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October 13, 2012
There are two missing figures in David Rowe's cartoon of Aussies at Parliament House. Despite the newspapers the first is a person from the Canberra press and media gallery talking to a politician. They are an integral part of this political culture, as it becoming ever more explicit through the way that they continue to defend their hypocrisy interpretation of Gillard's speech from the criticisms in the social media.
The gallery says that they got it right, because the real story is that Labor exploits misogyny as a tactic for its own self-interest. The real story is Gillard's hypocrisy by playing the gender card.
The criticisms of the gallery's interpretation hold that political coverage and journalism as it is currently practiced by the gallery is broken. The gallery's response, in which the press is trying to be serious by providing “analysis” instead of entertainment and trivia, is designed to highlight their savviness. This savviness increasingly relies on an impoverished notion of politics.
David Rowe
We can approach this through the second missing figure: the figure of populist conservatism and its paranoid style of politics. For instance, The Australian has now added a lefty Twitter to its long list of enemies of Old Australia. The Australian has so many enemies who need to be put in their place once and for all that it is clear their paranoid style of politics needs a scary, domestic enemy.
The significance of these two missing figures is that the defensive response of the Canberra media gallery to the criticism from social media is that it journalists fail to analyze the core elements of populist conservatism. Lenore Taylor, one of the more thoughtful members of the gallery, says:
To be clear, I thought Gillard gave a great speech, but that it was delivered for at least some of the wrong reasons, in the wrong context, at the wrong time ...The point is that understanding and calculating the political context, the strategies, the deal-making, the sequences of events, is a critical part of our job. Politics is about presenting a message-as-product, which is what most observers see. We are supposed to gather information and make assessments about how and why the product is made. Assessing the actual political impact of this out-in-the-open gender debate, rather than simply how it made some people feel as Julia Gillard spoke, is something that will only be possible over time.
So according to the gallery, it is not part of the gallery's job, as savvy insiders, to analyze the sexism in populist conservatism, the defence of patriarchy (blokes rule by nature, and women are destroying the joint) or its use as a political weapon to undermine Gillard.
This sexism has no part of the political context or the sequences of events in Canberra. It is just how some people--the outsiders, the viewers, the electorate--- feel, even though the Slipper episode is a part of the political context of the pervasive sexism and misogyny in the political workplace and political life.
So the gallery are unable to give a proper analysis, or a full estimate of Abbott or his strategic work. That is why the gallery has an impoverished notion of politics.
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There is paranoia everywhere in Rowe's cartoon. Everybody is looking at everybody else and wondering about the dirty tricks and what unscrupulous tactics will be employed.