Marketing and spin: journalism's big challenge

Call me old-fashioned, but I think as a journalist that if the prime minister going into an election has a private plan to retire during his next term, the voters have a right to be informed.

Kerry O’Brien is a veteran in the Australian journalism industry and was able to highlight some of the roots of what he saw as the current evils:

The explosion of media minders in federal politics goes back to the Whitlam era, a time that also marked the start of a dramatic expansion of the lobby industry and the proliferation of special interest groups that are now embedded in the system and just another arm of the same culture. Many of today’s political minders are tomorrow’s lobbyists, or corporate spin-doctors for hire.

Media management on both sides of politics is a far more sophisticated and disciplined operation these days. This is the age of slick, media-trained pollie-speak, of candour when it suits, and obfuscation or avoidance behind a wall of rhetoric or media manipulation when it’s deemed necessary.

Audiences have grown with the industry, however, and audience members are now highly attuned to message management, as O’Brien indicated:

Amongst the welter of public feedback I get, the most common theme from people of all political persuasions (or no particular political persuasion at all) is: “Thanks for trying to make the bastards answer the question.” After 17 years of feature political interviews, first with the Channel 10 Sunday morning program “Face to Face”, then with the ABC’s “Lateline”, and now the “7.30 Report”, I have to say the politicians who agree to interviews with a commitment to openness and transparency, a commitment to anything remotely approaching candour, are in a depressing minority.

“Of course, spin is not exclusive to politics,” O’Brien said:

It’s impossible to get a real picture of the effectiveness of media management, media control across the corporate spectrum. But look at the history, the record of industries like the pharmaceuticals industry, the tobacco industry, the banking industry, the asbestos industry, the telecommunications industry to name a few.

O’Brien concluded with a caveat that his speech was not intended as a whitewash of the media and news environment:

This is not an exercise in painting all journalists as white knights and all the media-minding industry as the black knights. There is a legitimate and practically useful interface between the two that can facilitate good, honest journalism. Equally there is legitimacy in the various institutions of society - public and private - protecting themselves against incompetent, inaccurate, lazy or dishonest journalism. But I believe the balance is increasingly and unhealthily out of kilter in the way the game is played today: weighted towards the information managers and away from the information gatherers.

But he put a position which media observers and politicians alike will have difficulty misconstruing: that the news media, and the publicly funded media especially, owes its audience a degree of independence which it now appears to lack:

I continue to believe passionately that a strong, well-funded, genuinely independent public broadcaster is a critical element in that equation. I don’t believe the ABC we have today is well-funded. At the program level we’ve experienced a funding decline in real terms over the last decade. Our resources are diminished, which does impact on how we make our stories and access our interviews.