|
August 20, 2012
The media in Australia is very slowly coming to critically reflect on its poor performance in covering policy issues and critically analyzing the attempts by governments to reform the economy and society. Unfortunately, the media's critical reflection on its own culture and its failure to do serious, issues-based reporting and commentary is still limited. It is as if they unable to grasp the nettle of what is causing their growing lack of legitimacy.
Thus we have George Megalogenis in his How the language of shock-jocks came to drive political debate in The Australian defending the Canberra press gallery by saying that this is the wrong place to look when diagnosing our reform malaise.
The best journalists in the business still cluster in the federal parliament ...The problem [is] something deeper in our culture.....The white noise of 21st century reporting is, in fact, the language of the shock-jock. Even earnest print journalists such as myself sometimes type with the cap locks on because we have been bluffed into thinking that if we don't shout, we won't be read. The paradox is that the community, and even the politicians, still crave serious, issues-based reporting. Yet the public, and through them our leaders, also insist that everything be simple enough to fit on a T-shirt. Everyone wants more for nothing.
I guess that there is now an awareness that the sneers and jeers of the shock jocks are an integral part of the media; and that the tabloid style has both influenced the culture of the media and the way journalists currently report and comment on politics.
Megalogenis then interprets this downmarket trend to shock-jock journalism in terms of an absence of nuance, even though he acknowledges that Gillard has been verballed on carbon pricing. It's much more than an absence of nuance in the light of the media's conduct around this episode.
The fact that Megalogenis calls it a "carbon tax" rather than carbon pricing indicates the problem:---the notable failure of the Canberra Press Gallery to question the way that the Coalition has framed the policy issue of shifting to a low carbon economy. That failure is interpreted by Mark Latham as Abbott being given a free ride in the press.
Megalogenis says he's not sure about this (ie., Latham has gone too far). My judgement is that Latham didn't go far enough: most of the media --including the Canberra press gallery---have been opposed to those reforms designed to help shift Australia to a low carbon economy. In the case of News Ltd journalists they have been openly hostile. That antagonism is one explanation for the media's lack of scrutiny of the way Abbott frames policy issues in terms of slogans.
The problem goes deeper than Abbott's free ride in the press, the partisan stance of the media, or the media's big shift to infotainment. The general problem, as Freya Mathews highlights is the way that the "news" is constructed by the media. Mathews says that:
those who construct the news focus generally on items of relative triviality while ignoring the literally earth-shattering changes that are occurring at an accelerating pace all around us.... Most [of the media] carry over the 19th century assumption that the natural world, perennial and relatively unchanging, is mere backdrop to the sizzling dramas of human society. With this 19th century assumption goes the further assumption that what happens within the realm of nature is not our responsibility: nature looks after itself and we cannot intervene in its intricately ordered webs of eaters and eaten without upsetting the whole kit and caboodle.
The media's construction of the news is one that gives the impression items about the ecological collapse of the planet are on a par, in terms of moral significance, with everyday items about crime, celebrities, scandals, financial vicissitudes, trends in lifestyle. So the media has become mere “tattlers”, purveyors of tittle tattle, to which people instinctively pay little serious attention.
|
It is perhaps interesting to note the only journalist who worked for the Australian that used to consistently write/report (in the Weekend Oz) on matters of the environment from a sympathetic perspective was Mike Skeketee.
He no longer works there.