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.

--------------

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.”  

--------------

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.

Commentators up the wattage to cut through noise

What Tony Abbot in a state of deep chagrin called a “febrile” media culture has had another casualty, with commentators on the right seemingly dismayed by Anthony Albanese’s solid performance in the opinion polls, causing them to up the wattage on their pronouncements.

The above tweet appeared on or near 8 February and – unsurprisingly – garnered a lot of responses. The amount of online activity accompanying this little sally by Bolt was striking. It was almost as though this – the response – had been the aim all along. To counter that effect, the next day (or thereabouts) Alan Jones came out with his own attempt to provoke outrage among adherents of the Left.

You’ve got to applaud the quantity or quality of imaginative effort that such tweets entail in the formulation. Because putting them out there is – as everyone knows – a matter of moments. Coming up with an idea precisely aimed at sparking hatred however takes practice and a good deal of bravery. No-one can legitimately accuse Bolt and Jones of being a shrinking violet.

In fact being out there and building this kind of negative capacity is the whole plan. In order to remain current in that new media culture – a phenomenon engendered by the rise of social media, since about 2007 – commentators must up the wattage constantly just to remain visible. 

If they’re not visible they lose the only thing that they’ve got to sell: their popularity. And around this time it became urgent to cement their gains due to the appearance – in addition to Albanese’s good polling numbers – or Joe Biden as US president. There was also the festering scandal of New South Wales’ pork barrelling money for fire rejuvenation. The events that this show targeted had played out a year earlier, during the aftermath of the summer bushfires, but the long tail of shame had come to grips with the deputy leader of the Coalition in Sydney, John Barilaro, who sat up in front of a Parliamentary enquiry stumbling over his words in an effort to cope with the effects of cognitive dissonance. 

It was actually a superb performance, and if it had been an actor instead of a politician, he could’ve won an Oscar but it’s easy to make this sort of snide comment – I’m almost ashamed of myself – because that’s how so much of public discourse is carried out. As I noted a couple of years ago, the commentariat’s increased breadth has been accompanied by a narrowing of viewpoints available to sample. The negative comments people make when an unpopular politician pokes up his or her head school pundits in how to gain traction. 

We’re creating the new mode used by Bolt and Jones. 

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. 

Journo-speak and the disconnect

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. 

The information viaduct and species behaviour

You don’t often find justifications for journalism with this kind of title, but as the length of this post indicates (approx. 2300 words) I’ve been thinking about this sort of thing for quite some time. The first traces of this line of enquiry I can find appeared on Happy Antipodean on 14 September 2015 in a post titled “Studying journalism is not just a vocational course” which was about training. A light piece in response to a Sydney Morning Herald story that’d just appeared, it contained this:

Storytelling is an essential human activity that shows no likelihood of disappearing. And all industry sectors can use storytellers to build their businesses. In fact they need them, in the same way a viable electorate needs journalists in order to make the critical decisions that national stability relies on. They don't call it the media – the layer in the middle, the information viaduct – for nothing.

On 2 July 2018 I expanded on this point in a post titled “The articulation of stories and the dynamics of progress”, which I include in its entirety below.

On 29 June at 6.49am an account on Twitter named ‘Stand For Something Even If You're Sitting Down’ tweeted the following:

[President Donald] Trump: The press is the enemy of the American people.

Milo [Yiannopoulos, a right-wing commentator]: The press should be killed.

Shooter [Jarrod Ramos, who killed journalists in Maryland in 2018]: Kills members of the press.

The Left: Trump and Milo are dangerous and culpable in this.

The Right: The Left needs to be civil.

We tell ourselves stories all the time as we strive to function as members of a community that sustains us. Such stories are essential to its proper functioning and to maintaining our ties to it. They cement us within its fabric as essential parts of it. They are the glue that binds each community together, and part of that process involves us articulating aspects of the stories that animate our social lives, to form coherent narratives. The above tweet is a symptom of this articulation, where each step in the process of meaning-creation stems from the one that comes before. We locate ourselves within this process of meaning-creation by helping to tell either the whole story from beginning to end, or just one part of it that can then be taken up by the next person in the chain.

That chain ties us to the earth, from which all wealth derives. The earth sustains us as the stories we tell each other sustain us in our various tribes. They work in two ways: to keep us together and to keep others out. While the first aim is important for our survival, the second can prevent us from learning new things. So while stories can teach people entering the tribe what it is important for them to know, so that they can help the whole function more effectively, they can also exclude ideas that might function to help the tribe survive and prosper.

In our communities, the tribes operate much like sporting teams that are competing for the scarce resource of victory. In this flawed scenario, which is a zero-sum game, only one team can win, and so each member of it works to the utmost extent of his or her capacities to destroy the effectiveness of the opposition. In this earnest game we strengthen the bonds that keep us together by helping to articulate the stories that sustain the tribe, but we might also lose sight of the ultimate goal, which is for both teams to prosper and to increase the amount of wealth the earth surrenders, for the same amount of energy expended. Sometimes we need to borrow from the playbook of the opposition, and use ideas that have been articulated and developed by that tribe, in order to strengthen the chain that binds us to the earth. This is called “progress”.

At the end of the month I was at it again as the bug had bitten and I was on a roll. This time the post was titled “Intolerance and incivility on social media”. The bit I want to include is this:

They say that there are "echo chambers" online where people just see views that conform to their own, because people only follow people with views that are similar to theirs. But especially with Twitter hashtags, you now get to see what people of all walks of life are thinking and saying. And often tweets from people you follow might be in the form of a retweet from an ideological enemy accompanied by additional commentary refuting what the original tweet had said, but you still get to see what had been written. I think there is actually more awareness now than ever before of what people on the other side of the fence think and do.

But what is true is that the conversations that happen across the divide are very low-quality. Flame wars erupt, sarcasm is used, and people just dig in, refusing to budge an inch from cherished positions. It’s not at all like a collegiate forum where robust academic debates take place in an ambience where the right of everyone to express themselves unobstructed is respected, but more like the schoolyard, where hurtful things are said casually to exclude, to wound, and to objectify without considering the consequences.

On 2 December 2018 I published a post titled “Ego, like tribal loyalty, cements people’s identity” which contained the following elucidation of my theory of narrative.

If you don’t have a healthy ego you’re probably suffering from a mental illness. It is what keeps us confident and “happy” (that indefinable feeling of rightness that characterises our waking life, even if we are not aware of it most of the time). You don’t want to be without an ego. In its absence your life would be hell.

But ego has a drawback even while it keeps everything ticking along smoothly: it keeps new ideas out of our consciousness. We privilege what we already know and cleave to ideas that are central to our identity. This aspect of ego makes it a liability in some circumstances. We won’t listen. We reject things outright unless they’re wrapped correctly. We say “No” when we perhaps should think twice.

For groups of people, the function of ego is carried out by tribal loyalty. We might all be individuals, with own tastes and preferences, but we cannot survive alone, without a community to support us. The group has its own language, its common referents, its beliefs even. It has its icons and its leaders and its spokespeople. It has traditions and lore and ways for members to use to conduct themselves so that everyone gets along well. Pledging loyalty to the tribe, however, has, like ego for the individual, the downside risk that it serves to quarantine the group from valuable input from outside. People who are identified as outsiders are distrusted or even mocked and scorned. Their ideas are diminished by sarcasm and other rhetorical methods used to create community, or ignored.

So, good ideas can have trouble getting in. Bad ideas can be perpetuated regardless of their merit simply through common usage. If someone you trust says something that is factually incorrect, you are likely to believe that it is true. This happens all the time in the public sphere, where most people outsource their critical faculties to political parties. Individual tastes only go so far; mostly our preferences are predictable, and our likes and dislikes can be accurately mapped just by learning which group we belong to.

In August I examined a flame war that Australian journalist Peter van Onselen had been caught up in. For a while he quit Twitter, but made an exception for a colleague. As I reported in a post titled “Extreme views get all the attention”:

At 9.06am on 17 August, van Onselen tweeted to Fairfax journalist Jacqueline Maley: “Yours is the only tweet I’m responding to, I said I’m no longer using twitter [sic] for more than posts [because] the vile abuse I’ve received has stunned me. The left right spectrum is more of a curved U leaving extreme left & right with much in common. That’s all I was saying. Signing off.”

I went on, later:

The sensible centre is being hollowed out as people take sides and reward the outlets that buttress their personal biases with their cash. But partisanship is not good for democracy. What we need are outlets that look at individual policies and judge them based on their merits, not on the basis of whether we support the political party that espouses them.

“Social media is bad for journalism” ran the headline on a post I put up on Happy Antipodean on 5 April 2019:

Social media is great for sharing links but the quality of material being produced in recent years is not encouraging. BuzzFeed for a start, with its quizzes and text-poor stories and endless sequences of quoted tweets, is a bad sign.

Then you have the newspapers that pimp their stories to get subscribers. The quality doesn't matter to people as long as the bias conforms with their own. Some, like the Guardian, ask for donations and run campaigns to fund stories on specific topics. But with the groupthink evident on social media begging for ideologically-bent material in preference to objective stories written by ethical journalists, it's hard to see how we can be well served by such organisations.

You also have "indie" media which is run on a shoestring and which runs complete nonsense that people applaud and retweet endlessly, as though the vomit they are promoting were some rare souffle offered up by the kitchen of a Michelin-starred chef.

The kinds of extremism that thrives in social media, on sites like Twitter and Facebook, is precisely the wrong kind of influence you want to have operating on journalism. In the old days, university graduates used to complain about the hysterical headlines produced by the major urban tabloids. Words with the same kind of rhetorical audacity as statements that are made by politicians intent on demolishing the arguments of their opponents. But with social media this same kind of rhetoric is ubiquitous.

On 27 February 2019 I wrote a post titled “Group behaviour and popular narratives” that contained the following further elucidation of my ideas, particularly as they related to groups.

People actually don't want to be made to think, they want to be made to feel comfortable with their existing biases. This is what makes them adhere to groups in the first place. It’s quite natural. You see this clearly with both politics and with the arts. In the latter case, people gravitate to the familiar and the routine, the thing that most closely resembles what they have already consumed at one time or another. This is because they remember the feeling it gave them last time and they want to feel the same way again. It’s about pleasure, and we are nothing if not pleasure-seeking animals. But it’s also about safety (we feel good when we feel safe).

With politics, what you find is that people will unthinkingly endorse views that conform to their political party's policy platform. People don't want anything "challenging" (although that is a normal way for critics to compliment a work of art, such as a movie or a novel that they like). People want what they had before, except better and cheaper.

With public policy, problems usually arise where you find regressive thinking that derives from people’s tendency to operate in mobs. Demagogues are a problem sometimes but once you have rule by the demos the problem actually derives in most cases from the ways that groups behave.

We actually shouldn't be following party platforms. What we should be doing is choosing the policies that are going to achieve the best results, regardless of which party endorses them. Unfortunately, people are unthinking creatures who like to stick close to the group. So we will continue to swing wildly from one side to the other even while the big problems such as climate change and wealth inequality, both of which are complex and worsening in their impacts, and which require concerted action, resist the solutions we throw up from time to time in a haphazard fashion.

In a post put up on 23 September of the same year titled “Social media and the cultural elites” I wrote:

[T]he cultural elites are enthusiastic proponents of social media and use it as aggressively as your average (left-wing or right-wing) troll in order to promote their favourite views regardless how narrow these might be. They are not babes in the wood, nor are they merely subject to unwarranted censure by an ignorant rabble. They are participating with eyes wide open in a system of communication that encourages verbal abuse at worst and at least an ugly contempt for opponents.

Now that we’re all paddling in the water, how does it feel? Do you feel comfortable? How should you react if your feelings are not respected? What about your own conduct? Are you entirely blameless if some people flame you or denigrate your words? If they disrespect you? Do you respect others? Is being “nice” important or is good policy the only worthy goal? What kind of policy is created according to reprehensible behaviour? Does it matter? Does good policy even matter? 

Who says it’s good?!

You do. Or s/he does. Or else you all say it’s bad. Either way, you’re complicit. It’s actually your policy. The polls tell us so. This brings me back to another 2015 post, this one titled “A ‘febrile’ media culture or radical transparency?” It was in response to just-deposed PM Tony Abbott’s parting slash at the commentariat. I talked about how the public sphere had changed since a large proportion of the community was using Twitter.

[T]he thing is that the whole relationship between the public and politicians has changed due to the ever-on nature of the public sphere, enabled through social media. There is nowhere to hide any more once the soundbite has been launched into the ether. If there is any dissimulation, or plain treachery, or just day-to-day spin, you will be found out. That then will cause a wave of opinion to start in cyberspace and this will lead journalists to find ways to satisfy the appetite thus kindled.

Scott Morrison is more used to working in this new type of space, as his recent policy shift in favour of greentech indicates. So even though a lot of what happens on social media is reprehensible at least, and damaging at worst, at least we see the message getting through.

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.