Because for many journalists, every day is a new day and each event exists independently of what came before. So in the constant obsession with the new, context and perspective become collateral damage.

While short-termism has always been a professional hazard for those who work in the news media, the problem has become much more intense in recent years under a general ratcheting up of deadline and commercial pressures and amid the online commodification of the who-what-where-when news that was once the bread-and-butter of the nightly television bulletin.

Alongside this sense of a compression of time has been a shift away from qualitative to quantitative factors in news assessment. So as time pressures have increased, and as resources have been cut, journalists are being asked to say something meaningful about subjects driven by numbers - whether it be climate change, financial markets or political opinion polling. And it's fair to say that for most journos, maths is not a strong suit. Neither is their facility with new media. When you add that to their deadline-driven impatience with complexity or nuance, you have a pretty good recipe for misleading the public and deforming democracy.

This problem was neatly highlighted by the invaluable Possum last year when the Auditor General's report exposed the beat-up that was the media mantra over the BER "waste" (and, earlier, the Pink Batts "scandal"). The actual numbers were totally at odds with the accepted media narrative, but the facts simply didn't matter or where deemed just too darned esoteric to bore the audience with.

This institutionalised innumeracy is rather unfortunate and perhaps explains why an experienced journalist like Barrie Cassidy, appearing on a taxpayer-funded public broadcaster, can just sit mute as one of Rupert Murdoch's professional trolls is paid to come on the Insiders program and spray deliberate mistruths to support a far right political agenda.

And you could see it last year in the gullibility of some (not all - honorable mention to Ian Verrender) of the financial media in giving slack-jawed credence to numbers provided by multi-national miners to beat off a government attempt to secure a better return for taxpayers from finite and publicly owned resources.

Most of all you can see it in the usual suspects wetting themselves over the latest Newspoll without pointing out to their viewers and listeners that Howard was in a similar position as Gillard is now in his first term. And reminding them that in any case the election is still more than two years away and today's poll will soon be a distant memory.

Perhaps it's time for our media bosses to slow things down, take a deep breath, send a few journos off to short courses in statistical analysis (or point them here) and reacquaint themselves with some old fashioned concepts like, oh, respect for the facts and context, a real regard for the reader and viewer and an appreciation of what things mean beyond the 24-hour news/noise cycle. Too much to expect?

The End of the Affairs?

2011-03-09T16:40:00.002+11:00

A truism about journalism is that it consists of applying six basic questions to issues of public interest: Who, What, Where, When, How and Why. In breaking news, journalists often will deal with the first four questions fairly readily. The last two are sometimes harder.

Decades ago, public broadcasting sought to deal with this challenge by splitting the roles of journalists between the who, what, where and when people (the 'news' journalists) and the how and why people (the 'current affairs' journalists). The cultural differences, competition and divisions this rather arbitrary definition created in the '70s and beyond are a story in themselves. But more of that another time.

Essentially, though, broadcast journalism (in the public sector anyway) these days comes in two strands - news (what happened?) and current affairs (what does it mean?). Sometimes, the latter form of journalism is described as 'public affairs', which embraces the wider definition of being concerned with issues pertaining to the public domain, not necessarily just what was deemed to be 'news' or 'current'.

Anyway, the recent revamp of ABC Television's 7.30 Report (now trimmed to just 7.30) triggered a debate on Twitter this week, with a few of us (including the formidable Mark Colvin and the charming ABCNewsIntern ) musing on the role of current affairs and, more particularly, its relevance in an age when many people have access to original source material and analysis in real time over the web. The discussion ended with Mr Colvin, a respected journalist and broadcaster, wondering whether I had developed a rather "jaundiced" view of current affairs. Naturally, I respectfully disagreed. If anything, my view is that current affairs has a jaundiced (as in cynical) view of its audience. And this shows up in a number of ways.

The first of these is the tendency of journalists in current affairs programs to interview other journalists (Fran Kelly and Michelle Grattan on ABC radio and Barrie Cassidy and his cast of "insiders" on ABC television and now, Leigh Sales interviewing Chris Uhlmann on 7.30 about HIS interview with Julia Gillard). Obviously, there are cases where journalists have little choice but to interview another journalist - most notably when a reporter is on the spot of a breaking story in a warzone or disaster area. But in political coverage, these insider chats risk becoming too cosy for a couple of reasons. For one, a journalist-on-journalist interview can become an easy option for reporters who don't want to push hard enough to get someone on the record or who want to insert an inference they didn't manage to extract in their external news gathering. For another, it suits the politicians and minders themselves, who come to see journalists as tools to manipulate opinion to their advantage without having to put their own heads above the parapets and risk getting them blown off.

The second problem with current affairs, as it has evolved, is the cult of the host. This is the idea, never expressed directly, that the program really isn't about the issues; it's about who's presenting them. For instance, the once respectable Sixty Minutes long ago became more about show business than the news business. Who can forget Richard Carleton turning up to Timor with his yuppie hamper to pick fights with he militias? More recently, that show morphed into the most superficial form of magazine journalism, cranking out paper thin pastiche profiles of here-today-gone-tomorrow pop stars. To its credit, the constantly cash-strapped, cardiganned and looking-over-its-shoulder ABC had largely been immune to this journalist-as-celebrity schtick. But we are seeing it creep in even there now. Witness the Nine-like puff over Sales and Ulhmann. Surely, a Women's Weekly cover story can't be too far away?

The third problem is an existential one. What is the purpose of current affairs journalism in a disintermediated and disaggregated world? How often do you find yourself watching one of these programs to discover they are a day or two behind what you had already read on Twitter and Facebook and seen analysed in more depth and with greater authority by the actual authorities on each issue on blogs? Yet, in this traditional journalistic world, it as if social media does not even exist. They are starting with a blank sheet.

Operating within established power structures and conventional narratives, many MSM journalists live in a womb of splendid isolation that leaves them telling stories in predictable ways. Nothing new is revealed because their own assumptions about their status in all this is never challenged. And this gets to the heart of what should be a familiar problem for those reading this blog.

And that is that journalists - who pride themselves on the ability to "stand back" from a current issue and shed light on it - seem strangely incapable of doing the same thing to their own profession/craft/trade. They are hopelessly incurious about their role within public life and the impact their programs and articles make on discussion of public issues; how the news widgets they create are part of and drive the story.

In so many ways, they are talking to themselves. And this is more than ever evident when everybody else not employed in the mainstream media is talking with each other online. Most of the communication in traditional media land is purely one-way and the 'audience' is left out of what should be (and more important, with new technology) what CAN be a discussion and a sharing of ideas.

Paul Bradshaw, a visiting professor at City University's school of journalism in London, put this malaise rather well in a recent speech, one that asked whether "current affairs" needed to open out more to the discussion that is happening in an online world rapidly finding traditional media irrelevant:

"Journalists have always been jacks of all trades, and masters of none," Bradshaw said. "Now that the masters of each trade can publish themselves, it is our connections across differing worlds that is our strength. But to maintain those connections we need to put people before stories, and get over our egos."

You can see Bradshaw's full presentation here:

Is Ice Cream Strawberry? Inaugural lecture, City University

View more presentations from Paul Bradshaw.

7.30 Something

2011-03-07T21:52:00.001+11:00

After a build-up bigger and longer than the advertising campaign for Avatar (where were the 3-D glasses?), ABC Television's revamped current affairs flagship 7.30 Report went to air for the first time on Monday under its "new generation" hosts the televisual Leigh Sales and Chris Uhlmann.

As expected, there was a new set - leaving the flame-haired Leigh up on her feet, weather and finance presenter style, and accompanied by an animated slideshow over her left shoulder. While the graphics were a welcome addition in explaining number heavy stories (why has the ABC never used them before?), the actual package was depressingly formulaic, reflecting a style that hasn't changed in television for 40 years.

That style is lots of pretty pictures (in this case ships at sea), interspersed with set-up shots, brief grabs, a droning voice-of-god voiceover and an occasional piece to camera. The old 7.30 Report's style was to dramatise the news by doing slow-mo shots of politicians getting out of cars to a sinister music track.
Whether the 30-something version of the show does the same remains to be seen, but on the basis of the first episode they are not taking any particular risks either.

The "big story" was an investigation into the Royal Australian Navy's "rust bucket armada", another ritual expose of mismanagement and over-spending in the Defence Department. The response of this blogger was: "And this is news?" When hasn't the Defence Department been accountable and when hasn't it sought to white-ant attempts to fix it? The better story might have been to take a step back and iterate how the department has resisted reform for decades.

Chris Uhlmann, perhaps suffering from nerves and the inevitable comparisons with Kerry O'Brien, overdid it with his interview with the minister Stephen Smith, repeatedly interrupting and rushing questions when there was no suggestion at all that Smith had anything to hide.

The other major segment - Ms Sales' interview with Westpac boss Gail Kelly - I thought could have been turned into a better lead. Kelly said she supported a carbon price mechanism and wanted an ETS running ahead of the government's timetable. Given the huge topicality of the carbon tax, I would have used that as the stepping off point for a story about business' undeclared support for action on carbon (for instance, Graham Bradley of the Business Council is a passionate advocate for greening corporate Australia).

But apart from a lack of acuity in news judgement, my major quibble with the program was its worthiness. Good television current affairs should take public issues and look at them in a fresh perspective. That means playing with conventional television narrative techniques, defying audience expectations and subverting journalistic cliche to get at the truth. It often helps to have an attitude - as Jon Stewart does so well on The Daily Show. We last saw this in Australia back on the ABC with This Day Tonight in the late 1960s and early 1970s and by the early days of A Current Affair with Mike Willesse on the Nine Network.

Ultimately, and admittedly based on just one episode, the makeover of 7.30 appears to have gone no deeper than a change of set, the insertion of a couple of younger and better looking presenters and the loss of the word 'report' from the title. To this bloggers' eyes, it's all a bit beige and one is left to conclude that at least stories about dodgy plumbers would be entertaining.

PS: If I were EP of 7.30, I'd poach one of the creative young minds from Hungry Beast. They at least explore new ways of telling stories outside the extremely codified narratives of television journalism.