“What we will witness over the next 18 months or more is a Great Unhinging, an orgy of hysterics. The goalposts of what constitutes government legitimacy will be moved from the constitutional to the convenient, from the reality of the parliamentary majority to concocted nostrums about mandates to govern. It will not just be a campaign against the government, but one rolling, frenzied campaign after another, where each new contrived outrage will assume a greater level of mania than the last.”
Uncanny, isn’t it? That prediction was made just over three years ago by blogger, econometrician and polling analyst Scott Steel (AKA Possum Comitatus). Perhaps, it’s his distance from Canberra. Perhaps, it’s because he doesn’t scribble about politics for a living. And perhaps, it’s because he doesn’t have to try to say something new every day. But Possum’s piece on the Great Unhinging is still the most chillingly accurate portrayal of the media-politics dynamic served up in recent years.
If anything, he undercooked it in predicting that “one side of politics and one wing of the media will do its best to turn it all into a complete and utter circus”. As circuses go, this has been a three-ring Cirque du Soleil – an everybody-in, all-moving-and-dancing, technicolour, widescreen spectacle of the ridiculous in which the clowns have all taken turns seeking to upstage each other.
It began with hysterical coverage of The Great Australia Day Restaurant Getaway. Parliament House camera crews, whose biggest thrill is normally walking down a hallway backwards after a leadership spill, got to shoot the PM and Opposition Leader being “bundled” by police out of a Canberra restaurant during a protest by members of the Aboriginal tent embassy. It was “mob violence”, said the Herald Sun. On tabloid TV, it was a “Major Security Scare”. But footage from the protestors themselves painted a somewhat different picture. And it increasingly became evident that a combination of over-exuberance by federal police and over-excitement by the press pack had given the public an erroneous impression of the scale of the disruption. As usual, the world’s best news organisation Reuters got it right with “Australian PM Loses Shoe in Fracas”.
In February, it was 24-7-Kevin month as a year of media speculation about a Rudd comeback (based on whispering from the always anonymous sources) finally bore fruit. But this came after interminable and sometimes bizarre thumb-sucking by the press gallery crew, including a piece by Rudd booster Peter Hartcher comparing St Kevin to a Chinese Monkey God. Business, meanwhile, did its usual thing of pleading for “certainty”, saying the wheels of capitalism would stop turning if the nation didn’t resolve the Julia vs Kevin show. But after all the exciting trailers (with the best lines flagged), the main feature was always going to be a letdown. And so it was. Kevin zipped.
In March, the narrative was all about how the evil totalitarian Gillard government planned to control and silence the media. Indeed, coverage of the considered and thoughtful Finkelstein report into the media takes the 2012 prize for the reporting which bore the least resemblance to reality. Suddenly every newspaper editor worth his or her salt was quoting Mill and Voltaire (whom they previously most likely would have mistaken for horse trainers). “I may not agree with your picks, but I’ll defend your barrier draw to the death or something…”
Stinking out the middle of the year was THE CARBON TAX. A week ahead of “C Day” and amid warnings of entire towns being wiped off the map, News Ltd economic columnist
Terry McCrann published an open letter pleading to Julia Gillard: “Dear Julia, It’s still not too late to abandon your carbon tax madness. Your tax promises to be the single most destructive thing that any government in Australian history has ever done.” Oh, the humanity.
But with the economy and government refusing to fall over, the News Ltd tabloids in July started banging their other favourite drum; ASYLUM SEEKER CRISIS. We were told that Gillard had now “seen seen more boat arrivals than any other PM” and that hostile detainees – “some from the Palestinian authority” – were being
released into the community. The “crisis” was also going to
destroy the budget (ironically because the government had been forced into an auction to satisfy the Terror and the Hun). By the end of the year, the
Tele was telling us that while Gillard was struggling for votes at home, she had plenty of fans in Java. I would say that you couldn’t make that up, except for the fact that they did.
But enemies of the state were not just found in refugee centres or the CSIRO. The internet was infested by millions of nasty trolls who were prepared to do and say anything to push their agendas and DESTROY OUR AUSTRALIAN WAY OF LIFE! So The Daily Tele, the people’s champion, launched its own Twitter campaign to
STOP THE TROLLS! The intent was to silence amoral individuals who “mercilessly attack not just celebrities and sports stars but other everyday users simply for the thrill.” That this is the standard KPI for Murdoch hacks seemed to be lost in the noise.
Undoubtedly the biggest media fail of the year was the misreading of the significance of
Gillard’s misogyny speech to parliament in October. Most of us who watched or listened to the speech in real-time felt it broke the mould of what had become a tired and predictable political contest. Irrespective of your party allegiance, it felt like a watershed
. But not to the gallery, who as ever, were caught up in the day-today political ‘tactics’ at the expense of the big, big pictur
e. My
own post on this scored the biggest hits of anything I’ve written this year.
What IS clear is that the media no longer owns the narrative. People have always had their own responses to and interpretations of political events. But they can now express those directly and they don’t need the media to tell them what it means. Of course, the gallery lectured everyone in that episode about how you
needed to understand “the context”. What they fail to understand is that that is THEIR context; that they are living in a bubble of their own making and that political meaning goes beyond the he said-she said and the daily horse race of Canberra.
The big picture, the unreported crisis of 2012 is the crisis in our institutions. Parliamentary democracy, as we practise it, increasingly looks like a circus with unpopular leaders staging
ridiculous stunts to attract an audience that long ago stopped listening. The traditional media, its own audience drifting away and its business model busted, focuses on colour and movement at the expense of the substance. It increasingly depends on hyperbole or
manufactured scandal to stay relevant. And any attempt to lift its standards is met with
panicked claims of censorship.
Some in the media get the existential crisis they face. Most don’t. In the meantime, there are fewer and fewer jobs in traditional old media journalism. And that was the
biggest story within the industry this year – the loss of thousands of positions and the scaling down of newsrooms. The irony is the fewer jobs for journalists and the more time people spend on social media, the more noise the old media has to make to be heard and the less people it has to do it. This makes for a commonality of interest with the side of politics deprived of government by a single seat and wanting to send the message that the whole world is about to end.
So the restaurant ‘riot’, the Julia-v-Kevin saga, media regulation, the carbon tax, the Ashby-Slipper affair, the AWU ‘scandal’ – every story is beaten up to within an inch of its life to attract straying eyeballs and every Opposition press release is treated as headline news without an inch of scrutiny. And it’s not just the Death Star (News Ltd) doing this. The ABC is among the worst culprits, treating as news the most self-serving spin from the party machine.
Social media can’t replace journalism as we knew it. But journalism as we knew it can’t exist anymore because there isn’t a business model to support it. That means journalists have to get smarter and work with the new communications technologies not against them. And that means more collaboration and curation and less of the assumption that they are the voice of god. It means they are going to have fall out of love with the idea of One or Two Big Narratives (Left vs Right) and realise there are millions of them. Finally, they are going to have stop trying to force every event into a prestructured view of the world that suits the ideological and commercial interests of their publisher.
The Great Unhinging that Possum predicted partly reflects the desperation of the conservatives in a situation of minority government. But it also reflects the desperation of the media. This won’t change even if Abbott, as the polls currently suggest, leads the conservative parties to a landslide win in 2013. That’s because there isn’t one story anymore. There are many.
This show can’t go on.
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23 Comments
paddybts · December 14, 2012 at 5:00 AM
ROTFL Thanks for what must be close to quote of the year Mr D. 🙂
“Suddenly every newspaper editor worth his or her salt was quoting Mill and Voltaire (whom they previously most likely would have mistaken for horse trainers).”
paddybts · December 14, 2012 at 5:00 AM
ROTFL Thanks for what must be close to quote of the year Mr D. 🙂
“Suddenly every newspaper editor worth his or her salt was quoting Mill and Voltaire (whom they previously most likely would have mistaken for horse trainers).”
Anonymous · December 14, 2012 at 5:41 AM
If we didn't have so many excellent indy media sites now we would learn nothing of value.
Like the IA people who have exposed the true conspiracy against Slipper while the MSM morons are still claiming he is disgraced, for what they have not said but I presume he is disgraced because they say so and not for a thing he did.
WE now have Gillard implementing full hateful refugee planSHE WANTED all along, she did not have to be told or egged on, it was her plan written in 2002 and it caused Carmen Lawrence to quit.
And today Carr is in Sri Lanka so the stupid ABC interviews potential asylum seekers and identifies them for the cops and navy to stop and jail.
Anonymous · December 14, 2012 at 5:41 AM
If we didn't have so many excellent indy media sites now we would learn nothing of value.
Like the IA people who have exposed the true conspiracy against Slipper while the MSM morons are still claiming he is disgraced, for what they have not said but I presume he is disgraced because they say so and not for a thing he did.
WE now have Gillard implementing full hateful refugee planSHE WANTED all along, she did not have to be told or egged on, it was her plan written in 2002 and it caused Carmen Lawrence to quit.
And today Carr is in Sri Lanka so the stupid ABC interviews potential asylum seekers and identifies them for the cops and navy to stop and jail.
Tim Rust · December 14, 2012 at 6:19 AM
And that's why you're mandatory reading, along with Andrew Elder. Thanks, Mr Denmore
Tim Rust · December 14, 2012 at 6:19 AM
And that's why you're mandatory reading, along with Andrew Elder. Thanks, Mr Denmore
Anonymous · December 14, 2012 at 11:09 AM
Yes Tim.
You're right.
Brilliant Mr D [and Possum]m and a bit scary too.
fred
Noely Neate · December 15, 2012 at 12:33 AM
Gee, you doing the roll call there of 'dramas' has really depressed me. I have no idea how many times this year I have sat down to read or watch the news and gone “Seriously, this again…” or “Seriously, this is the most important issue at the moment…”. The saddest thing for me is that when there has been something very important happen they have not really looked into it. I sort of feel like we are being treated as Fox News punters 🙁
Noely Neate · December 15, 2012 at 12:33 AM
Gee, you doing the roll call there of 'dramas' has really depressed me. I have no idea how many times this year I have sat down to read or watch the news and gone “Seriously, this again…” or “Seriously, this is the most important issue at the moment…”. The saddest thing for me is that when there has been something very important happen they have not really looked into it. I sort of feel like we are being treated as Fox News punters 🙁
redsheep · December 15, 2012 at 1:12 AM
Great summation of a disgusting year for the MSM, you've got a new follower… Most telling this week is the sound of crickets on potentially the greatest political story to occur in Australia, the attempted overthrow of the government by the opposition. 'Move along folks, nothing to see or hear here…'
redsheep · December 15, 2012 at 1:12 AM
Great summation of a disgusting year for the MSM, you've got a new follower… Most telling this week is the sound of crickets on potentially the greatest political story to occur in Australia, the attempted overthrow of the government by the opposition. 'Move along folks, nothing to see or hear here…'
KnifeySpoony · December 15, 2012 at 1:30 AM
Very prescient from Possum, though he was wrong about the liberal moderates and underestimated the complete disconnect between reality and the conservative parties in Australia. They honestly believe in the world according to News Ltd…..
KnifeySpoony · December 15, 2012 at 1:30 AM
Very prescient from Possum, though he was wrong about the liberal moderates and underestimated the complete disconnect between reality and the conservative parties in Australia. They honestly believe in the world according to News Ltd…..
Anonymous · December 15, 2012 at 8:12 AM
Thank you for your sane, intelligent and insightful blogs this year – even if your 'coming out' was a bit of a worry. Stay true and resist becoming just another talking head. We need you.
Anonymous · December 16, 2012 at 12:56 AM
The abiding image I carry from 2012 is the “running man” saga as Abbott,Pyne, Entch and others tripped over themselves trying to escape from the parliament to avoid being seen accepting the vote of Craig Thomson.
Priceless !
Anonymous · December 16, 2012 at 12:56 AM
The abiding image I carry from 2012 is the “running man” saga as Abbott,Pyne, Entch and others tripped over themselves trying to escape from the parliament to avoid being seen accepting the vote of Craig Thomson.
Priceless !
PB · December 16, 2012 at 3:21 AM
This has been an extraordinary episode. I find it incredible that journalists aren't frothing at the mouth to find out what the hell is going on. The story has got everything – betrayal, corruption, an attempted coup, shadowy millionaire backers, fake claims of sexual harassment, gay SMS flirting and (maybe) a gay honeytrap. It reminds of nothing so much as LeCarre's “Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy.”
I wonder how many of the journalists working at News, Fairfax and the ABC, when they were doing their journalism degrees expected their job to be transcribing Opposition press-releases and ignoring the biggest story they are ever likely to see.
There has to come a day of reckoning for the Old Media. They're dead but just don't know it yet – like the dinosaur who has just had his hind quarters ripped off but the message hasn't yet reached his (walnut sized) brain.
PB · December 16, 2012 at 3:21 AM
This has been an extraordinary episode. I find it incredible that journalists aren't frothing at the mouth to find out what the hell is going on. The story has got everything – betrayal, corruption, an attempted coup, shadowy millionaire backers, fake claims of sexual harassment, gay SMS flirting and (maybe) a gay honeytrap. It reminds of nothing so much as LeCarre's “Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy.”
I wonder how many of the journalists working at News, Fairfax and the ABC, when they were doing their journalism degrees expected their job to be transcribing Opposition press-releases and ignoring the biggest story they are ever likely to see.
There has to come a day of reckoning for the Old Media. They're dead but just don't know it yet – like the dinosaur who has just had his hind quarters ripped off but the message hasn't yet reached his (walnut sized) brain.
Anonymous · December 16, 2012 at 3:59 AM
“The ABC is among the worst culprits, treating as news the most self-serving spin from the party machine.” Unfortunately you are right. I've lost count of the number of times ABC Radio News starts with “The Opposition says….”. This is news?
Anonymous · December 16, 2012 at 3:59 AM
“The ABC is among the worst culprits, treating as news the most self-serving spin from the party machine.” Unfortunately you are right. I've lost count of the number of times ABC Radio News starts with “The Opposition says….”. This is news?
sue · December 17, 2012 at 1:00 AM
And as the year ends we have Abbott,Pyne, Entsch trying to run the 10 hour marathon all to escape the Mal Brough/Ashbygate
Brad and Janet · December 17, 2012 at 8:40 AM
An awful lot of MSM journos have proved without doubt how lazy and thin skinned they are; and how foolish they are to keep treating the public with such disdain. Social media has helped reveal what was previously hidden: they are all just a bit too cosy with each other. The result is now a MSM news club that is not bound by factual, objective, investigative reporting, but more about chums, networking and future job opportunities. Unfortunately, this comes at the expense of us, the reader. Hence, we look elsewhere while they continue to play their silly games.
Brad and Janet · December 17, 2012 at 8:40 AM
An awful lot of MSM journos have proved without doubt how lazy and thin skinned they are; and how foolish they are to keep treating the public with such disdain. Social media has helped reveal what was previously hidden: they are all just a bit too cosy with each other. The result is now a MSM news club that is not bound by factual, objective, investigative reporting, but more about chums, networking and future job opportunities. Unfortunately, this comes at the expense of us, the reader. Hence, we look elsewhere while they continue to play their silly games.