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August 13, 2010
The normal way to cover an election is to cover campaign strategy, attack ads, candidate gaffes and poll numbers. Political journalism during an election campaign is limited to the day-to-day reporting of events in the campaign. The journalists highlight the cut and thrust of what the leaders are up to all day, and who is winning in terms of getting the best exposure in the media headlines. This construct is what we call news, which is then commented upon. The increasing reference to The Greens is what is new.
Ben Eltham in The longing for engagement at the ABC's The Drum says that:
The lack of attention to serious policy issues seems to have been one of the most common complaints about the 2010 federal election. Voters seem apathetic, the media cynical, politicians clueless. Above all, the dominant theme seems to be disengagement: between politicians and voters, between politicians and the media, and between the media and voters...No wonder, then, that the best election coverage of this campaign is to be found on an advertising show: the ABC1's Gruen Nation. When substantive policies are thin on the ground, when great moral challenges are cause for delay and procrastination, and when even the audience at a campaign debate can be accused of being biased, it's not surprising that the most insightful political analysis comes from a panel of ad-men.
My sentiments too. However, Eltham doesn't explore how the media is integrated into the stage-managed and media-centric nature of modern election campaigning in a televisual and multi-mediated society that has emerged during a protracted crisis of social democracy.
It's integration can be seen in what Jay Rosen of Pressthink who is in Australia for the Walkley Media Conference 2010, calls horse race journalism. He says:
Horse race journalism is a reusable model for how to do campaign coverage in which you focus on who's going to win rather than what the country needs to settle by electing a prime minister.And it's easy to do because you can kind of reuse it sort of like a Christmas tree every year and it requires almost no knowledge either. And it kind of imagines the campaign as a sporting event, right? And everything that happens in the campaign can potentially affect the outcome. And so you can look at it as 'How is it going to affect the horse race?' And every day you can ask, 'Who is ahead and what is their strategy?' And I think this perspective appeals to political reporters because it kind of puts them on the inside, looking at the campaign the way the operatives do. By the way, I'm told that you actually have a program here on Sunday morning called the Insiders.
Touche. The 'insiders' are the journalists who see themselves the chroniclers of the inside game and tell us from the point of view of the professional strategists who's doing better.
Rosen says that an alternative model of journalism:
might start with 'What do the people of Australia want this campaign to be about? What are the issues they want to see the candidates discussing?'And then to ask each day, 'Well how did we do on advancing the discussion of the citizens' agenda today?' Was it ignored? Was it addressed? Was it demagogued? Was it slighted? And if the journalists helped citizens get their agenda addressed during the campaign they would be performing something that's actually very important - a role that's very important for them to do.
This kind of journalism is definitely not done by the Canberra Press Gallery or by the traveling political journalists embedded in the political parties campaign.
A good example of the citizen's agenda population pressures and the state of our cities which the politicians reduce to immigration that surfaced on Q+A as a result of Dick Smith's Population Puzzle documentary. (You can watch it on iView). Few who practice the craft of journalism are looking at the election from the perspective of a better quality of life in our cities; the urban sprawl that is gobbling up valuable farmland; or the sustainability of our cities.
Instead of this we get horse race journalism based on the journalist with contacts eg., Glenn Milne being told information from inside a political campaign. These inside sources are authoritative and this supports said journalists claim that they have special insight into the political process that the rest of us don't have. That insight into the political party's strategy means that they can predict what happens next. That is why they are the classy professionals they are.
Rosen says that the practical strengths of horse race journalism are:
Who's-gonna-win is portable, reusable from cycle to cycle, and easily learned by newcomers to the press pack. Journalists believe it brings readers to the page and eyeballs to the screen. It "works" regardless of who the candidates are, or where the nation is in historical time. No expertise is actually needed to operate it.bIn that sense, it is economical.....Who's going to win -- and what's their strategy -- plays well on television, because it generates an endless series of puzzles toward which journalists can gesture as they display their savviness, which is the unofficial religion of the mainstream press. But the biggest advantage of horse-race journalism is that it permits reporters and pundits to "play up their detachment." Focusing on the race advertises the political innocence of the press because "who's gonna win?" is not an ideological question. By asking it you reaffirm that yours is not an ideological profession.
They identify with the strategists for a political campaign and their focus of whose going to win rather than policy debates, even though campaign tactics are not all that interesting in themselves. They see getting into policy as getting into what the Americans call the weeds.
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What was Jay Rosen's address to the Walkley Media Conference 2010? I cannot find any content online.