by Laura Tingle
What is fascinating about Figes’s book for my purposes, though, is that he doesn’t just tell the story of the bleak battles in the freezing or roasting conditions of the Crimean peninsula, or of the machinations of the political leaders of the day, but sets events in a broader context:
This was a war – the first war in history – to be brought about by the pressure of the press and by public opinion. With the development of the railways enabling the emergence of a national press in the 1840s and 1850s, public opinion became a potent force in British politics, arguably overshadowing the influence of Parliament and the cabinet itself.
The aggression of the press then – not just in Britain, but in all the nations involved – is truly shocking, even to our jaundiced eyes, especially in contrast to our impressions of polite Victorian England. Yet seen from the standpoint of Australia in 2015, there is also something depressingly familiar in the way an angry populace and media drove events 160 years ago, and how war was used for political purposes.
Figes argues that the British prime minister, Lord Palmerston, was the first modern politician to understand “the need to cultivate the press and appeal in simple terms to the public in order to create a mass-based political constituency.” Palmerston became so popular, “and his foreign policy became so closely linked to the defence of ‘British values’ in the public mind, that anyone who tried to halt the drift to war was likely to be vilified by the patriotic press.”
If you think the media – here and in other Western countries – can be a little feral these days, consider this: Queen Victoria’s beloved Prince Consort, Albert, found himself attacked as part of the British media’s Russophobia at the time of the Crimean crisis (although he was German, the press drew little distinction between the two nationalities). It went so far that he was accused of treason and one newspaper called for his execution, adding for good measure: “Better that a few drops of guilty blood should be shed on a scaffold on Tower Hill than that a country should be baulked of its desire for war!” Queen Victoria was so outraged that she threatened to abdicate, Figes writes, but it had little impact on newspaper editors, because such talk sold newspapers.
The Crimean War reminds us that many of the things we tend to see as unprecedented in our debates about politics and the media are not new at all: certainly not politicians playing with defence and national security, and certainly not the media taking aggressive, jingoistic and partisan positions. In fact, given the interwoven history of newspapers and political pamphlets, it is more accurate to see the recent decades, when journalism was seen to aspire – at its more serious end – to sober, investigative and responsible reporting, as an aberration.
What is new is that business pressures and technological changes have coincided with a renewed shrillness. This means double trouble for any hope that the media will fulfil their role to document events fully and fairly, and so write the first draft of history.
The media should remain a major repository of our collective memory. Just as historians go to old newspapers to gain a sense of what people were talking about, what views they held and how politicians responded, people still rely on the media to tell them what is going on today. Yet forced to generate 24-hour-a-day news, and under intense financial pressure, the media struggle to retain their own memory of what has gone before, and – if they do keep it – the capacity to set a story in any longer-term context. The need for the new means the media increasingly work in the “present tense.” They can only frame events by what is happening contemporaneously. The rise of the trivial story that erupts and then disappears, and the tendency to see events purely for how they affect individual players in that particular story – rather than their longer-term implications – start to become inevitable. The opportunities also dwindle to go back and review what happened after the initial flurry of interest in a story abates.
The speed with which we can obtain new information changes the context in which we see it. We now perpetually update stories with the incremental addition of new facts. The time – only a couple of years ago – when print deadlines on newspapers effectively pressed “pause” on a view of history is gone. Now when editors ask journalists for stories for the morning print edition, they do so having absorbed and often discarded – as “old news” – events reported on the web that day. They want the “throw-forward” story, or the completely new fact or idea that will survive twelve hours of print turnaround time.
It is little wonder that, amid all this noise, editors – even before they look to advance an ideological or commercial agenda – seek to re-assert their influence by declaring an issue a national emergency or seeking notoriety through inflammatory comment.
This is not a purely Australian phenomenon, of course. Matt Bai covered three presidential campaigns for the New York Times Magazine. Last year he published a book on what would seem an unlikely subject of interest to Australian political junkies: the downfall of Gary Hart, a frontrunner for the Democratic presidential nomination in 1987 until he was undone by a story about a frolic with a beautiful young blonde on a boat with the unfortunate name of Monkey Business. The book is not just about what happened to Hart. In All the Truth Is Out: The Week Politics Went Tabloid, Bai looks at the conjunction of changes that made Hart’s scandal a turning point in the way politics is covered in America. Thankfully, we haven’t seen all of these trends in Australia – the media here are more cautious about entering politicians’ private lives – but the overwhelming majority are painfully familiar: the way it has become always about throwing forward, always about personality. Bai describes how Hart was hit in 1987 by “all these disparate, emerging forces in the society – a vacuum in the political debate, changing ideas about morality, a new generational ethos and new technologies in the media, [and] the tabloidization of every aspect of American life.”
By 1987, the 24/7 news cycle was well underway with the rise and rise of CNN, itself built on new technologies of easily transportable satellite dishes and the switch from film to video. There was also the stripping down of borders of news with the arrival of the fax machine. The age when most Americans only read their local newspaper and there was a diversity of coverage was starting to fade as newspapers could get instant readouts of what papers in other parts of the country were reporting.
For those interested in the machinations of the media, a particularly fascinating aspect of the Gary Hart scandal was that the story was broken by the Miami Herald, which had staked out Hart’s townhouse in Washington. Until then, national politics in the United States had been largely reported by White House correspondents and was the preserve of big mastheads, such as the New York Times and the Washington Post. Two non–White House reporters for the Post broke the Watergate story in the 1970s, but other newspapers didn’t poke their noses much into Washington politics. You can imagine the humiliation for the Washington media establishment when the Miami Herald broke a story that happened on its own patch. The press corps had also always kept out of politicians’ personal lives, and particularly those of presidents. Bai argues that the culture of journalism, and of American journalists seeing themselves as having to, above all else, uncover politicians’ lies, started over guilt that they’d missed the Watergate story. It caused everyone to try to be Woodward and Bernstein. And then it morphed into a complete monster as the barriers to reporting politics were smashed and the job was taken out of the hands of the Washington elites: “Politicians were now fair game for all the media, just as it was going tabloid in all facets of society.”
At the same time, the vast expanse of 24-hour news meant reporters suddenly found new identities as celebrities and commentators on panel discussion shows. “Little wonder politicians became defensive and little wonder – crucially – that the relationships between journalists and politicians changed dramatically.”
What made political journalism so alluring, so important, was the idea that you actually got to know the minds of the public servants you were writing about. You were
supposed to share beers at the hotel bar and late-night confidences aboard the chartered plane. You were supposed to understand not just the candidates’ policy papers or their strategies for winning but also what made them good and worthy of trust or what didn’t.
However,
by the time my contemporaries and I got there … presidential politics – indeed, all of politics – was really nothing like that. With rare exceptions, our cautious candidates were like smiling holograms programmed to speak and smile but not to interact, so that it sometimes seemed you could run your hand through them … Candidates in the age of Oprah “shared” more than ever before, but what they shared of themselves – boxers rather than briefs, allusions to youthful drug use – was trivial and often rehearsed, as authentic as a piece of plastic fruit, and about as illuminating.
Bai relates what happened when he gained an interview with John Kerry during the 2004 presidential campaign. He “assumed Kerry would welcome the opportunity to elaborate on his actual plan for governing, rather than having to answer yet more questions about the authenticity of his war medals” but in fact “he seemed to regard me not as someone who sought to explain his views (which is how I saw myself) but rather as a hired assassin who had just walked through the front door without so much as a struggle.”
Bai’s book nails why political journalism operates the way it does in Australia these days. It is helpful – as is the reminder from the distant Crimean War that a partisan media is hardly a new phenomenon – in unpacking structural trends in Australian journalism that can get drowned out in the local angst about what has happened to News Corp and Fairfax.
Whatever job we do, we are inclined to respond, like Pavlov’s dog, to incentives. The rewards for political journalists in Australia – whether in the form of promotion, notoriety on social media, or becoming a “commentator” – flow when you have an “exclusive,” when you write the supposed “inside story,” or particularly when you write punchy commentary. They rarely come from spending a couple of days getting to grips with a policy debate and explaining to readers the pros and cons of outcomes – if indeed you can get such a piece in the paper at all. You might get away with talking about the cost to the budget. But you will be rewarded most if you write about how it affects the political fortunes of the two sides of politics. In a world where there are fewer and fewer bodies in the newsroom, and there is greater and greater demand to punch out stories, your chances of having enough time to do that work are minimal, but you will always be able to get a yarn in the paper if it goes to the political contest. We tend to think that this is just because in-depth policy stories are a little too “worthy,” that they are not “sexy” – and there’s something to that. But we have also fallen out of the habit of seeing a role for such reporting because no one has the time to do it. Over time, it’s become a forgotten skill.
The days of specialist reporters in the Canberra press gallery – reporters who would cover education, welfare or health, for example – are long gone. Instead of reporters who cover issues day in, day out as they develop, we have generalists. The generalists descend on the story of the day, whatever the policy area, and have to make instant sense of it. How many people do they know who are experts on the subject, or even experts on the politics of the subject? Where are they going to start but at the point of political contention? What is the easiest thing to report but the mechanics of the political brawl, rather than the substance of the matter being brawled over?
Without an obligation, or opportunity, to know the history of an issue, it is natural that journalists will make the context of reporting the issues – and politics – of the day. But that only increases a tendency to see the story in black-and-white terms. They have no time to consider that a debate about the subject at hand might, or even should be allowed to, develop. And they are even more unlikely to follow it up to see what happens tomorrow, because they will have been forced to move on to the next issue.
On any given day, a generalist reporter will cover the issue of the day, whether that be (some recent examples) a summit between political leaders and indigenous leaders on reform of the constitution, the restructuring of a $20 billion agreement between the government and the pharmaceutical industry that determines how much we pay for our drugs at the chemist, or (those perennials) tax reform and reform of the federation.
In the press gallery, I estimate there have been four or five “generations” of journalists (there is a turnover every two or three years) who do not remember a time when political stories were not framed as leadership stories, or took as their focus how a policy decision would affect the fortunes of the major political parties, rather than giving at least some consideration to whether it is a good or bad policy, and how it might affect voters.
Relationships between the media and politicians have also changed. Politics is no longer the exclusive preserve of a few press gallery journalists. Politicians must deal with journalists right across the country. That is fine, except that with it goes the capacity – or need – to form trusting relationships with journalists which might allow politicians to feel confident thinking out loud about the options they have in front of them, or explaining how their thinking about an issue has developed. Politicians here are likely to identify with John Kerry in seeing Matt Bai as a hired assassin. The likelihood that one group of journalists will directly report on, or even talk to politicians about, any particular issue for more than a day at a time is now remote.
Social media and the internet have broken down the “barriers to entry” to the media, thereby allowing a massive amount of material to be presented. The benefit is that experts in a particular field can get their views heard quickly. (Look at the success of a site like the Conversation, part-funded by the universities.) But social media do not have as much access to the people and institutions that drive our system as the traditional media do, even if relations between the media and politicians have deteriorated. They don’t get the chance to question, or to interact. Social media commentary is framed as if looking in through a window.
Major reports and factual data that people could once have accessed only through the media are now available on the internet. Such access is a good thing, but the sheer volume of material may mean that even fewer people see it. And the media are no longer always in a position to synthesise it for them with any real expertise.
These changes have come about – and helped drive – a very different interaction between the media and politicians to that of the past. It lies at the heart of an inanity that drives voters to despair.
But I should also defend the press gallery. Having endured countless rants over the years about how dreadful the gallery is, how it engages in groupthink, I find it ironic that the quality of political coverage has become much worse as technology has freed both politicians and journalists from the constraints of Canberra. Critics of the press gallery often excoriate journalists – and particularly commentators – who don’t work in it, and in fact have never worked as political journalists. And while many on social media rail against the influence and narrow view of the “MSM” (mainstream media), the great irony is that much of the conversation on social media is much more partisan – in both directions – than anything you will see in a newspaper.
As politicians have become less likely to share late-night confidences with journalists and commentators, the appetite for the “inside story” has only grown. Yet, as Matt Bai also observes, the inside stories are too often nothing of the sort. When Cheryl Kernot defected from the Democrats to Labor in 1998, newspapers immediately wanted the inside story of this stunning political shift of allegiance. It really had come out of the blue, so by the time reporters went in search of what had happened, anyone with the slightest connection to it was in lockdown. Eventually we were all called down, one or two at a time, to Gareth Evans’ office, where he told us how the deal with Kernot had been done over a plunger of coffee. Was it only me who was mortified the next morning to see that same pl
unger of coffee anecdote spread across every paper in the country? It was the beginning of the formulaic “inside story” (and of course it was later revealed that the story was more complicated than first appeared).
The formulas are never thicker on the ground than they are at the time of the federal budget, partly because the budget lock-up and the sheer volume of copy mean newspapers – and electronic media – have to plan how coverage is going to be structured days, if not weeks, in advance and hope like mad there will be no huge surprises which require changes not just to specific content, but to the overall coverage. There are stories allocated by area – health, defence, education. There are set budget and economic stories. There are pre-arranged “cameos” to illustrate how the budget affects particular groups. In Canberra, there are the set interviews with the treasurer a few days before the budget, which one hopes contain some tiny new fact. There is the Sunday television interview to set the government’s political message.
Amid this planning and massaging, all the pre-budget commentary disappears and the entire conversation about the state of the government’s books is restarted. In part that is necessary, because there are new forecasts and an entire new round of spending and tax measures to be debated. But between the pre-planning and the formulas, discussions which relate the budget to everything that went before are largely lost. Before a budget, for example, the talk may have been all about the need to rein in spending. After a budget, a massive tax cut that wasn’t expected dominates not just the headlines but also the debate as a whole. All the talk about reining in spending disappears. Similarly, budgets are assessed for what they mean for the government – and the treasurer – and for whether they are politically “smart” or not, rather than for whether they are good or bad for the country.