The failure of Australia’s political media

A tired and emotional Glenn Milne’s rampage at the Walkley awards recently reminds us once again just how dodgy our political journalists are. We rely on people like Milne, Michelle Grattan, Paul Kelly, Laurie Oakes and the rest to inform us about our nation’s politics. They wield real power since they not only tell us the news, they tell us what it means as well.

One of the interesting things about Mark Latham’s diary was his comments on the media. They were almost uniformly negative, which is likely why his analysis of the political system did not receive more serious attention in the media. They mostly just went along with the “oh, he’s just bonkers” line taken by the politicians, otherwise some explaining would have been required.

As I recall, Latham called Milne the “poisoned dwarf”. I don’t know how tall Milne is, and certainly don’t support heightism, but given Milne’s excuse for the attack, perhaps Latham was just being accurate about the poisoned bit.

But enough cheap shots, the failure of Australia’s media in covering politics is a huge problem for our democracy. Journalists are the intermediaries between the people and the arcane world of politics, and we rely on them to interpret events meaningfully. If they are continually biased or lazy, then the electorate cannot make reasoned judgments and democracy cannot function.

About 20 years ago I worked in Parliament House, Canberra, for a Labor senator where I encountered the Canberra press gallery. I was struck by how much time journalists spent reading newspapers in the library, and how rarely they talked to ordinary politicians. Then I discerned a pattern; the leaders broke the stories, and the others hurriedly joined the pack. There was minimal serious investigation going on.

In our office we made constant efforts to alert journalists to issues of substance, but they were rarely interested. Then one day I suggested to my boss we attempt to organise left staffers into a research pool to better deal with issues as they arose. The left was continually creamed by the right because they were not on top of the issues. It came to nothing: as one honest MP told me, we don’t want our staffers working on joint projects, we want them following us around.

The funny thing was a few days later a story appeared in The Australian about a secret left think tank being organised. I could only wish it was true.

About the same time I was having a beer in the old non-members bar with a youngish print journalist (who afterwards went on to have a successful career as a senior staffer in state politics) when the topic got onto Indigenous issues. To my great surprise, out came the usual prejudices - aborigines were weak and would not fight for their own culture (compared to say, the Maoris), so why should we care? I pointed out to him some of the literature on Indigenous resistance, and hopefully he read it. He certainly needed to actually find out something about this important subject.

These three realities - the ignorance and personal bias of journalists; the failure of journalists to actually find stories; and their inaccuracy in reporting when they did - typified my experience with political journalism.

The role of the media in politics has always been central. It was newspapers that arguably invented modern politics. Once each political party or viewpoint had its own paper, and news and debate flowed freely. Now we typically have only one or two newspapers in each city, all owned by rich conservative old men whose politics range from right wing to far right wing and who impose their will on their papers more or less overtly.

In my own home town a brash young man has attempted to turn a staid, dull but reasonably reliable paper into a tabloid cheerleader with all the emotional manipulation this entails. He has already had brushes with ethics groups and the law, but so what? His vendetta against the current Labor Government has become utterly inane (what’s next -“Carpenter Devil incarnate, says poll”?). The sad thing is The West Australian is one of the few independent papers left.

The situation with the electronic media is worse. With the honourable exception of the fast-diminishing ABC, political news and debate on radio is almost entirely banal, or just rabid. As for TV, aside from a couple of ABC and SBS programs and the odd tit-bit elsewhere, TV is a political commentary free zone.

As if this void is not bad enough, what does the ABC do when it wants a politics program (called, of all things, The Insiders)? Why, get a journalist (and ex-Labor staffer) to talk politics with three other journalists, usually from the newspapers. There are typically the two soft, soft, soft lefties, including a token woman, and one of Howard’s men - Bolt, Henderson or Ackerman - for “balance”. It’s all so cosy - no new ideas or viewpoints there.

The truly amazing thing about political journalists is how little they can actually tell us about anything of substance. Paul Kelly in particular gives the impression he has just finished conferring with Packer, Murdoch and Howard on the nation’s destiny, but his august judgments are no more on the ball than anyone else’s.

For people whose profession is finding out things, they usually know bugger all. Furthermore, their apparent disinterest in reading any social theory means they inevitably follow the latest trend with the true zealotry of the truly ignorant.

The failure of our political journalists is why ventures like On Line Opinion are so important. The presence of OLO on Google indicates its success, and also the absence of this sort of thing generally, but OLO’s ongoing struggle to get in the black also shows that it is still money that matters.

There is some talk that blogging will revolutionise political news and debate, but this seems unrealistic to me. Blogs are already following the money as the big boys move in, and research indicates that they polarise, as opposed to inform, opinions. With no blog more authoritative than another, you go to the blogs that agree with you.

This lack of credibility is a hugely important matter. Any functioning society needs an ideological centre, some commonly accepted ideas around which debate can revolve. Australia’s commercial media have given up this role of maintaining core debates, and the repercussions are already apparent in the general loss of faith in democratic politics, especially in the young.

So credibility is essential. During World War II the BBC sustained reasonably accurate broadcasts, while German media were full of Nazi propaganda. The result was that Germans increasingly turned to the BBC for news of the war, despite the harsh penalties if they were caught. An unreliable news source is worse than nothing.

There are undoubtedly powerful commercial pressures that act against good journalism, but political journalists need to recall that fair and accurate reporting and informed debate are essential for a functioning society. If these things fail, the society will fail too, and this has to be bad for profits.

As for the ABC, it is time to remember it was founded as an alternative to for-profit commercial media, not to imitate them. Diverse political opinions, some of them well founded, are out there, and it is high time the ABC went looking for them.

Thomas Jefferson once said that given the choice between government without newspapers or newspapers without government, he would choose the latter. Now that we are living in such a complex world with such serious threats as global warming the need for open-minded, well-informed political journalism is more important than ever.