Media to blame for scripted, stage-managed politics

Here's a quick exercise. Ask a few friends or colleagues whether they remember Treasurer Wayne Swan smashing a water glass during an interview last year.

It happened on May 12, as Mr Swan was in an ABC Radio studio in Canberra, and the incident was also captured for posterity by a television crew.

In my experience, most people with even a passing interest in current affairs remember the incident – it was the lead political story on the television news that evening.

Now ask your friends if they remember what the Treasurer was talking about. No-one will. The Government's message of the day was washed away with the shards of glass, and both were consigned to the dust bin.

What that incident demonstrated – aside from clumsiness – was how the trivial frequently dominates the substantial in media coverage of Australian politics.

Jump forward to this week, and the wash up of the Federal Labor leadership challenge. After the vote, widely-respected ABC political editor Chris Uhlmann reflected on the two stories the Labor party had presented to voters in relation to the Gillard-Rudd imbroglio.

Uhlmann rightly noted that Labor had denied over many months that Rudd was undermining Gillard and that there were elements of the Caucus dissatisfied with her performance. Similarly, any suggestion that Rudd was not 100 per cent behind the leader had also been dismissed by Labor MPs, who said that Kevin was "working hard as part of the team".

All that civility was jettisoned once the challenge was out in the open, and as the race intensified very senior members of the Government were far more than frank in their assessments of one another.

Then, after the fact, they were once again back to mutual praise – all the criticism of previous days apparently forgotten in the blink of an eye.

Uhlmann observed that the faux unity prevailing since August 2010 had been no more than a stunt. He bemoaned the inability of Labor MPs – and politicians generally – to speak plainly on the issues critical to the nation's good government.

And, most importantly, he laid the blame for this general lack of frankness at the feet of the media.

Uhlmann is right.

The political media – including this writer in a previous career – has made an art form of amplifying any division, and seizing gleefully upon the slightest dissent as evidence of a "split", a "backbench revolt" or "internal ructions".

As a result, politicians must avoid holding publicly any position at odds with their leader. They must not express any view other than the carefully scripted party line lest they become the focus for reporting and divert attention away from their party's message.

This means that our MPs are not free to float policy ideas for discussion. They are not free to raise legitimate concerns about party policy.

And they are certainly not free to speak their minds on crucial questions of leadership and competence in government.

Instead, they front the cameras and declare their allegiance to a person or policy position when all the players in the political process – their colleagues, their opponents, the journalists and even the voters – know their utterances to be false.

The truth is left to seep out through off-the-record quotes from "sources", "party figures" and vague references to what a media organisation "understands" to be the real story. This is how the media reconciles what is said in public with what is done in private.

Nowhere else in the democratic world does the media dive on a plurality of views within a political organisation and portray it as a sign of weakness. Indeed, in the United States or Great Britain it is considered a sign of strength that the democracy is able to withstand robust discussion.

So why can the Australian media not take the same view?

It's been no secret to journalists that Kevin Rudd was dismissive of Gillard's ability to appeal to voters, and she of his management style.

It's well known that Malcolm Turnbull holds different views to Tony Abbott on gay marriage and the best way to reduce greenhouse gas emissions.

And yet, any MP who admits to these differences of opinion can be certain of starring on the 6pm news in the role of political dissenter (a sure-fire career killer) and can expect a prompt and terse phone call from their party whip or leader's office.

The situation is no better when politicians are outside the cosy environs of Parliament House. Journalists will complain that political leaders' media events are so carefully stage managed as to render them effectively sterile from a public point of view.

This is never more the case than during an election campaign, and in Brisbane this week The Courier Mail announced it would no longer participate in the official media campaigns of both sides.

Declaring itself "off the buses", the newspaper said it was sick of being dragged around pre-planned campaign stunts by the two leaders and their campaign teams.

"No more photo shoots, no more radio stunts, no more scaring kids," it boasted.

While the sentiment is understandable, the newspaper is as much to blame as anyone for the reality vacuum in which it now says the two campaigns are operating.

On the first full day of the official campaign, The Courier Mail and all other media outlets reported Liberal National leader Campbell Newman's encounter with a voter who said she hoped he would lose and attacked him for having the "hide" to join in the democratic process.

This voter was clearly a Labor supporter, and her views therefore should not have surprised anyone (least of all hard-bitten political journalists). Yet the encounter attracted significant media coverage and drowned out Newman's policy announcement that day.

Similarly, Julia Gillard has experienced ambushes from voters while selling her carbon tax plan to the punters. Remember the sweet-voiced senior who asked her in front of TV cameras in Brisbane last year, "Why did you lie to us?" Once again, it received blanket coverage on all major news outlets.

It's little wonder then that both sides of politics hold their arrangements for public engagements so close to their chests. They simply can't afford the slightest public dissent because it is blown out of all proportion by the news process.

If the media is concerned about the trend towards style over substance – and if they're not concerned, they ought to be – they can help reverse it by ignoring the banal and trivial.

They can treat a dissenting opinion – either in Parliament or in public – as the view of one individual, rather than as some terminal blow to the leader.

And they can take a more mature, sensible approach to the differences of opinion and plain old personality clashes that exist among politicians as they do among any group of human beings.

No-one – least of all the media – would argue that they would not prefer frank and open answers from politicians.

Yet as things stand today, the nature of political reporting is working actively against that openness.

We existing in an environment where breaking a glass draws as much media attention as breaking a promise, and where the views of the individual who crosses the floor of Parliament are reported far more widely than the views of 72 colleagues who stand behind their leader.

As long as the media maintains a focus on the trivial, and amplifies division at the expense of reporting substance, politicians will continue to stage manage their words and deeds to minimise any damage.

And that is a shame for all of us.