I hate to say it but I think that this is probably the stupidist election cycle that I have ever witnessed. By stupid, I mean it in the sense that there have been deliberately choices taken which have resulted in the media coverage of this election which has resulted in this thing being reduced to farce.
I am a keen follower of politics and so I like to think that I am abreast of the issues over which an election is being fought but not this time around. This election however, is not necessarily a fight of competing sets of policies but rather, an incumbent government which abandoned the idea of doing any genuine governing some time ago, and a media which is intent of keeping them there, lest the current party in opposition take power and worse, actually use it for enacting policy.
All that the Daily Telegraph, the Australian, The Sydney Morning Herald, 2GB, and now even the ABC News are, is kaleidoscope for showing a continuing round robin of gaffes, gaffes, gotchas, grins, and grifters. The first week of the election campaign gave us an unreasonable amount of coverage devoted to Anthony Albanese's gaffe in not remembering one number, and this was balanced with an anti-Semite going on the attack about transgender issues. Seriously? We've got a regional security crisis going on with the Solomon Islands which was directly caused by the Morrison Government's abject apathy when it comes to doing any kind of diplomacy in the region and that's what you think is the most important thing going on? Let’s talk about the gaffe again and again and again. Three weeks on, that is still being spoken about as though it was somehow worse than some of the most rampant corruption we've witnessed at Federal level in this country.
If the analogy of an election cycle is like calling a sporting event, then not only is the audience watching without knowing what the rules actually are but the media runs this sporting event without telling the audience what the real sport is either. In theory an election should be about a body politic called 'the electorate' who gets to decide who they want to be in charge for the next three years but in practice, election cycles have devolved into just an extension of the normal cycle of abuse of the audience.
The decidedly anti-audience attitude of the media is on display almost every Friday when members of the audience of ABC1's Q+A are roasted. Often the content of the discussion is irrelevant and the question becomes one of who let such a person on. The anti-audience attitude of the media is on display when on talkback radio, callers are screened before they ever get to air and then immediately cut off of they say anything which disagrees with the company line.
Legitimate concerns that the public has is vetted and cancelled before it ever gets to air. If facts are pointed out, then they have to be ignored. If the public asks genuine questions such as why Alan Tudge really was stood aside, or who paid a million dollars into a blind trust for the defence of an historical rape case of Christian Porter, then those questions also have to be ignored.
If the media's omission of fact, or deliberately telling of lies is in any way criticised or questioned, then we get a further display of self righteousness and abuse from the media. Any attempt to hold the media to account, results not just a mere refusal engage with the electorate but further abuse and ridicule.
I should preface this by emphatically saying that I do not in any way think that the abuse of journalists is acceptable. I also do not think that it is useful or achieves any helpful purpose. Having said that the outright refusal to communicate and engage with the public, cheapens what used to be a once noble profession. What we now get is a state where regardless of the issue and regardless of what kind of damage that they have inflicted, the media isn't even curious enough to bother to understand why the general public might question or criticise them.
There was a documentary made in 2015 called 'Best of Enemies' and what is both telling and instructive is that the journalists who were sent to covering both the 1968 Republican and Democratic Conventions, got more ratings from "reporting" on an argument between Gore Vidal and William Buckley, than any attempt to cover any policies that the candidates might have had. Those two squared off in no less than ten debates on America's ABC network and is probably the genesis of modern political partisan punditry as opposed to actual journalism.
What that documentary demonstrated, what that the audience of political coverage is not the electorate but rather, the audience is the current cohort of politicians who need to be brought to heel, the cabal of journalists and the commentariat who design their current sales pitches, and advertisers who then benefit from having the electorate's opinions and votes wrangled and hammered into submission. The audience of political coverage certainly is not lowly outsiders like you and me looking in, it is the hooded figures already inside the temples of power looking at each other.
Admittedly this is a documentary and so it is by nature going to zoom in on only one aspect of the media but this kind of attitude is more or less the business model of Sky News Australia and because they have considerable sway over the Liberal Party, it explains why presenters like Chris Kenny, Rowan Dean and Peta Credlin find more grist for their mill in sorting through the seeds of journalistic discord than actually doing the work of investigative journalism.
That mode of lazy journalism is immensely profitable because it doesn't require doing very much work at all. Facts take effort to uncover but any idiot can have an opinion. The media will do anything to get attention or ratings or clicks and because attention can be grabbed with a sudden explosion more than a carefully detailed explanation of what is actually important, the flash wins. The media would rather show us a spectacular show than a show of seriousness. It is literally impossible to infantalise the electorate enough in the eyes of the media companies.
In this election cycle, the Labor Party in knowing that it can not possibly win over public opinion on the strength of personality (because the electorate is now so debased that it seems to think rape within Parliament House is acceptable) has had to resort to that older art of laying out actual policy. I do not know if this is a winning strategy when the electorate can be made to look at petrol prices, interest rates, instead of checking to see if the needle on their moral compass is still there.
There have been some attempts to draw the media's gaze to the more serious issues of climate change, housing affordability, trying to change the composition of the sectors of the economy; and these are all serious discussions that we should be having but instead the media is content to play culture wars games.
No comments:
Post a Comment