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.’