The failure of Australia’s political media

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.