Bernard Keane -- who writes for Australian media outlet Crikey -- had something to say about the handling of the Craig Kelly affair this week. On 3 February at 5.23pm he tweeted:
My current count is 6 media outlets saying Kelly was "dressed down", 4 saying he'd been "hauled in" for it and the others that he'd been "called in". That's separate from all the "dressed down" tweets.
I'm sure it's due to journalists having a limited vocabulary and nothing else.
Craig Kelly had caused a public outcry with his views on Covid-19 treatment and vaccines, apparently (I didn’t see what he had been saying) opining that the latter were harmful to people. So the ruckus was amusing even as it was not trivial. Keane himself is often amusing, taking veiled swipes at one or another of his particular bugbears. In the present case the people he was swiping at were people like himself: journalists. The evasive language of the press gallery headline caught his eye and he let rip with both barrels.
Journalists are a class of individuals we reserve our fiercest opprobrium for, and the tendency is so widespread that Aldi – which uses the tagline “Good. Different” for its promotional material – even made an ad for TV with this as a central theme. The ad featured a helicopter (see image below) descending to hover near the ground close by a pedestrian in a suburban park. The woman holding the shopping bags – full of food, with green veges prominent in the shot – is unprepossessing, plain and slim.
The TV journalist in the helicopter asks the woman what she’s got in the bags. “Tell us what you’ve got there? Toilet paper?” “No,” says the woman in reply, “just dinner stuff.” The bags are raised a bit to indicate the truth of what she says. Yep, you think to yourself, she’s not hoarding toilet paper. “You must’ve paid an unprecedented price for that during these unprecedented times,” goes on the journalist, still hoping for something newsworthy. “No,” the woman says, “they’re from Aldi. Prices are always low.”
At this the journalist signals to the pilot to lift off and depart the park. She’s disappointed at the lack of material suitable for a scoop. The “gotcha” moment has fled and she’s away (see image below).
The ways that journalists talk on TV is under examination in this ad, which is, like the retailer’s other TV spots, funny and wry. We’re sharing a joke at the expense of journalists – the people retailers like Aldi rely on to keep the food supply system ethical and honest, and to keep prices for consumers at reasonable levels. We’re also asked to critique journalists’ tendency to manufacture news, and to reflect on the price that some people pay for their involvement in the news process.
But what about Keane’s criticism of the press gallery? How do the two things dovetail?
I think that we’ve got a problem with the press in that we don’t give it the same latitude we give ourselves. The cost of failure in their case is deemed to be catastrophic whereas we ask for accommodation and a bit of leeway for ourselves. A question put too insistently – or not insistently enough – causes people to bridle, as though they were a horse and they had reared up at a perceived obstruction or threat in the roadway as they went along.
Some people take one small point of inflection and magnify it to encompass all media acts, as though all journalists were the same and that the mistakes or lack of ethics of one person (or company) mean it is justifiable to denigrate a whole class of individuals described with the label “journalist”. Those people who are most likely to do this, furthermore, are the very same ones for whom it is a point of principle that minorities should be respected, and that language that discriminates against a small faction of the community is an abrogation of their human rights.
Keane is not wrong to say that journalists often use a language register that is divorced from common parlance. Often this is done for the sake of brevity, in order to fit the word-count of a headline or a strap. But sometimes it makes the action involved – as it does, I think, in the Craig Kelly case – seem less serious. To pull someone up is not to “criticise” them. To haul someone in is not to “discipline” them.
Most people will use euphemisms in the course of their daily routine in order not to be seen as too rigid. It’s commonplace for this kind of sideways language to be used in companies and other organisations. It allows people to communicate effectively without making someone else lose face. We all do it, but journalists are not allowed to. And so they shouldn’t be allowed.
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