The Usual Suspects

When the ABC’s Lateline told its audience on Friday afternoon to tune in that night for a review of the week in politics with Tony Burke and Scott Morrison, a collective groan was almost audible on the twittersphere.

We immediately knew what to expect – another vapid, predictable and non-informative on-air clash between political partisans mouthing hackneyed talking points on the issues of the week. No point in tuning in. And I didn’t.
Why do the ABC and other media outlets, like Sky, persist in bringing together interview panels of people we have heard from so much already and whose views are so well known? Where are the fresh and iconoclastic voices who can cast a new light on issues and make us think about things in different ways? Isn’t that what good journalism is supposed to be about?

Well, yes. But that would require some work on the part of the producers. Persuading politicians to put their faces in front of a television camera, even on a Friday night when the rest of the world is at the pub or the football, requires an effort similar to that involved in getting a kid to eat ice-cream. Just open the fridge door and they’ll be there.

Even better for the ABC – forever paranoid about accusations of political bias – a panel made up of someone from the red team and someone from the blue team is not going upset anyone in the boardroom. So you just set them up and let them do their thing. If it’s not Morrison versus Burke, it’s Kroger vs Howes or any other pairing whose respective utterances are so predictable you could write the script beforehand.

The big loser in all of this, of course, is the audience. It’s as if the ABC is saying to Australia: “No new paradigm to see here folks. Move right along now…”

Every now and then, though, a little bit of light enters the enforced gloom, usually by accident. On that score, surely the most linked-to ABC interview of the past week was one carried out on ABC radio in Sydney by Deb Cameron with former public servant, diplomat and prominent businessman John Menadue, who put the proverbial boot into the media’s coverage of the federal election campaign, including that of the national broadcaster. In surely one of the most deserved and well articulated attacks on the fourth estate this blogger has ever heard, Menadue skewered the banality, superficiality, gutlessness and, in some cases, sheer mendacity of political coverage. Indeed, his view was that the media “failed absolutely” in its role of challenging power and examining policy:

“It was the worst media performance I have seen in my many decades of public life. The public has passed judgement on the politicians for their, frankly, abysmal performance during the election campaign, but the role of the media is still not properly examined. The mainstream media has a particular responsibility and unless the public is informed, we are going to get bad decisions at elections and bad policies from governments.”

Instead of encouraging public debate on issues the politicians are running a mile from (like the consequences to the rest of the economy of the mining boom), the media had meekly allowed themsleves to be sucked into parroting the politicians’ mindless, superficial and often downright misleading slogans about tax, debt, ‘waste’, boats, crime etc;

But Menadue – a former general manager of News Ltd no less – saved his heaviest criticism for the shamelessly partisan Murdoch broadsheet The Australian and its deliberately distorted coverage of Labor’s widely praised fiscal stimulus program. “You just watch, they’ll do the same to the NBN now,” he said.

Menadue also criticised the ABC, observing how the national broadcaster had become a virtual echo chamber of the Murdoch media’s attack lines, many of them based on deliberate lies and misinformation (as in their reporting of the inquiry into the BER program):

“If you look carefully at the ABC’s news coverage, you’ll find it follows very closely what The Australian is running. The Australian’s role (in the election campaign) was pernicious. (It) has become the voice of the extreme right wing in this country. Murdoch has obviously decided that that is the business constituency that he wants to align himself with. The Australian has become almost like a mad hatter’s tea party, it is so extreme.”

So given the leaden predictability and blandness of the ABC’s political coverage these days, whichever producer got Menadue on (and without getting on someone like Tom Switzer ‘for balance’) deserves a medal. These things needed to be said and reflect what hundreds of us in the blogosphere are now saying – people like Nick Gruen, Tim Dunlop, GrogsGamut and Possum.
Even a former Liberal Prime Minister has said them, for heaven’s sake.

So when does this groundswell officially become a story? When does the media ditch the usual suspects and start inviting fresh voices onto its panel shows to start talking about the real issues – the ones the politicians don’t want to talk about, the ones the media don’t want to talk about, but the ones the public desperately need to hear?
Don’t hold your breath.

See also Professor Jay Rosen’s new piece on how journalists operate within the “sphere of consensus” – excluding interesting and non-mainstream voices from issues of public interest.