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August 30, 2011
As is well known politics as entertainment is the dominant model of the media's coverage of politics. in this model the Australian media reframes politics as entertainment, seizing on trivial episodes that amuse or titillate and then blowing them up until they start to seem important. The stories are semi-fictionalized to make them more entertaining. Thus we have Lindsay Tanner's conception of the media as a sideshow and manufactured controversies.
In an interview on Lateline last week Jay Rosen, who is to give a keynote speech in the Melbourne Writers Festival, made some acute observations about the current state of the media and political journalism. One observation is that political coverage is broken:
I think we've reached the point where politics as entertainment, the 24-hour news cycle, the fascination with media manipulation and spin doctors, the cult of the insider in political coverage - have gone on for so long they've all come together to the point where I think they're not only distorting politics, but they're actually beginning to substitute for it. This is the sense in which I think political coverage is broken...we have now ... a situation where journalism isn't just representing what political actors do, it is actually changing what they do. And there isn't really an exit from that system no matter what channel you're watching or what news source you're consulting.
The roots of this observation is this earlier interview on Lateline in which he raised the issue of the ABC's Insider's program promoting journalists as insiders in front of the outsiders, the viewers, the electorate…When journalists define politics as a game played by the insiders, their job description becomes: find out what the insiders are doing to “win.” Knowing who the winners are is being savvy and this comes from being more inside than others.
The journalist then claims that their political reporting is agenda-less because they are uninvolved, innocent, merely reporting without stake or interest in the matter at hand. Examples are He said, she said journalism and horse race journalism.
Rosen's argument is that the above three bad ideas--insiders, the ‘cult of saviness’, and innocence-- are constitutive of the identity as a journalist and have made political journalism less useful than it should be. The inference is that political media is dysfunctional and it seems to be getting worse. What is disappearing in practice is the model of the media doing its job if it is providing citizens with the information they need to be more active and full participants in their own system of government.
Consequently, the needs of the democratic citizenry are not being met. An example.. Climate change is real, and anyone who denies it is a liar or wrong - but journalists don't call them on it. The journalist merely reports that x denies climate-change even though they understand that this a political game being played.
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Gerard Henderson's response to Jay Rose is typical of the cultural war conservatives:
He doesn't even bother to engage with Rosen's argument about the current state of political journalism.