I wrote about the manufacture of drama in a post that went up a year ago entitled “The media uses hyperbole to draw readers.” I’m returning to the theme today not because the trend has become sharper and not just because I’ve started this new blog and I wanted something interesting to write about – though that also is a factor in my calculation – but because I want to show both sides of the coin.
Hyperbole is something that journalists, themselves, don’t often point to when they’re discussing things online, but it relates to a post that went up last week on the blog you’re reading. https://magnetformedia.blogspot.com/2021/02/journo-speak-and-disconnect.html In that post there were actually two different issues raised related to the erosion of confidence in journalists within the public sphere.
I lumped them together and now I want to tease them apart. One is the tendency for journalists to downplay the seriousness of an infraction of standards of public discourse, of ethics, of party rules, or of some other set of agreed rules, such as the law itself. In the post linked to above it was the chastising of Craig Kelly by the prime minister over public statements the backbencher’d made regarding vaccines for Covid-19. Journalists had sought out and used euphemisms for what the prime minister had done to him. One journalist, Bernard Keane of Crikey, called his colleagues out in a humorous manner, gently poking fun at them online.
The other side of the coin displayed in the blogpost linked to above is how journalists manufacture drama in order to draw readers to stories that are actually not very dramatic. This is a major problem that doesn’t look like one, since in fact it undermines the journalistic project because it disqualifies journalism from election to the ranks of everyday discourse. Journalists can therefore easily be “othered” and – subsequently, depending on the person doing the naming – demeaned and abused.
But journalists contribute to their own enslavement. In fact, when an issue is manifestly serious there’s no need to manufacture drama. I call these cases, in what follows below, ones where the journalists are acting as if they were “sober”. The other cases – involving hyperbole – I label ones where the journalist is acting as if he or she were “drunk”; shouting-on-the-street, florid language. The intoxicating language of hyperbole, in my earlier post, involved the use of metaphors. I classified these at the time into eight categories:
- Biblical metaphors
- Boxing metaphors
- Metaphors evoking madness
- Metaphors evoking disaster due to fire
- Metaphors evoking disaster due to cold
- Nautical metaphors
- Metaphors evoking the action of injustice
- Metaphors evoking civil disturbance
In fact there are only seven, as numbers 4 and 5 can be lumped together under “metaphors evoking disaster due to extremes of temperature”: so cold it’s freezing or else so hot it’s burning. One or the other and people immediately feel uncomfortable. It’s this discomfort that the journalist or subeditor is seeking to impose upon the reader’s consciousness. To make them so uneasy that they immediately – without thinking too much about it, avoiding the exercise of their critical faculties – click on the proffered link.
“Here’s a link you should click on. Excitement will follow if you do.” The problem being that the other thing that gets jettisoned when people suspend the action of their critical faculties is any feeling of shame or regret, so they can write what they want with impunity and without remorse. And because of social media, now, they can do so anonymously. So there’s usually no consequence stemming from poor conduct.
Of course you’re disappointed. No story can live up to the promise offered unless it’s really a flood or fight. (Weather and sport forming staples of the evening news.) When you click on one of those dramatic pieces of link text the package delivered is empty and doesn’t match the image on the outside. Now, you can turn around and convert that feeling of disappointment to rage and rancour, and launch it – it’s so easy, you just need to know the target’s Twitter handle – into cyberspace where it freezes in flight like Cupid’s arrow.
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I’ve labelled the type of language used for the shameless and enticing links “journo-speak” instead of the simpler “newsspeak”. We call them “journos” because, in the demotic register of our language – the one we use every day – we familiarise such people in order to better deal with the chaos that seems to surround us within the public sphere, a “journo” being easier to deal with than a “communications professional”. The more succinct epithet strips off glamour and offers a target at which we can shoot our fiercest barbs in the process of engaging with brethren online. It dehumanises so that we can further diminish the status of our adversaries.
Here is what they get up to.
Sober
When: 7 February
The Sydney Morning Herald put up a story on its website headlined “Payne deeply concerned after Australian adviser to Myanmar’s Suu Kyi detained.” The story referred to a man named Sean Turnell, who’d been advising the Myanmar politician Aung San Suu Kyi in a professional capacity and who, in the recent coup, had been detailed by the armed forces.
When: 8 February
A story in the SMH was headlined, “NSW health alert after returned traveller tests positive for COVID-19 following hotel quarantine.”
When: 9 February
The SMH put up a story with the headline, “NSW records 23rd day of zero local cases, investigation into positive traveller continues.”
When: 10 February
The SMH website had a story with the following headline, “WHO releases report on COVID-19 origin after independent investigation in Wuhan.”
Drunk
When: the morning of 7 February at 5.10am
Type of metaphor: boxing
I saw in my Twitter feed a post from ABC News’ account that said, “Morrison geared up for a party room fight over climate this week. There wasn't a peep.” The story linked to had at its top a photo taken at the National Press Club gathering where Morrison, the PM, had announced a more expansive environment policy. He’d said that Australia would achieve net-zero with regard to CO2 emissions by 2050. It had been the first time the PM had made such a statement.
When: 8 February
Type of metaphor: boxing
There was a story on the SMH website with the headline, “True crime as Stan Grant hits out at Peter FitzSimons.” It was about a verbal contretemps between the two media personalities over the issue of Captain Cook, the man who was the first European to discover the east coast of the continent.
When: 7 February
Type of metaphor: madness
Titled, “‘Traffic nightmare’: How a single boat can paralyse one of Sydney’s busiest roads.” This story was about the Spit Bridge, and how small craft that need to get through the channel where the bridge sits have to wait for the bridge to open to proceed. The bridge is raised six times a day during the week, to let boats through. The numbers of waiting boats is smaller during the week than it is on the weekend.
When: 8 February
Type of metaphor: boxing
On the SMH website there was a story with the headline, “The bushfire areas that took a $300 million hit but did not qualify for funding.”
When: 9 February
Type of metaphor: boxing
The SMH published a story on its website with the headline, “Paire slams Australian Open for ‘shameful’ quarantine treatment.”
When: 10 February
Type of metaphor: civil disturbance
The SMH website had a story with the headline, “Facebook bans vaccine conspiracies in COVID-19 misinformation crackdown.”
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That January 2020 blogpost wasn’t the only time I voiced arguments in favour of moderation. We see the deleterious effect of social media in all sorts of ways, not the least of which being the extremism of language used online. And journalists are taking note, copying what we offer ourselves in the course of the day. Instead of responding to the challenge by moderating their own discourse, they are falling into line.
Some years back I talked in a blog post about the debasement of public discourse in the context of words used to describe political manoeuvering. The long tradition of removing sitting prime ministers that started with Julia Gillard’s ousting of Kevin Rudd had led to a spate of articles and even books. On 19 November 2018 I expressed dismay at the tone used to talk about politics, as though it were a blood sport and not, as it is in fact, a gentleman’s game:
The inaccurate use of such words by journalists as they try to make sense of the world we now live in has a long tradition. In the case of Julia Gillard’s push to remove Kevin Rudd from the leadership of the Labor Party in 2010, the word “knifing” was parlayed about indiscriminately by journalists and everyone else in order to raise the temperature of debate and to make things seem more dramatic than they were in reality. The Australian Broadcasting Corporation made a documentary titillatingly titled ‘The Killing Season’ that covered the period occupied by the removal of Rudd from his position by Gillard and her faction of the Labor Party, which aired first in 2016.
[Guardian journalist Katharine] Murphy told me in a tweet that the use of such words as “mutiny” and “coup” is “entirely accurate in the context in which they are deployed”. “This may be obvious the closer you are to events,” she went on, hopefully. But I’m not convinced. You don’t have to take much time to look at the word “knifing” to understand that it is a mere case of hyperbole that, because of the element of violence that it carries, can only be detrimental to the tone of debate. Likewise with “killing”.
As for “mutiny”, this is a word that has been optimistically borrowed by Speers from the vocabulary of the armed forces. It means to remove a captain from his or her command and to take over control of their ship. In the Australian Navy, command of a ship is given to a captain by the Navy hierarchy and the crew has no say over who their captain is. So there is no logical connection between the word “mutiny” and the removal of a party leader by ballot, which is something that is entirely licit and normal depending on the circumstances. The word “coup” comes from the language of politics; it is a shortening of the French term “coup d’etat” (etat” meaning “state” and “coup” meaning “strike” or “punch”). It is normally used to describe what happens when the armed forces takes over the government of a country by force regardless of the wishes of the broader community. The community had elected the government and now it has been taken away by the generals. Again, the applicability of this term to a case where a party leader is removed from his position by ballot is entirely spurious.
Until we wean ourselves off the juice – the high-toned language of the troll and the social-justice warrior – journalists are going to continue to see their reputations fall in the esteem of the public. We can control what we produce, since, apparently, not everyone can. And so we must.
