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September 20, 2005
media and democracy
I interpret this image by Cathy Wilcox as an interesting attempt to connect the public image of Mark Latham the politician to the person:--a homedad in a Sydney suburb who is doing a bit of writing that reflects on his experiences as leader of the federal ALP in 2004.
True, Wilcox does not gesture to the tabloid image of the Latham as the mad dog:--she gives us the more sophisticated paranoid and narcissistic personality image. This gives rise to a hater who cuts a path of waste and destruction to all around him in the ALP. From the ALP side Latham's Diaries stand for betrayal of trust and political bastardry.
Wilcox's cartoon misses the mediating role of the media between the hater image and the stay at home person entirely. She publishes her cartoon in the corporate media, but she does not reflect upon the role of the media as a player in the political process.
Very little of the journalist commentary around the Latham Diaries concentrates on the role of the media in our political culture. Paul Sheehan is an exception. He says:
Latham's behaviour is not so far removed from what the media serves up every day as it subjects politicians and the electoral process to an unremitting campaign of belligerence, cynicism and ridicule. The media condescends towards democracy because it competes with democracy. It competes for power and control of the national agenda. The biggest contest in Australian politics is thus not between the Coalition and Labor, but between the elected and accountable against the unelected and unaccountable.
The broadsheet journalists are not watchdogs of democracy. They (eg., Glen Milne) are players in the political process, and they are very partisan in both a party political and a party factional sense.
They are publicists writing for a political cause and their sources are drip feeds, anonymous backgrounders, rumors and leaks from their political contacts. The journalists in the corporate media are maintaining a collective silence about Latham's exposure of the way they trased the objectivity ethos of journalism they profess to uphold. They are players, not defenders of the public interest or democracy. They are playing very hard to demonize Latham. They want blood. They have closed ranks.
We have to start talking otherwise about the media: maybe about the independent media in contrast to the corporate media. An independent media that picks up Latham's truth telling, and then develops it to help us to understand our political culture better. A media concerned with enlightening citizens and not mass deception.
Posted by Gary Sauer-Thompson at September 20, 2005 10:39 AM
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