Political reporting: a flawed model?

Updated September 29, 2010 12:01:52

The kerfuffle about the Australian news media's performance during the election campaign relates to a discussion that's been going on in academic political communication studies for some time.

Grog's post kicked off a debate about how much value we're getting from our news media's political coverage. He was pretty scathing, and like many press critics he put the blame squarely at the feet of the journalists and what he saw as their obsession with triviality.

Since Grog posted, there have been a range of (mostly) reflective responses from journalists, bloggers, and even powerful media figures like the ABC's Mark Scott.

Perhaps the most important ones for broadening this discussion have been two nuanced, historically aware accounts of the reality of life on the campaign trail for the boys and girls on the bus. One was written from the point of view of an experienced journalist - The Age's political editor Tony Wright. One was written during the campaign by blogger "Dragonista", giving a view of the same changes from the perspective of an experienced political communications practitioner. Both writers ask us to take account of the role played by intensive media management by political campaigns. Their pieces are detailed and based on their lives at the coal face. I'd encourage you to read them both. But I'll take their arguments as my cue to link this discussion up to one that's been happening in academic circles, at a more general level, for some years.

Starting with the seminal work of figures like Jay Blumler and the late Michael Gurevitch, and developed more recently by writers like James Stanyer, an important strand of scholarship has urged us to think of political communications in liberal democracies as a dynamic system, almost like a natural ecology. The elements in an "ideal type" system are political advocates (including candidates, parties and activists), the media, and voters.

Each actor in the system is pursuing its own goals. Politicians seek elected office, and a prerequisite for this is getting out their preferred message. There's a strong incentive for them to attempt to control how that message is transmitted. The media (severally and collectively) is seeking to maximise its audience. Accordingly its secondary goals include breaking stories, and enhancing the credibility of individuals or organisations as information sources. The immediate consequence is that political actors and the media compete for control of the political messages that get to the voting audience.

It used to be - in what Hallin called journalism's "High Modernist" period - that journalists were so deferential to political authority that they were practically "embedded" with the governing class. Few want or expect a return to such arrangements, which in any case had a specific connection with the historical conditions attending the depressions and hot and cold wars of the mid-20th century. But more recent systemic changes have made the relationship between politicians and the media resemble open warfare, especially during heightened periods like election campaigns.

As political actors' techniques for manipulating and controlling the political media have become more intensive and sophisticated, over decades we've seen an escalating backlash from journalists. Where campaign events are increasingly tightly controlled, journalists have responded by focussing more and more on flaws in the glass - gaffes and mistakes. We can also understand "metacoverage", where news is often concerned with media management itself, as a tactical response by journalists to politicos' attempts at message control. Over time further manipulation produces even more strident coverage, in what David Swanson called back in 1997 a "disdaining dynamic", embedded in an "unending spiral of manipulation and resistance". This is another way of thinking about what Tim Dunlop called the "political-media death spiral". More kindly, some political communications scholars refer to this as a form of "co-adaptation" within the system, as different actors try different methods in seeking advantage.

In the recent campaign, the attention given to leaks, Mark Latham and the like can be seen in this light - the tighter the control, the more risk-averse the campaign, the more likely journalists are to pounce on unexpected distractions as they attempt to avoid becoming mere mouthpieces for the political parties. Meanwhile, on the sidelines, the audience often feels starved of the information they need in order to make democratic choices - the frustration of citizens like Grog in unsurprising.

The other powerful dynamic that's affecting political coverage is the fragmentation of the audience in a post-broadcast, multi-channel world. Put simply, there is a much wider array of information channels to choose from, and the audience for any given traditional media outlet is likely to be shrinking. This means that all concerned have to work harder to get our attention and sustain their businesses.

In Australia, three commercial and two public television networks have been joined by an array of pay television news services, and two dedicated 24-hour news channels. Soon we'll have broadcast-quality broadband services in that mix. Newspapers have been challenged by the emergence of a networked news ecology online, including the emergence of the ABC as, effectively, a major provider of print news.

We can't even assume that everyone is even intermittently tuned into politics anymore, either. In our "high choice media environment", people have the opportunity to switch off the news and current affairs broadcasting altogether, and pursue their preferred forms of entertainment without interruption from politics.

This fragmentation increases competitive pressures in media markets, and has been used by some to explain an increased focus on conflict in "horse-race" style coverage that turns campaigns into a species of entertainment. Experience and horse sense tells media workers at the editorial level that only a small proportion of the audience finds elections intrinsically interesting. Best, then, to play up the "colour and noise" aspects of campaigns. The crowding of the media market also increases the temptation towards increasingly partisan coverage, which serves to shore up niche markets among the politically committed. And as Bernard Keane pointed out recently, the imperative for individual journalists to generate populist, partisan or at least exciting coverage is getting stronger as media bosses in a tight market reconsider their investments in expensive things like a Press Gallery presence, or a seat on the media bus.

Fragmentation also affects political advocates, but here they induce yet more risk aversion and control freakery when it comes to campaigning - when polities are more demographically diverse than ever, the tendency will be to opt for clear, simple messages which reach the lowest common denominator, and offend no one. Political campaigns have become "small target" operations driven by media sensationalism that shrink any non-partisan common ground we once had for national debates. As three academic authors put it in a book published this year, media and politicians alike can no longer operate on a "presumption of attention" on the part of voters and audiences, as they did throughout the 20th century. Voters and audiences can and will switch off. The question of how, and even whether liberal democracy as we have understood it can operate under such conditions is very much an open one.

Understanding this structural or systemic dynamic makes some of the moralising about the "choices" of individual journalists ring hollow. Some of our foremost international press critics still seem to think that if only journalists made different choices, all would be well. But what we have here is a systemic problem with some momentum behind it, which no individual journalist employed by a major media organisation could hope to address.

Is there any way out? I think so, and in my next article I'll show how these dynamics are starting to be shifted by new strategies on the part of the audience, and a new willingness on the part of journalists to listen to what they have to say.

Jason Wilson is a Lecturer in Journalism and Communication at the University of Canberra.

Topics: elections, information-and-communication

First posted September 15, 2010 11:00:00