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.’

On Kate Grenville, politics and imagination

Kate Grenville and I go back years. Four years, to be precise. Not that she is aware of this.

Four years ago yesterday, the Northern Territory Emergency Response was announced by the Howard Government under the guise of moral righteousness. Four years ago on the same day, Alexis Wright won the Miles Franklin for her novel Carpentaria and used her acceptance speech to criticise the Intervention. Four years ago, I was halfway through my Honours degree as I listened to a lecture on creative writing about Indigenous Australia, and the lecturer discussed Grenville’s work.

At the time, it felt like everyone had been talking about The Secret River: an imaginative retelling of the story of Grenville’s ancestor, Solomon Wiseman, and his journey to Australia as a convict in the late 18th Century. It had become the subject of some feisty debate thanks to a 2006 Quarterly Essay by Inga Clendinnen discussing the discipline of history and its relationship to fiction, but also because of its depiction of Indigenous characters, which is where my lecturer dove in.

The Secret River (2005) is the first part of a trilogy about early colonial Australia. The novel traces the character William Thornhill’s journey from England to Australia, where he does his time as a convict before deciding to take land on the Hawkesbury River and make it his own. Crucial as they are to the plot, the Indigenous characters are still peripheral: the story is Thornhill’s, the crises are Thornhill’s, and the epiphanies are Thornhill’s too. But for Grenville as the author, the Indigenous characters were pivotal. As she discusses in Searching for the Secret River, it was the complete absence of any Indigenous people from the stories her family told about their ancestor’s arrival in Australia that encouraged her to write the novel in the first place. She responded to a personal political issue with an act of imagination – to engage with a historical reality through the art of fiction – and The Secret River is the result.

The second book in Grenville’s trilogy, The Lieutenant (2008), still focuses on the perspective of an English man, but it takes a step further by detailing the relationship between Daniel Rooke, an astronomer of the First Fleet, and a young Cadigal woman named Tagaran. The narrative is told from Rooke’s perspective, but Tagaran in particular is given a voice, has charm, humour, independence and a temper, and the Indigenous characters generally are given much more shape and personality.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, I find the most interesting thing about The Lieutenant to be the extensive use of Cadigal language and the reflections on the writing of fiction that are embedded in the narrative. Many of the issues Grenville came up against relating to colonial Australia and writing about Indigenous Australia were the catalysts for the research that would become the basis of my own PhD. And while my own fiction has moved in a much different direction, in the final frantic few months of thesis rewriting and revision, I’ve been going back through Grenville’s work and thinking over those questions that pushed me towards my project in the first place: what are the differences between fiction and other kinds of writing? What are you ‘allowed’ to do as a white writer writing about Indigenous Australia and what is considered bad form? Are there, or should there be, limits on fiction that falls into this political context? How does identity – and the political implications of identity – influence what fiction can do?

More than just meaty topics for academic discussion, those kinds of questions have become crucial to my negotiation of fiction and art in general. Australia is still a colony. The Intervention continues. The politics of Australian fiction is important. What we do with our imaginations influences what we do with our realities, so what do we do next?

Kate Grenville is currently working on the third book in her trilogy. She will be discussing The Secret River and her own reading habits as part of the 2011 MWF Schools’ Program.