With much of Australia’s ‘mainstream’ media at war with its critics on ‘social’ media, it’s worth reflecting on an observation from a journalist who was at the vanguard of breaking down the distinction between the two.

In ‘Breaking News: The Remaking of Journalism and Why It Matters Now’, Alan Rusbridger writes of his long career in journalism, notably the 20 years he spent editing The Guardian, one of the two or three greatest newspapers in the English-speaking world.

Rusbridger took over at the newspaper in the mid-90s, right at the onset of the internet revolution and akin to being chucked the CEO role at Kodak just as digital photography was getting going. It was the mother of all hospital passes. This was the beginning of a hugely disruptive era, one in which the advertising-driven media business model that had once sustained journalism was virtually destroyed.

Aware of the interactive nature of new media, Rusbridger sought from the start to break down walls between journalists and the people formerly cast as ‘the audience’, bringing the latter from their formerly passive role into the centre of a now public conversation and encouraging innovation in the process. 

“The vertical world is gone forever,” Rusbridger wrote. “Journalists can longer stand on a platform above their readers. They need to find a new voice. They have to regain trust. Journalism has to rethink its methods; reconfigure its relationship with the new kaleidoscope of other voices. It has to be more open about what it does and how it does it.”

If anything, the onset of social media (‘Web 2.0’) in the past 15 years has accelerated that need as new tools allowed anyone to be a publisher. Experts in various fields such as economics, law, geopolitics or journalism had a direct conduit to readers who normally would have been able to access those voices only through the heavy filters and editorial processes of traditional media.

Of course, as we all know from experience, social media also opened the floodgates to trolls and provocateurs and people who used the cover of anonymity to launch vicious and personal attacks against others, highly visible journalists among them. 

Now in Australia, with a federal election campaign adding to the intensity, it is the latter activity that is providing the focus of some mainstream journalists’ criticism of social media.  Twitter, in particular, is portrayed as a nest of hyper-partisans and ‘far left’ extremists who have no appreciation or understanding of the role of journalists in a democracy. Deeply personal attacks and obscenities are the rule, and the criticisms of coverage are merely the whingeing of party warriors who lack the objectivity of a professional journalist.

Almost entirely lacking in this sort of defence is a willingness to actually engage with the criticisms being levelled at journalists and the media – like the focus on personality as opposed to policy, like the ‘gotcha’ and ‘gaffe’ mentality that obsesses over missteps at the expense of the examination of overall coherence of policy platforms, like the sports commentary-style analysis about how a strategy is playing with the punters, but most of all like the fact that a large chunk of the media now routinely makes or breaks prime ministerships.

The public isn’t stupid. Much of the criticism they are expressing on social media about journalists reflects a sense of frustration that the issues they and their families care deeply about (like climate change or stagnant incomes or our treatment of refugees) are not advancing.

Again, despite the cheap shot that media critics are mere partisans, this disquiet is broadly based. It partly explains the rise of non-aligned independents. People are tired of the left-right, he said-she said, blue team-red team reductionism of every issue demanded of a commercially squeezed media, for whom bipolar conflict is easier to report, and a professionalised political class for whom issues like energy are just a tool to showcase their “brand”.

And it is not just the naive outsiders, ignorant about journalistic processes, who are saying these things. In responding to ABC journalist Michael Rowland’s condemnation of Twitter as just ‘partisan fury’, veteran journalist and blogger Margo Kingston argued for a little more empathy for those without the bully pulpits of radio shows and newspaper columns:

Another perceptive voice is Tim Dunlop, one of the first Australian bloggers and someone who has written extensively about the need for journalists to surrender the illusion of omnipotence:

This sort of anger directed at your audience has been going on for 2 decades, since blogging first took off. Now it’s directed at social & you seem to have learned almost nothing. You get angry at the worst criticism & ignore the best. And then turn around and ask us to subscribe— timdunlop (@timdunlop) April 23, 2019

Of course, there are journalists (like The Guardian’s Katharine Murphy) who have written thoughtfully on the challenges journalists face in a world in which there is virtually no gap between ‘events’ and the response to those events, in which spin is virtually inseparable from substance and in which ‘reality’ is now whatever a politician deems it to be.

In which case, I would argue the need for journalists to work constructively with people on social media, to use the opportunity for shared engagement to strengthen the public’s understanding of issues, has never been greater.

As Alan Rusbridger says, ‘social media’ is too often dismissed as a pallid catch-all for ephemeral postings on Twitter or Facebook. In reality, it is about empowering people who were never previously heard – people from all walks of life, many of whom are highly expert in complex policy areas or who have perspectives that are rarely heard in the heavily delineated arenas patrolled by traditional media.

We can all of us agree on the need for civility. We can all agree on condemning anonymous trolling and personal attacks. But can we please also agree on greater cooperation and understanding?

There is no going back to the old vertically-oriented media world of journalists perched loftily on platforms above passive audiences defining what issues are covered and how. All media is now social.

We have a chance to do things differently. Too much is at stake not to.


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