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September 19, 2005
The image below is how Mark Latham, a former leader of the federal parliamentary ALP and so Labor's alternative prime minister, is now portrayed in the media, after extracts of his diaries were made public on the weekend.
Michael Mucci
The Latham Diaries, which describe a toxic political culture inside the ALP, went on sale today. They are represented as the work of an aggressive and paranoic ego that seeks domination.
The older image of the mongrel streak of a political head-kicker from the Sydney suburbs has gone. Latham is not just seen as being out to settle old political scores. He has now become the mad dog full of poisonous bile who will infect people with his vitriol and cause great damage. He must be put down.
This demonisaton of a political figure shows the extent to which a tabloid media culture has penetrated our political culture. It has become tabloid in that it works in terms of crude, highly charged images. The visual and the rhetorical have fused.
At a more sophisticated level Mark Latham is described as having a narcissistic personality disorder. Latham exhibits all the classic signs of clinical narcissism, a condition 'marked by a hard-wired lack of empathy for other points of view and inability to see the world beyond the filter of self-reference.'
What is being dismissed by this kind of visual rhetoric is Latham's arguments about the endemic sickness, poison and backstabbing in our political culture, and the way the media works in collusion with politicians.
What is interesting in the reponse to the Lathman Diaries is the way that reality has become the image. The image has been become adrft from its referent--the real Mark Lathm as an homedadcarign for hsi two boys who wrote an account of his time in politics.
This tabloid image is not a distorting mirror as many claim. We stare in fascination at the circulating images of Latham as we become aware that they reflect nothing outside them.
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But how much is the media a reflection of its audience. Judging by the Auian blogosphere, the labor supporters are just as keen to discuss it as the liberal supporters. All the big sites are agog with discussion and posts on it.
Could it not be argued, that the media is giving its audience what it wants?
Judging by the Au blogosphere, the audience wants reactionary celebrity politics....