Media to blame for scripted, stage-managed politics

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.