News in freefall

To me, the New News conference at MWF 2011 reverberated with anxiety. Packed sessions were dominated by knitted brows and pensive looks. Conversations on stage shone with a cheery veneer, but frustration gathered steam as the sessions wore on, and between the huffs and puffs of disagreement, the cracks would start to show.

It’s not hard to see why. Journalists, editors, and media professionals of all kinds these days exist on the edge of a precipice. It has been this way for a while now – so long, in fact, that it feels like permanent teetering. Journalism was never a particularly lucrative career, but with ‘old’ media under increasing threat and ‘new’ media paying a pittance, if that, one can forgive news professionals for feeling a little bit stressed. Recent restructuring and mass layoffs at Fairfax, further job cuts at News Ltd, dramatic slumps in print news circulation and ballooning public apathy towards politics, industry, international affairs and the other domains of ‘serious’ reportage just increase the sense of vertigo. It’s a hard time to be a journalist in Australia.

In many ways, what’s happening to newspapers and news media more generally in Australia cannot be extricated from the political interests of those who control it. The issue of how the media intersects with and shapes politics in Australia and around the world – one of the most interesting questions raised during last year’s conference and discussed at length – has never been more crucial. It might seem audacious to a casual observer for mining magnates with such obvious conflicts of interest to actively and unashamedly try to buy their way onto the boards of a major newspapers in order to have editorial influence. Yet corporations with such vested interests in government policy and practice have been controlling our mainstream media for years.

In my opinion, the current state of the news media is yet another example of broader social and structural problems that go beyond just a failure to understand or adapt to what is no longer ‘new’ but rather ubiquitous technology. But what can we do about it? How do you protect media workers’ rights in an industry that relies increasingly on user-driven and unpaid content? How do we respond to this as individuals and as a community? What are the options for people who engage with news media and what are the options for writers, publishers and broadcasters? What’s the role of the ABC and independent grass-roots organisations in an industry dominated by corporate-driven publication and broadcast?

These are just some of the questions that need to be asked, and answered, sooner rather than later. And if you’re not involved in the conversation yet, now is a pretty good time to dive right in.

 

The New News Conference is on again at MWF 2012. Guests already announced include Margaret Symons, Chris Uhlmann, Tim Dunlop and Derryn Hinch. You can book a dedicated New News pass now or keep an eye out for the Program Launch on 20 July. These sessions sold out speedily last year so if you’re keen, book early.

 

Playing the blame game: on politics and journalism

At the MWF on Friday, as the New News sessions were running hot in the Wheeler Centre, BBC correspondent Nick Bryant, political journalist for the Australian George Megalogenis, commentator and former staffer of Kevin Rudd, Tim Soutphommassane, and Stuart Littlemore, Media Watch presenter between 1989 and 1998, got together to discuss the intersection between journalism and politics.

Bryant posed the question: who is to blame for the infantilisation of politics? Megalogenis for the most part appeared to argue around an answer, apportioning blame everywhere and nowhere. Soutphommassane argued that politicians are not passive victims – a poor actor cannot just blame the script – and in the professionalisation of politics, ‘conviction’ becomes not a determination to make a firmly-held philosophy into reality, but a matter of political marketing. He then went a step further, however, to claim that the public are culpable for continual media focus on the trivial: that if we as a people are not prepared to call politicians out for their kneejerk policies or vapid media stunts, then we get the politicians we deserve.

Perhaps it was to be expected that Littlemore would turn on the journalists, but in the circumstances it wasn’t unwarranted, as neither Megalogenis nor Soutphommassane acknowledged any form of media accountability in shaping political debate. Littlemore didn’t entirely disagree with either of them, but ‘I have difficulty blaming the citizen,’ he said. ‘And I have difficulty leaving the journalist out of it.’ As the discussion continued, it wasn’t hard to see the cycle of blame emerging: journalists abdicating responsibility for the pitiful nature of their political coverage; politicians blaming a relentless and superficial media for the nature of their policies; and the public becoming outraged at both the calibre of politician they have to vote for and the generally useless information they are fed in the guise of ‘political coverage’ by the popular media.

When the issue of asylum seekers came to the fore, Littlemore put Megalogenis on the spot. One cannot divorce the journalist from growing racism and Islamophobia in society, he claimed, and ‘your employer is one of the worst!’ Editorial is not the same as journalism, Megalogenis countered, and at least the Australian is upfront about its agenda when it does editorialise.

Perhaps these comments would have slid away from memory, like a talking point spouted by a politician in an orange vest on the 6pm news, had this session not been followed up by Jay Rosen’s New News keynote. The crux of the problem of political coverage, Rosen claimed, is that journalists identify with the wrong people. They reframe politics as entertainment because it’s cheaper than presenting it as problem-solving or consensus-building. And in positioning politics as a horse-race or a sport, journalists position themselves as ‘insiders’, and this ‘cult of savviness’ becomes fodder for political coverage itself.

In response to an audience question, Rosen drew attention to the Murdoch media machine – a tool for bullying and intimidation, and wielded by men seeking to influence power and policy. In order for this machine to function in the way it does, he said, a strange culture of denial exists. The people paid to write for it need to believe that they are merely doing honest jobs as journalists, and that there’s no ‘conspiracy’ involved in the broader corporate structure to dominate or control the direction of policy and politics. And of course there isn’t a conspiracy, Rosen said, because it’s an openly recognised fact that this is the case.

It would be ‘bizarre and irresponsible’ Rosen claimed on Twitter later, to interpret his speech to mean that the media was to blame for poor government policy. Indeed, as he said on Lateline, ‘Political actors and producers of news are interdependent at this point.’ But this conception of politics as an inside game – this cult of savviness – is ‘an attack on solidarity.’ If journalists are not fulfilling their responsibility of enabling the public to be more active participants in their own democracy by reporting facts and separating spin from spit, then they are failing at their job. Seen in this light, Littlemore’s comment, made only two hours earlier, seems a lot less arbitrary, and a lot more scary: ‘Popular media is an assault on democracy.’

Censor and Sensibility

I pulled the program guide out of my bag and checked the time. I had arrived on schedule, just not at the right place. I had forgotten that while Federation Dodecahedron is the headquarters of the Writers Fest, not all the events are held there. I shook my cuff back and looked at my watch. It looked remarkably like a hairy wrist. That’s right, I’m a child of the eighties, and as such, my timepiece is found on my emailing pocket clock that doubles as a phone. I had ten minutes to make it up to the Wheeler Centre.

Fortunately for me there was a bank of share bikes ready for rental. I paid the fee and unclipped the bike from its holder. I adjusted the seat to ‘lanky’ and swung my leg over the frame and started to pedal. A police officer curtly stepped in front of my velocipede, halting my momentum with a bulky frame of his own. I assumed he was going to ask about my helmet. Instead his gloved hands began to fondle my curly hair, which he referred to as nature’s helmet. Once satisfied with the density of my ringlets, the officer slapped an approval sticker on to the side of my head and ushered me into the traffic.

I slotted my bike into another bank of bicycle holders and jogged the rest of the way to the Wheeler Centre. I had a whole minute to spare and dedicated it to not passing out from my recent exertion. I was sitting in on a forum called Cheek: The Getting and Losing Of Jobs Online. I was interested in the first half of the title. The latter part was something I already have down pat.

While the audience waited for the guest speakers, we were treated to a quartet of people singing the news stories of the day. I was amazed at how bad news doesn’t sound as harsh when sung in a falsetto. If I ever experience an ugly break up, I think a song might be a lot nicer than the SMS my last girlfriend deemed fit to send me – twice.

The singers lapped up the applause and placed themselves in the front row of the room. The other members of the audience indulged in nervous small talk while we waited for the session to begin. The conversations were interrupted by a loud beeping noise and someone called out asking for all mobile emailing pocket clock phones to be switched off. The beeping continued. Every head in the crowd swiveled to see the source of the incessant beeping. It wasn’t a phone, but a truck reversing up to the stage. A volunteer asked if we could step back a bit to allow Catherine Deveny’s ego to make it through.

After several sweaty minutes, a group of volunteers managed to push her ego on stage and prop it up with some wooden buttresses. Everyone settled back down to enjoy the talk and the speaker rattled off the credentials of the panel. There was one guy whose only reason for being there was he had actually found an online job. This did not bode well for the rest of us hopeful job seekers.

Jonathan Green talked about his experiences moving from a quite papery medium like The Age to digital media like Crikey and The Drum. Although the conversation continued to be hijacked by Deveny, who insisted her now famous tweets weren’t the reason she was fired, rather, it was the fact that she was a woman who fought the good fight against the dead old white men that run mainstream newspapers.

Towards the end of the talk the audience was invited to ask questions. I wanted to ask if it might be a good idea to put a breathalyser on mobile emailing pocket clock camera phones that won’t allow us to activate our twitter accounts if we’re over the .05 alcohol limit at any awards nights. I decided it was best not to, after all, I don’t want the dead old white men to fire me from my job as well.