New and old media struggles

If you bother to read to the end I won’t promise you’ll be amused but this story about new and old media is at least interesting. The new represented by X and the old in this case represented by the Sydney Morning Herald. X has been here I think since 2007 the SMH since I think 1831.

I saw a tweet by someone I follow and I won’t include his name here because I don’t want to cause any consternation or upset. I don’t have a problem with this poster usually but this event was so extraordinary that I just had to comment. He wrote:

Now I'm not one to speculate as you know but if you were Justice Lee picking up the paper today and seeing a headline saying a lying recidivist and alleged rapist should receive compensation, I dunno, I'd probably be taking a dim view.

I immediately thought that there had been an announcement in the Bruce Lehrmann defamation case. It had been in the media a lot the previous year. I personally had heard nothing so when my acquaintance tweeted this my ears pricked up. Had the judge said something? Surely I would’ve seen an announcement if the case had been brought to a conclusion.

So I responded with a question and my acquaintance replied with a link to the story that had appeared on the SMH website a day or two before. I had seen this story and it was just word of what the lawyers for one party had suggested should be done. I asked if the SMH had done wrong by publishing the story.

But the judge hasn't announced anything, this story is just reporting on the progress of the case. There doesn't seem to b anything abt this story that's exceptional from a legal standpoint. Were you suggesting otherwise?

He said “No” and I asked again if the SMH had done something wrong.

But [name removed] your tweet suggests something different. It seemed to me that reporters who had been invited into the court and had done their job as the judge wanted them to do were the object of your opprobrium. Correct me if I'm wrong. Did the SMH do something inappropriate here?

He told me to let it go, I told him to be wary of defaming the plaintiff.

This highlights a certain problem that new media has with regard to the instruments of government. People who use new media have trust issues for whatever reason, I can’t fathom what they are in every case, in fact in most cases there’s no way to know why a person might distrust authority, but the fact is that my acquaintance worked for a media company for all of his adult life.

What to make of this event?

It’s funny how posters like my acquaintance crow with delight when an election result that is favourable to them transpires, how they celebrate when someone they hate is successful convicted of some offence. Yet they still don’t like authority, in this case simply the authority the SMH has to be trusted based on 190-odd years of operation. 

If this situation doesn’t illustrate the conflict between the new and old medias I don’t know what does. You see here a electronic platform that is being used to publish defamatory material with the assistance of a company that is legally going about its business as the judge wants. My acquaintance is exploiting the company for his own purposes.

Calling someone an “alleged” rapist is bad enough, the word at least shields the poster from possible action. The other accusation? Bruce Lehrmann has shown no inclination to let things go, and his case in court at the moment hinges on what the judge thinks about his testimony and the testimony of the woman he is accused of assaulting. 

This is the thing with social media, the release is instantaneous, you can get things off your chest but they can come back to bite you. I contacted Seven West Media, which had paid for Bruce Lehrmann’s accommodation. I had tried to find out who was representing Lehrmann and in the news stories had only been able to discover the names of his barristers. Now I needed that of his solicitor.

UPDATE

• The initial poster blocked me then about five days later unblocked me saying “I’m sorry”. Another person’d gotten involved who also blocked me, but so far no apology from that quarter. I did find out where she works though (in an art gallery).
• I sent an email to Lehrmann’s solicitor but they never got back to me. As at the time of posting this the judge in the case still hadn’t made an announcement.

The Age has turned off comments for Twitter posts

I discovered this on the morning of 7 October when I wanted to reply to a post editors had put up about Gina Reinhart saying that humans weren’t affecting the climate. See image below.

This is fairly alarming though I saw the same morning (it was about 8.30am) that the Guardian and the New York Times hadn’t followed suit. It’s alarming for the same reason that it’s alarming when politicians block people on Twitter. This is because dialogue is the raison d’etre of social media and, for a journalist or politician, obstructing it must be viewed with a feeling of disquiet.

Though you can understand why some might take this step. When a journalist or a politician criticises social media on account of the tone of debate social media responds by doubling down, so you see two sides ranked like opposing football teams, each one eager to prove itself in the contest. Some people keep away. Others keep silent and watch from the sidelines.

Nikki Savva to write a column for Nine Newspapers

In 2016 Savva published a book about Tony Abbott and the small coterie of insiders who helped him to govern. In it, she talks about Abbott’s problems. I wrote at the time:

One of the main ones was that all decisions seemed to emanate from a small group of select people in the leader's office, including his chief-of-staff. The type of collegial consultation that members of Parliament are apparently used to in a Westminster democracy were thrown out the door. A tiny clique was doing everything to control the message, but when the leader's popularity failed to turn around people outside that group turned on the leader and replaced him just like that.

That chief-of-staff, Peta Credlin, now writes a column for The Australian, where Savva used to run her words. Savva also used to work for Nine Chairman Peter Costello, so the current move is as cosy as Abbott’s counsellors were.

Savva is best known to the general population for her appearances on the ABC’s Sunday chat show, ‘Insiders’, which gets talked about at length on social media. One thing Savva didn’t talk about in her book was the one-term government we’ve seen so much of in recent years in Australia. As I wrote at the time of her book’s appearance:

But this phenomenon of one-term governments is something that the commentariat will have to one day really take a close, hard look at. So far noone has really made the attempt. I think it has something to do with the new public sphere in the age of social media. But a lot of people would despise me for even suggesting something like this.

It'd be very interesting if Savva could turn her attention to such things as these because so far the quantity of discussion about the shiftiness of politics in this country hasn’t percolated through the community to any significant degree. People are aware that something’s changed, but they are not all saying the same thing. Awareness is limited to responses to journalists and politicians who castigate the broader community when debate turns ugly. The common people revel in the icy sobriquets thrown out by the wounded.

Channel Nine gouges second slab out of airport peach

A great yarn. A story ripe for the picking. Once again, the publisher of Australia’s newspaper of record has allowed itself to indulge in a provocative bit of baiting of The Man, forging in the process a repeat of last weekend’s sidestep into regions near absurdity. Only difference between two relatively proximate sites of political speech being that now the actual dollar figures – landowner compensation gazetted by the government – are out there for value-sensitive, property-conscious Sydneysiders to contemplate. It’s $300 per square metre for land to be developed and $20 per square metre for land to be used for a “green” zone. This lady isn’t happy so you can guess what category her land is listed under.

Who’s she up against? Well, this guy for a start.

Maria lives in the area and Goliath works for the state government though Zucco looks like she weighs more than he does (the two chaps Channel Nine found to populate their week-earlier segment also being grossly overweight). Not short of a few bob, or else too frequently snacking on hot chips. Now might be a good time for the United Australia Party to field a candidate in Mulgoa. 

Though, maybe not. A staunch Liberal seat, which makes sense if you look slantwise at Channel Nine’s offering to viewers still dazzled by 6 January.

Time to beef up the attack on governments of all flavours. Isn’t the Liberal Party the party of small government? It’s almost as though Macquarie Street were in the process of putting pressure on the boffins inside the actual department who decide such things as compensation. 

Resolute, Channel Nine demands viewers watch a good 60 seconds of footage for a story that might’ve been adequately dealt with as a to-camera address by the TV anchor. Enough to just mention the previous story and add the dollar figures, which had been missing last time. Quite adequate in that guise without new talking heads to fill up half the screens in Sydney. 

Western Sydney Airport is a juicy fruit. Plenty of stories still to come, you can bet on that. And – for the TV station that brings you ‘The Block’ – what better angle to adopt as your very own than land values. Property as religion.

How much effort did it take to put together this Thursday night news segment? I think it could’ve been done just as effectively with far less.

More drama in headlines when there’s less in the story

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:

1. Biblical metaphors
2. Boxing metaphors
3. Metaphors evoking madness
4. Metaphors evoking disaster due to fire
5. Metaphors evoking disaster due to cold
6. Nautical metaphors
7. Metaphors evoking the action of injustice
8. 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.

Koalas versus the big end of town

Badgery’s Creek green zones are good for koalas but anger property owners.

I had a struggle when writing this story because initially I couldn’t locate the evening news segment where I learned of it. It took a bit of digging. I thought it might’ve been Channel Nine or Network Ten, but from my PC it was impossible to find the segment. The Daily Terror had a story on its website but – of course – it’s paywalled so no go there, and when I went back to the TV to log into the Nine and Ten OTT services it took me about an hour to find the relevant section of video.

It’s on the Nine site. What drove me to spend the time doing this – let’s face it – tedious work being to link koalas with the selfishness of property owners who think they might’ve gotten a better return for land they own if it were to be purchased by a developer, than by the state government for parks for wildlife. In doing so I also have cause to talk about the media’s obligation to analyse more when it reports news.

I think it’s fair to say that no-one wants the koala to become extinct in the wild. Do we agree on that point? 

Good, because you cannot have it both ways and I’m sure Nine has, in the past, reported ethically on the plight of the poor koala. I’m sure they will in future but surely their debt to such customers as BFC and Toyota – seller of camping goods and maker of four-wheel drives – would place a certain weight, in the balance of our collective esteem, on protection of the environment. 

It seems, though, that this is not the case. The majors are quite happy to step up to the plate and to bat for property developers – who are, of course, significant employers in the big cities, as well as users of the services of such companies as Nine – when it suits them. 

I can understand the Terror’s animus against anything remotely savouring of greeneity but – Nine? Surely the publisher of the august Sydney Morning Herald – Australia’s newspaper of record – must see how unfortunate it is to allow overweight Boomers (see image below) to invade our private spaces with their gripes surrounding council proposals, their belligerent canvassing of favour as property owners – we all own property, and want to own more – and the TV compere’s sneering appeal to our better natures on their behalf.

Georgie Gardner inviting viewers to sympathise with the men in their battle against government (and don’t we all hate government?). 

It’s difficult to ignore the station’s tin ear when the spokespeople for the big end of town are two unprepossessing battlers from out west. But then, to complete the circle of madness they’d started, the very next day on the SMH website a link was posted to a story titled “‘How good were koalas?’: A national treasure in peril” by journalist Stephanie Wood. This is a Good Weekend story, therefore one which involved a decent amount of work to put together. 

If you want, like Wood, to protect creatures who rely on our good offices for their very survival, then it might mean lowering your expectations when the time comes to calculate return on investment. That parcel of rural land your father bought back in the 1950s might thus not be worth tens of millions of dollars, but only millions. Or even less. 

Is it worth settling for less on account of the struggling koala? I think so, and the media has a part to play in this epic fight. 

Blog launch

Welcome to Media Magnet. I began to use this as a place to put posts I'd already written elsewhere but that I thought deserved another run on the track. You can't let an old dog just lie in the sun, you've got to throw them a bone on occasion and take them out to the beach for a frolic in the shallows.

When I look back on those old posts I'm reminded of how the internet has changed in the intervening years. How much more polarised it is since every man (and woman) and his dog has come to the park. On 3 January 2016 I wrote in a post about social media:

One possible downside is that people might just edit events to fit an overarching positive narrative, but that takes a lot of effort and work. It's much easier - if you want to increase your followers - to just become more positive and collected yourself, and the benefits will just follow. In a real sense social media is changing the way we live because we have to actually make our lives fit that overarching positive narrative. It's not just a matter of continuously masking the reality by putting a positive spin on things that might actually have been relatively less satisfying or rewarding. We are starting to behave in ways that would anyway receive a welcome from our friends and acquaintances.

How wrong I was! This post is remarkable however for  the fact that -- like the post you're reading now -- it appeared first at the beginning of the year. Five years back. On 29 April 2013 I wrote in another blogpost:

The big question for people who are looking at the future of the media is revenue, but I think that even more important issues are how to drive the public agenda and how to form trust in the media within the public, trust that has been eroded over time.

In that post I thought aloud about different funding models for journalism, and this brought me into contact with a man who started a new website, but I fell out of the loop with them as I felt that my contributions weren't being properly credited. I did write however:

For the Big Two [Fairfax and News Corp], the tempo stays the same - there are just as many stories as ever - as they move toward raising revenue via paywalls, but overall the quantum of effort in the media environment is shifting to well-funded public relations at the expense of in-depth public-interest journalism. Public confidence in the media is eroded, but the Big Two can't slow down or else they'll lose clicks, so they just keep on doing what they've always done.

You could envision a pyramid structure with part of the content for a story available free-of-charge - this can be shared online - and more in-depth items available for a fee. And you could move beyond the flat story, too. For example, you might offer a podcast video free at the top of the pyramid, with a story readable for a fee and then, lower down the pyramid, transcripts of the source material that can be read by people willing to pay more for more context. Interview transcripts can run to thousands of words and you might have three or four interviews for one 1000-word story. Would people be willing to pay for that? I'd like to find out.

The Guardian took up a different tack from the Big Two, and has given people a means to provide funds independent of a subscription. People do this because they like the website, not in order to read the stories, which remain free (though you have to register now to read).

So there are many models. Disappointing however is how people have taken the disarray of the media -- especially since Google has threatened to take its search engine out of Australia -- and turned it into attacks on the media. So, if you dislike Murdoch papers you then lump all media into the same basket  and crow about their malaise.

What happens is still up ion the air, but keep your fingers crossed Google starts to change its approach. I will be crossing my fingers and toes in anticipation of a win for news over tech giants.