Last week's episode of The Minefield on ABC Radio National was mainly about the rise of opinion writing in newspapers and about whether or not it is ultimately bad for public discourse and by extension, democracy. It is well worth your effort to listen to for an hour but not necessary for this piece. A link is included in the footnotes below¹.
It has to be said that the internet has in many ways changed the media landscape but in many fundamental ways, has not. In a little under 30 years, the internet went from being text only, to including sounds and then podcast and streaming radio, to also doing likewise for video. Naturally as audiences changed their sites of attention, advertisers also changed their sites of advertising; which in turn dried up a lot of the source of revenues for previous media empires built upon print, radio, and television. However, what should be stated is that the resistance to new media stealing away revenue sources, is not a new problem at all and was repeated exactly when radio started taking revenues away from print, and when television started taking revenues away from radio.
In Australia the most famous and long running battle has been between News Corporation and the ABC, when in 1932 Sir Keith Murdoch objected to the ABC even having a news desk, and then successfully managed to bully the government into preventing radio from having news bulletins before 0745 in the morning. Similar fights happened over television and then the internet.
What does any of this have to do with opinion writing though? The simple fact of the matter is that the production of any media content, requires at least some amount of work. The most stellar example of this is the list of credits at the end of a movie, where you have a massive list of people who did the work to get the story to the screen. That's also true but to a lesser amount of people for television, radio and print.
It probably is also obvious that the collection, analysis and production of news, also requires an amount of work. The unique thing about the news, as opposed to opinion pieces, is that they require gumshoe reporters out in the field to collect and produce the pieces which eventually go to print and air.
However, with falling revenues because of falling rates of advertising which is predicated on falling audiences, the number of people employed professionally to actually go out and collect the news has also fallen². Moreover it has fallen so much that in Australia, virtually the entirety of regional news print media has been culled (save for a few independent newspapers) and in turn, the number of people who are actually collecting and recording the news for publication has also fallen.
This is naturally going to have an effect on the composition of the newspapers, radio and television which is left. Overall the number of pages in newspapers has fallen due to the lack of a need to print adverts but it is also true that the number of news pieces has also fallen; with much content now being purchased from outside sources such as the Associated Press.
The dilemma then is what a newspaper, radio station, or television station fills up its space with. The cheapest kind of filler, relative to the expense of producing it is opinion.
News Corporation has long since determined that it gets the best revenue to expense ratio by producing opinion which is designed to cause outrage. While the old adage "if it bleeds, it leads" still rings true, when you are the one doing the punching, then you can keep on producing pain and blood and shaping the opinions of the audience to make them believe that those people deserve it, more or less forever.
News Corporation has such an extremely limited number of people on the team, who it can rotate through the positions in both print and on Sky News, to the point where the actual collection of news is almost a sideshow.
Nine Entertainment Co. is slowly moving towards this model but has the pesky problem of the remnants of Fairfax Ltd newspapers still being a legacy piece. Seven West Media is also following a similar path; and Ten is... sort of always doomed.
They all resent and hate the ABC and SBS, who actually bother to maintain and keep regional news offices and in the case of News Corporation, it has spent 90 years fighting the existence of the ABC.
The thing about opinion as a commodity for consumption is that not only can it be produced with little to no acknowledgement that the world that waits outside exists, it's that it is by its very nature unfalsifiable. You can not say to someone that their opinion isn't real because it is impossible to fact check the internal beliefs of someone.
It is possible to fact check a weather reporter who tells you that it is raining by going out and looking to see if it is raining or not. Admittedly virtually every issue which exists is more complex than the weather but the point is still useful. It is impossible to fact check an opinion reporter who tells you that the rain is awful and that you should also hate the rain. You can not say to the weather opinion reporter that their opinion is wrong because they are the one who invented their own opinion.
It probably also goes without saying that as someone who is neither a journalist, nor employed in that capacity, nor someone who has the ability to collect news as it happens, I am very much an opinion writer. Although you will find footnotes peppered throughout these pieces going back over many years, you should treat everything that I have to say with skepticism.
News media which is dominated by opinion rather than fact because it is cheaper to produce, also tends towards the promotion of that opinion as a means for political action.
Every piece of media ever published has a base intent for action in its audiences. Pure fiction is designed to entertain and emote. Beyond that, news and opinion pieces are designed either to impart information about the world or to make you see the world a little differently; to that end all media is political, all media is spiritual, all media is emotive, all media has some base purpose.
As opinion contains and promotes the biases of the people who generated it, it is by nature not news.
When not news is dressed up and made to walk around in the clothing of news and indeed facts, that portion of the audience which does not bother to check the truthiness of it, ends up wearing those clothes for themselves; even if it actively works against their own interests. If newspapers have designated enemies, then there are political reasons for designating those enemies and given that the capacity for human selfishness knows no satiety, then it becomes very easy to make the case that opinion writing is really just part of a concerted marketing campaign to make people buy the ideas, ideals, and opinions of the people selling them.
Is that bad for public discourse? Of itself, no. Is it bad for democracy? Again of itself, no. Are the ideas being sold bad for public discourse and democracy? Very possibly. The objective measure would be how they either expand peoples' freedoms and conditions and/or how peoples' lives are improved.
An organisation like News Corporation which deliberately tries to smash public services and peoples' wages and conditions through the promotion of repeatedly stupid and banal opinion writing, and in some cases has actively tried to dismantle the franchise, is not only bad for public discourse and democracy but is also bad for the well being of society itself...
...in my not very well paid opinion.
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